I don't know who found the NPS store and told my mom about it but
that person was like the Prometheus of dated food. NPS stood for Nice
Place to Shop and it was like heaven to us when we were little. The
store started in a small warehouse in the big city that was 50 miles
north and the first time I remember going there was when I was ten or
so and my mom bought a couple of huge cases of expired yogurt and
some fruit flavored toothpaste which all but required consuming more
than the size of a pea. Funds were pretty tight around our house so
yogurt and frivolous dental products were a rare treat. It felt like
heaven. Every couple of months we would make the hour long drive up
to go shopping at NPS and the burrito scratch-and-dent store around
the corner and eat like gluttonous kings of past-due mono-cuisine
until the huge box or bag or what ever was on offer when we happened
to pop in was gone. This was a curious thing to my mother who had
bought the food intending for us to eat it and then she would set up
a unstated window of time in which she thought it would be reasonably
consumed. This time limit was not based on empirical evidence and was
definitely not anything she could articulate, but if the food was
devoured ahead of her imaginary schedule she would accuse us of
'snarfing it up' and 'not even tasting it' or that we had 'just mowed
through it'. This would put her in a little bit of a snit and she
would not want to go back to NPS for a couple of months.
The store was a catch-as-catch-can gumbo of foods just a little too
odd to be snapped up by the casual shopper. Many of the sizes were
too big or too small. Some of the flavors were one we had never heard
of. It was the first place I bought something with mango flavor
before that fruit had a toe hold in Utah. It was a huge cylinder of
Tang and I thought, 'how bad could it be for a dollar?' Answer:
pretty freaking bad. It tasted like someone had spilled Pine-Sol into
a regular Tang and then tried to figure out a way to sell the stuff
anyway. The upshot was that it was only a dollar and that in our
house we never let something as trivial as horrible taste stop us
from snarfing down anything that even presented the illusion of
candy. When I got to be old enough to drive I introduced my friends
to the magical place only to have many of them snootily pick over the
bags and boxes and look like someone had wiped a little poop under
their noses. There was however, that rare connoisseur that would
embrace the madness and dive into the cheap and bizarre world of NPS.
The store moved into a much bigger building and started changing in
subtle way that made it a little less of an adventure and I have not
been there for ten years.
