The Good - Pepe's Playhouse
I always had to accompany my parents when they went grocery shopping when I was young. Me and my sister never cared for it, but we had no other choice but to go along. Kroger came to our rescue by implementing a thing called Pepe's Playhouse.
As the name suggests, it was a play area named after Pepe, which was Kroger's mascot or something. Here, parents would drop off their children, after signing them in, who wanted no part in the grocery shopping process and let them play until they were done checking out.
It was nothing more than a somewhat large cubicle with various toys and such, but the best part about it was that it had two Sega Genesis consoles. One always had Sonic the Hedgehog, and the other had either Bubsy or Earthworm Jim.
Surprisingly, they were neveroccupied when we went, so me and my sister always had the systems to ourselves. We would trade off every so often, but our parents would come after an hour or so. We would be sad to go, but we looked forward to shopping again at Kroger.
If it was just our dad who took us, he would often prolong his shopping so that we would get more time in Pepe's Playhouse. I don't remember how long we ended up doing this, but I want to say that we stopped when I was 7 or 8.
I went grocery shopping at Giant Eagle a few weeks ago and saw that they have something called The Eagle's Nest, or something like that, so I casually glanced over at it trying to not look like a pedophile. They had an N64 and a Gamecube, and I saw one kid playing Super Mario 64 and another playing Mario Kart Double Dash.
I guess the Genesis has been phased out now in places like that, but it still takes me back.
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