Petersburgian Case File #13: Produce Galore

Petersburg has a lot of (what I suppose we back in the states would call) corner stores / general stores. This isn't an observation I make lightly along the ho-hum lines of Oh well would you look at that I didn't think there would be another general store just two blocks from the last one. Isn't that marginally curious? Rather I make it in with a sense of deep gravitas and paranoia akin to Holy shit! What in God's name could posses a people to have such an inexplicably large quantity of general stores? How is any of this even marginally fiscally lucrative? Clearly these are all fronts. If I go into the wrong one and buy the incorrect item I will almost certainly be killed by a member of the Russian mafia...but I am so damn thirsty! At which point I usually begin to hyperventilate.

That's actually a picture of a guy who walked into the wrong store not somebody hyperventilating.
In actuality, though, I'd love to know the back-story behind this picture. We should have a caption contest!
"Avraham! Are you looking at our son's tuition bill again? Oy!" Oh I'm rich.
Yeah nevermind scratch the contest, I just won.

On the street I live on, only counting the ones on the side of the street where my house is located, there is one big produce store and two smaller ones. Three on one side of one street. Three!*

Lovely mom and pop operated little produce store or a front for savage Russian mobsters? You decide!

Unlike most pictures on this blog which are simply a fun little visual aid to break up my paragraphs and also help distract you from the fact that almost nothing of substance is being written**, this one deserves to be reflected upon. First of all the 3 items that are so prominently featured above are not, as one may imagine, a "greatest hits" of the General Store, rather they - that is, to clarify, wine, vodka, and cigarettes - make up around half of everything on sale in any one given store. You might think I am exaggerating but I assure you if anything I am making a conservative estimate.

Secondly let us examine that 24. I don't know why they say it about New York because frankly if the signs are not lying Petersburg seems to be the city that truly never sleeps. Everywhere there are signs of "Open 24 hours". Which begs the question who could possibly need wine, cigarettes, and vodka every day of the week in the middle of the night? Which is immediately answered by myself when I remember which country I am currently residing in. No wonder a lot of art history majors like to come here.

BOOYAH! Take that art history majors!...Hmm? What am I majoring in you ask?...Shut your dirty mouth, you bastard!

Whether they are actually open 24 hours I am not sure as, granted, I have never actually attempted to test out whether I can truly buy a potato and some cognac at 4am on a Tuesday. In fact I have been told that some of those places are not really open 24 hours and have "24 hour" signs purely because they think it is hip to have such a sign.

Cause if there is one thing that just oozes cool it is a place with an Open 24 Hours sign.

If that is in fact true I find that piece of information to be even more dumbfounding and fascinating than having 3 general stores on a single block and can't help but wonder what horrific piece of cultural miscommunication must have occurred for Russia to embrace the "24/7" sign as a leading symbol of modernity and progress.

This could have all been avoided...

...with just a few of these.

* There was actually a fourth that recently closed in case three isn't enough for you to think this is a story worth telling. Though really if three isn't enough what the hell do you want from me? What kind of insane grand expectations do you have for the amount of groceries on one block in St. Petersburg? If this does not meet your expectations for a haphazardly constructed rambling blog I really think that is something you should talk about in group.

**This is, of course, the technique Sir*** JK Rowling famously deployed at the start of each chapter of her heptalogy to similarly distract readers from the fact that almost nothing of substance was being written. *leans back in a rocking chair and listens to the sound of at least half of his readers permanently closing this website* *reflects for a moment* Worth it.

***I have to imagine she's been knighted by now.