"How Washingtonians like me became emotionally attached to the Secret Safeway"

"I am seeing in its last days just how full of psychic data that Safeway is. One person runs into a friend in the toilet paper aisle. Another watches a neighbor sweating all over the onions on a post-run shopping outing every week. Another sees My-T-Fine Pudding, remembers a childhood in New York and tells her impatient daughter stories to distract her from the supermarket’s ennui. Somewhere in there a community finds its home. No one notices.

Tied up in the material the store sells are snippets of the lives supermarkets sustain, including mine. Thousands of neighbors, many of whom I knew and more of whom I didn’t, have walked these aisles and wondered why they could never find the sauerkraut or the beer (my Safeway did not sell beer; the sauerkraut was just hard to find). They went at the end of a long day and then had to wait 25 minutes in the checkout line. Maybe someone consoled himself by buying a tub of ice cream. Transactions and acquisitions are the profile of our days: Safeway had them."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/29/how-washingtonians-like-me-became-emotionally-attached-to-the-secret-safeway/

Wow, how is this so poetic?