The new supermarket is capitalism gone mad.

I used to go to a market called Star. I'd never heard of Star before I moved to Boston, but there it was, wedged into the base of the Prudential Center. It was the size of an average market: deli counter, salad bar, bakery, and so on. And it was open 24 hours a day, so I'd often find myself in there at three in the morning, my cue case slung over my shoulder, picking up cereal and milk for the morning. I knew the night shift workers. It was friendly.

Then Star was bought by another company I'd never heard of: Shaw's. They chose to move the market out of its old space and into a brand new one, which they built over what was once a big grass-covered area. The wind is constant around here, so no one actually used the grassy space for anything, but it was sad to see it go, anyway.

The new market opened the other day, and I wandered over to check it out. My brain took in about five seconds of stimuli and blew a fuse.

The floor plan makes no apparent sense. Some aisles go one way, some go perpendicular to the first. There's a salad bar and a sandwich bar and a deli counter and a bakery and an entire section devoted to cheese. There's a florist, a place to sit with your salad, and what looks like a wine section (it was closed yesterday; no alcohol sales on Sunday). There's an imported-food section and, my favorite find, a natural-food section (organic whole-wheat pasta in ten varieties). And there are twenty check-out lanes and several do-it-yourself lanes.

The place is way too big. The aisles are way too small. I came across ten abandoned shopping carts; you just can't get a cart around in there. Customers looked and sounded unhappy. It's painful to think that some dingbat believed this to be a good floor plan.

To top it all off, it looks like a warehouse. A supermarket in a Home Depot space.

The fact that it's closer to my apartment should make it easier for me to stay on a diet, but already I'm dreading my next visit. Maybe it will be quieter mid-week; it was jammed yesterday.

Interestingly, it's not far from an enormous, ridiculous Barnes & Noble, also in the Prudential Center complex. What's with the trend of super-sizing stores? Does anyone actually like them?

I think it's time to find a small, quirky, friendly market in the South End, because my whole neighborhood is turning into a subsidiary of Prudential Properties.