Astoria Food Plaza
This grocery store space had been empty for years. My last receipt from the store which previously occupied this space was from March, 2004, at which time I purchased 4 cans of Chicken Noodle Soup and a bottle of dill hamburger chips. The last iteration of grocery store in this space was called Pioneer, but there had been a number of other names in the preceding years. I don’t know exactly when Pioneer closed, but I guess the space had been empty for 6 or 7 years.
Pioneer always stood out in my mind as the only grocery store I had ever seen where customers were required to check their bags at the door before being allowed in. On account of that I stopped shopping at Pioneer, and the place soon closed (coincidental, or no?)
I also quit buying stuff at CompUSA, Tower Records, Circuit City, The Strand, and other places that demanded my possessions upon entry. I even quit going to the main branch of the New York Public Library on account of this.
I have no delusion that my pathetic little rebellion made a difference, but the above-mentioned retail stores are all gone now save for The Strand, which seems to have abandoned its confiscatory bag-check requirement. The NYPL seems to have lightened up on this matter, too. I think Tower Records did, as well, before they imploded.
I have been in to the new Astoria Food Plaza a few times, just to see what is there. So far this bottle of lime juice is my only purchase from this shop. The lime juice was needed for to aid in creation of vodka gimlets, using the bottle of Stoli that I got the week before. I still have not made that evil concoction, several of which once got me paralyzed drunk in the learning-how-to-drink days of my early 20s. I have not even opened the bottle of Stoli, though I had no immediate intention of doing so. I have been liberally stocking up on my liquor cabinet, which essentially did not exist until a few weeks ago. I do not drink hard liquor very often, but I decided I should maintain some appearance of sophistication or baseline worldliness by simply having a reasonable quantity of liquors for visitors, burglars, and repair people.
Many parts of this city seem to be plagued by closures of grocery stores, or by a general lack of such places. Not here. We have a conspicuous abundance of supermarkets.
Astoria Food Plaza was formerly called Pioneer Supermarket. Before that it was Corona Food Plaza and/or Met Foodmarket. I was never sure what the name of the place really was in those days, since both Corona and Met Foodmarkets appeared on the receipts. Before the Corona/Met confusion it seemed to have been only known as Met Food.
