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The grocery is not a destination I choose willingly. I'd rather go to the dentist for a root canal. The dentist offers lidocaine, but there is nothing to numb the pain of grocery shopping.

Now, though, online shopping is coming to a grocery near me. Will I use it? I don't know. There are passwords and IDs involved. I've pooh-poohed most modern day techno-advancements - dial telephones, electric typewriters, computers, cell phones, programmable appliances, smart phones…. I don't take kindly to change, and I'm a real spaz with my phone.

Ordering groceries online is a new wrinkle in the old fabric of catalog and Amazon ordering: you make out an order, select a pick-up time, someone shops for you, you drive to the store at the designated time, your purchases are loaded into your car. But, you still have to unload at home, lug everything inside and put it away.

Instead of scribbling your needs on the back of an old envelope the way your mother did, you select them from what looks like a child's picture-book page, and if you want something unusual, you type it in - black olives stuffed with crunchy peanut butter, for instance.

Many things I buy are spur o'moment, not really a good idea, I know. Will the assigned shoppers know I have a hankering for a bag of peanut M&M's? Or a pomegranate? Or how about black rice? No, they will not. With this new scheme I'll have to "pre-know" that I might want a pomegranate and put it on my list.

Leslie and her friend Kenna mentioned seeing people do their weekly shopping while consulting a list on their smart phones. They don't, they said, and neither do I. I carry a printed list I devised, that groups items according to the way the store is organized: deli, produce, meat, dairy, and so on.

This new enterprise is almost ready to go locally, and now a large section of the store has been re-dedicated. They've reorganized merchandise, and shoved shelves closer. The aisles are way too narrow. I experienced a traffic jam in the pasta and other "foreign foods" lane last week. It took about four minutes to clear - four minutes longer than I wanted to spend in a place where I hate to go.

- Judy Clarke

Judy Clarke is a wife, mother of two daughters, grandmother to two grown grandchildren, reader, writer and blogger in southwest Virginia. Her two non-fiction books, Mother Tough Wrote the Book and That's all she wrote, can be found on her friends' and family's shelves, and she's working on a novel, But why? (That's the title of the novel, not a question to self). She placed second in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2016 writing competition, in the category of online, blog, multimedia under 100,000 unique visitors.