I can understand your desire to make your novel-length TF story have a lot of character-building and bonding scenes. Presumably you want to retain a serious, dramatic tone. But that requires two things.
I know there's a literal deity involved in the plot manipulating events, but this still seems a tad odd for a story that seems to want to be serious.
Speaking of which, there's a reason Vonnegut wrote that every sentence should advance the plot or build character. Faffing about in a convenience store does none of that. As someone who favors a certain niggardliness and efficiency of prose, as my readers may have noticed*, I would've cut out or cut down half the sequence. Maybe more.
Unless this turns out to be a plot-significant convenience store, almost nothing important to the plot happens. And I strongly doubt that's the case, because you regularly describe a bunch of random minutiae.
Another common piece of advice is "read your story out loud". If you had, you might've noticed that you're spending a lot of time talking about stuff that most people probably won't give a crap about.
*Unless I'm being fancy, in which case all bets are off.