Last Saturday, my wife, Shelia, and I went on a shopping expedition. It wasn’t a trip to the Galleria to buy clothes or someplace to buy furniture or a new care.

We went on a grocery shopping expedition. (Cue dramatic music.)

We have never been totally happy with the store we’ve been going to for groceries, so we finally decided to check out other stores. Our current store doesn’t have a lot of variety and sometimes doesn’t keep its shelves stocked. Plus, I’m trying to find low-fat or low-carb foods. Yeah — welcome to Demopolis.

We went out of town to begin our expedition to a store that a lot of people recommended. We found that the store didn’t have much of a variety either — about the same as our current store, I guess — but we did find one treasure. We found that “holy grail” of laundry detergents: Bold. (Cue dramatic music.)

For whatever reason, we can never find Bold in a lot of stores. When we lived in Murray, Ky., only one store out of the four or five grocery stores carried it.

So, while we didn’t find a wide variety at this store, we will make the trip there to pick up laundry detergent.

Next, we came back to Demopolis to check out the other store. It had some items that the other stores didn’t have, but again, nothing to make us want to change stores — yet.

For Demopolis — the largest town between Tuscaloosa and Mobile and between Meridian, Miss., and Selma — not to have a major grocery chain located here is unreal. I would have thought that when Southern Family Markets bought out Bruno’s last May, it would have placed one of its own stores in its place.

We have two vacant buildings in town, each of which were grocery stores at one time: the former Food World location on U.S. Highway 80 and the former Marvin’s store on Cedar Avenue that used to be Food Fair. Anyone who opens a grocery store at either of those locations is all but guaranteed a steady flow of business. Anyone? Anyone?