No One is Happy That The Bachelorette Sent This Grocery Store Owner Home

Jelisa Castrodale
Jelisa Castrodale
Jelisa is a freelance writer who has covered food and travel, sports and pop culture for numerous publications. When she's not on deadline, she enjoys getting new passport stamps, collecting records and shouting at her beloved Liverpool Football Club.
published May 30, 2018
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(Image credit: ABC/Paul Hebert)

The last grocery man to capture America’s collective heart might’ve been Mr. Hooper, the bow-tie wearing owner of Sesame Street‘s corner store — and that was in, like, 1982. But that all changed during the season premiere of The Bachelorette when we were introduced to Joe Amabile.

The 31-year-old Chicagoan wasn’t the smoothest contestant on the show (he introduced himself to Becca Kufrin with an honest “I’m Joe and I forgot everything I was going to say to you”) but that just made him more endearing, because if you’ve never embarrassed yourself on a first date, you’ve probably never been on many first dates.

In his introductory video, the grocery store owner and former watermelon seller said “I deal in produce, but one thing I haven’t produced yet is love,” and that sound you just heard was thousands of ovaries detonating themselves. But at the end of the episode when the off-the-charts adorable Amabile was sent back to the storeroom without a rose, Twitter was having none of it.

Hashtags like #JusticeforJoe and #GroceryJoe started trending, as women alternated between wishing Kufrin had handed him a rose and wondering whether they could find out which South Side grocery store was his. (We’ve admittedly done the same thing — without any luck. He doesn’t even have a social media presence, other than an Instagram account that seems to have been started last month).

“Cleanup on aisle five, amiright?” a quite possibly counterfeit Grocery Store Joe tweeted. “It’s just my BROKEN HEART.”

“I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT JOE THE GROCERY STORE OWNER DIDN’T MAKE IT PAST NIGHT 1 ON THE BACHELORETTE I WOULD LIKE TO SUE ABC,” one distraught viewer wrote.

“becca sent joe the grocery store owner home so we now know two things about her: 1. she doesn’t like watermelon 2. she is blind,” another harrumphed.

So um, yeah, who else needs to pick up a few things at the store today? In Chicago? While shouting a Bachelorette contestant’s name?

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