"Brown" labels

For those of you who don't know me very well, I grew up in the High Desert of Southern California in a place called Apple Valley. Don't get excited. It sounds prettier than it is. No apples, no valley, just dirt. It was a hot climate in a hot and crowded state, but it's where I grew up and had many memories. I don't know why, but today I was thinking about the stores where I grew up and two things came to my mind. The first store I thought of was Safeway. When I was a kid they only had one Safeway store in the city, and after a financial struggle they ended up closing the store. I guess it just wasn't cut out for the high desert. I remember we used to purchase a few items there, one of which was a bottle of rubbing alcohol. A few years later my family was doing some deep cleaning of the house and my sister and I came across that very bottle. We kept pushing it back and forth to each other, touching it with towels, sticks, whatever we could so we wouldn't get cooties from it because it was so old! No one wanted to touch the alcohol bottle from Safeway. I mean, that store didn't even EXIST anymore!! Gross! We passed it around enough to where my mom got fed up with our little game and made one of us take it out to the garbage. I don't remember who ultimately had to touch it, but I remember that day. When I came to Colorado and saw the Safeway stores so prominent, I started giggling like a little kid and remembered the rubbing alcohol from long ago. It was funny.

Another store I remember was Stater Brothers. Now, you California readers will have to let me know if that store is still around. This was 12 years ago, so anything could have happened to that store by now. I remember my dad or mom would go shopping and pick a few of the kids to go with them. Oh, don't worry. It wasn't really a treat. We were there to help organize the food in the cart, to walk behind our parents with our arms folded, and not touch anything. Then we were to help arrange the food in the car so we could take it into the house after we got home. Looking back t it now, it's funny to think of my parents with three or four little kids folding their arms and walking behind them single file through the aisles of the store. I remember going to Stater Brothers and seeing the generic brands of food. They had a light brown label with the name of the food stamped on the product. My family affectionately called it the "brown label" food. It was so funny to see! You'd walk down the aisle and see brown cans of "CORN" or "BEANS" or "TOMATO SAUCE". I remember thinking that they weren't really creative in their marketing. I googled the brown label to post a picture on here so you could get the full effect of what I was talking about, but they didn't have anything! If anyone has a picture of the brown label, you have to send it to me. It would be awesome. Anyway, my sister and I would always make fun of the label with other things. We would draw pictures of cars, then color them in brown and write the word "CAR" on the side. We would do the same for houses, and even pets. It was the funniest thing in the world to us. 

My sister and I had some good times at that store too. I remember one day, during finals week, we ditched our first class. Back then (I don't know if they still do this now or not) they would have two classes a day for finals week. So, my sister and I ditched our first class and went to Stater Bros. We had just enough money between us to purchase a package of double stuffed oreos, a cranapple juice for her and a cranberry juice for me. We sat on a bench in front of a store right next to Stater Bros. called "CigMart" that claimed it opened every day at 8:00 AM. It was shortly before 8 in the morning and my sister and I were taking guesses as to when we thought the store would actually open. We sat there eating oreos and drinking our juices when 10 seconds before 8:00 AM someone came to the front door of the store, unlocked it, turned on all the lights, flipped the sign over and propped open the door. My sister and I just busted out laughing. We spent the next two hours just talking and talking about everything and anything. It was one of the best days of my life, and one that we both still talk about today.

I think about the generic labels for store products now and they are so much more flashier. When did we as people feel the need to be entertained by even the "brown" labels of stores? It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere. It's just a can of food, or a box of aluminum foil, for the love of Pete. Sometimes, I miss the brown labels from my childhood. What about you?