The following message was found on the back of a Trader Joe's receipt outside the East Liberty store.
Please send help.
I came to the new Trader Joe's when it opened at 9 a.m. Friday morning. All I wanted was some flaxseed tortilla chips and coconut chicken spring rolls. Mayor Ravenstahl shook our hands as we entered, and the perky employees put leis around our necks, shimmying to upbeat disco tunes.
I was not able to escape.
The serpentine check-out lines strangled the flow of customers in and out of the store, and a fight over the last nonfat apricot-mango yogurt fully disabled the exits. A good Samaritan was able to smuggle out a few of the children, but the full staff and scores of customers remain trapped.
The dairy is gone, and the freezers have been decimated. The tandoori spinach rice bowl I grabbed in the initial riot is now of equivalent value on the black market to a day's work. After a few more days of appreciation, I may command a small gang.
There are rumors going around that Whole Foods has fresh fruit the size of beach balls. When the scurvy starts setting in, we only will become more delusional. It's reported that a clan of CMU engineering students hunkered down by the bread shelves has started devising a way to tunnel to the rival store and smuggle out their produce.
To keep up morale, store managers have begun distributing sandwich cookies and little cups of coffee, but I fear there soon may be another uprising. A veteran Trader Joe's shopper who drove from two states away for the opening has appointed herself commander of a group based near the soaps. They maintain a rivalry with a unit of rogue cashiers who patrol the aisles at night.
Estimates of the store's population have varied from 120 to 350. It's impossible to pin down, as one faction of elderly shoppers has taken to living on the miniature bridges above the shelves and throws jars of house-brand vitamins at you if you look up to count them.
Reports are coming in now that it seems the engineering students have sent an exploratory group on a test tunnel run.
The electricity has been cut -- Giant Eagle Market District employees are blamed -- and the sandwich cookies are nearly gone.
I am giving this note to a CMU student whom I have paid off with my rice bowl and a number of leis. If anyone is reading this, please tell Whole Foods I'm sorry.
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