Can you really meet women in the cereal isle?

So last week I downloaded the new Atmosphere download-only album Strictly Leakage, and have been pretty much playing it nonstop since. My favorite song is Domestic Dog, in which Slug sings about meeting women at the grocery store:

Women at the bar want to be a star
Stop her on the street, she thinks you're a freak
It's illegal to flirt when we're at work
so nowadays I score at the grocery store

There are some other great lines in the song (Clean enough to put soy milk in the pot belly, skank enough to buy sushi from the hot deli), but it raises an interesting question... does it work?

This isn't the first place I've run into this line of thought - last month I linked this article on confidence in approaching women. I hated the article for it's annoying circular logic - if women don't like you because you lack confidence, then all you need to do is act more confident, and women will like you because you are confident - which doesn't really address the root causes of why someone might not be confident in the first place.

But the author seems to be a big fan of hitting on women in the grocery store, and there are a bunch of similar articles on his site.

In a way, it makes sense - people have to eat, even hot chicks. But aside from my reluctance to randomly approach the ladies of the line in front of the deli, there seem to be a few problems with the idea.

First of all, there isn't really an obvious way to determine that someone is single in the grocery store - you can figure that if a women is alone or with girlfriends at a bar, there is a good chance she is single. Not so much at the Giant or the Weis.

Secondly, going to a grocery store doesn't seem to be much to build a relationship on - hey, look, we both eat food! Let's hang out sometime! People generally try to find people with similar interests - dating sites trip over each other trying to tell people that they do a better job finding people like them, and meeting through church or through friends finds people with similar interests. Meeting members of the opposite sex in the produce section doesn't seem like much of a base to build a relationship on.

I guess you could argue that stores that are targeted at certain demographics may do better- say, Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. Of course, every time I shop at Trader Joe's I feel a little out of place - a pickup-driving Republican in a sea of Prius-driving tie-dyed wearing hippies. If it wasn't for their chinese-food-in-a-bag and schoolhouse cookies, I wouldn't shop there....

The other thing about the whole "meeting women in the grocery store" thing is that I don't exactly, umm, look my best when I'm shopping. Lots of times I'll stop on my way back from the gym, wearing shorts or sweats, hair greasy, smelling like, well, the gym, or I'll go on a weekend wearing, well, weekend clothes. I also try to go at off-peak times, like Friday or Saturday night, when dateable people and the rest of the world are doing whatever fun exciting stuff I'm supposed to be doing on a Friday night instead of buying 12-packs of Vault Zero and whole-grain bread.

But it's probably a moot point - I can't imagine ever trying to start a conversation with the woman in back of me based on their brand of kitty litter. But it's interesting to contemplate.