Bonus Blog: the Great Creme Egg Hunt

Welcome, chocolatey reader, as I take you on an odyssey to find the lesser spotted Creme Egg.

Imagine the scene: it's the Saturday of the Easter holiday, and you don't have any Creme Eggs, so obviously you're going to go out and shop for them. Little do you know what awaits...

The first stop on our hunt was the Safeway on Middlefield Road here in Palo Alto. Now Safeway here has nothing to do with the now-defunct UK chain, but otherwise looks roughly the same: it's a middle-of-the-road supermarket, with stores of various different shapes and sizes. The one on Middlefield is... well... middling: it's not a convenience store, but it's not big either. Well, apparently, it's not big enough for Easter to have had any kind of impact, because there were no Easter eggs here at all, and certainly no Creme Eggs. So onwards it was, to the mighty San Antonio Center in Mountain View.

Our first stop here was the legendary Walmart, and our first challenge was just to get in. We queued for about 15 minutes for the privilege of shopping at Walmart. It's notable that Walmart sells basically everything, with the full-on pile-high-sell-cheap philosophy, but my experience is they never actually have what you want. To whit: on this visit, a 12-year-old with a fairly professional-looking fishing rod nearly had my eye out, we could have picked up enough Isopropyl Alcohol, handwipes, and "personal sanitation kits" to disinfect a sizeable cruise liner, and someone else was vainly asking the staff where to find pickling spice.

Or to put it another way: it's basically a war zone in there, with people everywhere, and it's more like looting a warehouse than taking part in the usual exchange of money for goods and services. Whilst walking around the place, I was thinking "OK, so this is what a superspreader event looks like". If you've ever been to Asda in Farnborough... well, it's a bit like that. Anyway, here's what faced us in the easter egg aisle at Walmart:

So then it was across the road to Target. I have a fondness for Target, which is a bit like Walmart's classier aunt: there's more space in there, there's a lot less chaos, and there's a more general atmosphere of "hey, we just tried to make this a bit less unpleasant" that I quite like.

That said, I also can't seem to work out how Target make any money given that it does always seem to be half-empty, and mostly seems to sell reasonable-but-not-amazing clothes and sporting goods. Target isn't really a food shop, isn't really a hardware shop, isn't really a clothes outlet, isn't really a department store... it's a bit like Woolworths ended up in the UK: you go there, you're not sure why, you come out with some unnecessary plastic objects.

[It's quite possible that Target don't make any money, given that they've just announced they're shutting a couple of stores here in the South Bay]

But whatever: there weren't any creme eggs in Target either.

So our final stop was yet another Safeway, at the other end of the San Antonio Centre. This is a proper big supermarket, although it was also the site of what we're now calling "quichegate", where early in our time here we tried to shop for a quiche and were directed to frozen pizzas as the nearest available alternative. And here, we finally hit paydirt: where the pet food used to be, there was a tasteful display of Creme Eggs and other Easter confectionery delights.

Happy Easter folks, and enjoy those Creme Eggs!