Super duper

    When I was a lad and could grow bangs and make wee-wee in under ten minutes, I was lucky enough to go visit France. Of course we loved the museums and gardens and food and cafes and topless beaches and all. But we also experienced regular everyday French life, and were puzzled by hypermarches. (Hypermarkets. You'll just have to take my word for it that there's an accent over that E.)
    I may have mentioned this before, but I think at least I'm going somewhere slightly different this time. Hypermarkets would be about at weird as a Super Walmart to 21st century American teens, but they were pretty wild in 1979. And where I'm going with it this time is that I was passing by the Dollar General near my dad's house. When I was a kid and still in 1979, it was a Red & White supermarket. Later on my way home on Rosewood is the Dollar Tree, which used to be a Piggly Wiggly.
    Point of all this is that Walmart didn't just kill the downtowns of small towns. Smaller supermarkets bit the dust, too. Still, Walmart's hypermarket model hasn't exactly won out. For some reason, supermarkets are just bigger than they used to be, but not quite hyper. And where the smaller supermarkets were are stores that also have groceries of a kind, although I myself won't eat anything from there. Also all drugstores are bigger, and also carry groceries. I do know who's buying groceries from the dollar stores (really poor people) but I don't know who is buying groceries from drugstores. (Presumably people with more money than time, or really desperate people without cars.
    I'll admit that I don't have any point to all this; I must composed the first sentence and really liked it. Ok there's a point with no point: all the little supermarkets went away; I just don't know why. Hey, I used to buy my baseball cards at that Red & White! Come back!