I’ve always had this weird curse.

I would live in a place for years bemoaning the fact that there was the lack of a certain store in that location and then move. Without fail, a few weeks later, said stores would pop up as if by magic in my former hometown.

Take the east village for example. I lived there for about 3 years and had to do my grocery shopping at associated supermarket at union square (and then lug my groceries home on the 14D bus all the way to ave C and 9th street, but that is a different story.)

If any of you have been to NYC supermarkets and have also been to suburban supermarkets, you know of what I speak. The city is of course flush with wonderful small gourmet shops and specialty stores and believe me, I trekked all around Manhattan for certain cheeses, coffees, prosecco, etc. But I’m talking about your everyday basic grocery stores. As I was saying, they pretty much suck, and the nice ones like Whole Foods & Fairway were not on my route home, and therefor not convenient for everyday shopping. That is until I moved to Fort Lauderdale…

Literally within months, the brand new ginormous whole foods had opened up on Union Square, and, as if that weren’t enough, the Trader Joe’s opened up a few doors down. And it even had a Trader Joe’s wine shop!

OK, still not convinced?

Before Jeff and I moved to FL, as you know we were living in the east village, i.e. we had no space and therefor almost no furniture to speak of. Certainly nothing like what we needed to furnish the 2 bedroom 2 bath 1300 sq. foot apartment we were moving to in Fort Lauderdale.

After a little research, I realized that there isn’t even an Ikea in ALL OF FLORIDA.

Wait, back up. Let me say that again. There is not an IKEA, in the state which by all accounts and statistics has more people moving in and out of there than any other state in the union. What kind of sick crap is that?

But wait, it gets worse!

Not only is there no Ikea, but even stores that in the North East sell furniture such as Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel don’t have stores in Florida that sell the furniture for pick up, so you’d have to buy everything online and pay their exorbitant shipping fees.

I ended up purchasing the bulk of our furniture in NY and bringing it down to FL with us flat in the packaging in our U-haul. Crazy right?

And guess what they opened the spring after we moved back from FL to NY? Yep, a brand spanking new Ikea in South Florida.

Ok, so now to address the title of the post and why I think my luck is changing..

First, across from the Costco that is about .3 miles from my house they are opening a brand new lowes, which is about a 2 minute drive from our local home depot and will make comparison shopping a breeze.

Second, and more importantly, I was driving home the other day past one of Nanuet’s more forlorn looking shopping centers and saw a HUGE homegoods sign with “coming soon” in the corner.

Whao, I almost didn’t believe my eyes.. previously we had to drive to Paramus NJ about 20-25 minutes to get to the nearest homegoods, and even that isn’t open on Sundays thanks to Bergen County’s archaic blue laws.

So I think, I’ am pretty sure that maybe my curse has somehow been broken. If a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s opened up in Rockland County somewhere then I’d be 100% convinced.

Until then, I’m just cautiously optimistic :)

Filed under: products, renovations by ariana
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