My wife requested ground oat bran today. She uses it for some health-related concoction that I think also includes whey powder. One of the two local chain* supermarkets never has it - though significantly for this discussion, it has a few things that are somewhat similar, leading a shopper to think that the Bob's Red Mill ground oat bran must be right here somewhere - and the other sometimes has it. So I often end up getting it at Whole Foods, which we go to occasionally for a few specific items.
I did eventually find it at WF, and it is worth noting that even the employees were stumped at first and went through the same list that I did. It could be with the gluten-free flours. It could be with the variety flours, as most of the Bob's Red Mill are. It could be with the cereals, in the oatmeal section. And it could be in the healthy bulk foods - as the whey powder is. It is in the cereals, but not quite in the oatmeal section. Next to the rolled oats and the steel cut oats there is a section of specialty cereals, e.g. foreign muesli's, and at the far end of that, ten feet from the other oats, because they only carry the organic version (it always irritates me on principle to spend even a few extra cents on organic), is the ground oat bran. It doesn't say that it is ground, because it is too busy saying that it is organic, but if you look at it, it is ground.
Sometimes supermarkets will put high-markup (brand name) snack foods in multiple places. Oat bran is not one of those.
Which reminds me of the joke about the couple being given their introductory tour in heaven (long storyteller details here, fill in your own), and the husband suddenly turns and smacks his wife a good one. She is flabbergasted, but he is unrepentant and complains "If you hadn't discovered that damned oat bran we would have been here years ago."
*We intuitively know order of adjectives, as I have mentioned before. In languages that do more with declensions and conjugations and less with word order this is less true.
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