Much of what’s good about America can be found at the grocery store.

Like many long-term residents abroad, Charlie and I experience reverse culture shock when we go back to the U.S. We marvel at the width of the highways and their broad medians as we drive away from the airport. We smile politely at the enthusiastic waiter who wants to know how our day is going. We rejoice in how easy it is to get in your (rental) car, drive somewhere and find a parking place.

Those expat clichés are still true, we are finding in our first visit to Virginia in eight months. But this trip is also different.

We left a France under COVID-induced restrictions that include restaurant closures, a 6 p.m. curfew and a prohibition against travel beyond 10 kilometers from home. We found a U.S. where so many people are vaccinated, at least in our parts, that we could attend an actual dinner party, at a house. We ate at a Charlottesville restaurant where people weren’t required to wear masks at the table. (Masks were worn by customers when they walked in and by staff at all times).

Those wonders and more come together at Martin’s, a slightly high-end grocery chain in Virginia, where the feeling of openness we are experiencing showed itself in many ways. Some of which, we admitted to ourselves, wouldn’t happen in France even in the best of times.

Hospitality: A sales worker stopped Charlie as he was weighing tomatoes at the self-pay register and told him that she suspected he had entered the wrong kind of tomatoes and was paying too much. Indeed, he saved nearly $1 with the new category she keyed in.

This nice young man led me halfway across the store to locate the paper product I was looking for. (All the employees wore masks, as did the customers).

Technology: It’s entirely possible that French grocery stores, the big kind far from central Paris that I don’t go to, also have robots to watch for messy spots and summon an employee to clean up. But do they name them (Marty, in this case), and put cute googly eyes and a crooked grin on them?

Health. Need I say more? And yes, the vaccinations referred to are against COVID-19. Please note this is not an endorsement of the messy and overpriced U.S. health system, which is far inferior to what we have in France. But vaccinating in grocery-store pharmacies s is one way that the U.S. has been able to give at least one shot to about 42% of its population, compared with 22% in France.

Information: I have never seen a grocery store in France that has this kind of overhead display. On the aisles, yes. But that requires trekking from one end of the store to another. In France, you are supposed to just know where everything is.

Selection: Actually, I think the options here are fewer than I have seen elsewhere in the U.S. There was no low-salt medium-pulp gluten-free orange juice.

Martin’s also features items that I like and can’t get in France:

(To be sure, there are plenty of items that I don’t like and that, happily, no self-respecting French grocery store would sell):

This is not a comparison between two countries, both of which are my beloved homes and offer much to their residents. If there is a comparison to be made, it’s between France, the U.S. and other developed countries that are managing to vaccinate their populations and control the pandemic, versus such lagging countries as India, where the suffering is terrible and worsening.

As I write about restaurants, rental cars and grocery stores, I try not to forget the genuine misery that the pandemic continues to inflict around the world, especially in poorer nations. And I continue to wish that my two countries, rich as they are, would do more to help.