Monday shopping nightmare
On Monday of this week I went shopping at my local well-known supermarket store. I registered that the omens were not good the moment that I drove down the driveway to the car park and spied that it was packed with cars – and so it proved.
I should add here the information that (and I do not claim this is because of my gender) I’m the kind of guy who hates the shopping experience and – whenever I am forced by circumstance to undertake it – I always attempt to complete the task as swiftly, directly and simply as possible. And then get out of there, rush home … in order to relax.
Last Monday was one of those days. Every man and his wife or partner in town had seemingly had drifted to my chosen supermarket – this presumably a situation repeated at countless similar stores all over the country – in order to replenish home stocks that had been run down to nil over the weekend.
It is in the nature of these things that, having obtained a small trolley (I was only buying the basics) from the area beside the entrance, I went through the automatic doors to be confronted by a middle-aged female who had stopped a metre in front of me, blocking all access to the store as she did so, in order to contemplate life, have a ‘senior moment’ and/or a ‘brain fade’.
If this specimen had taken the trouble to walk another five metres further forward before doing this, the three or four shoppers by then behind her (me first in line) could have jinked past her and made our way to the nearest aisle to get on with our business … but no, in typical ‘vacant head’ shopper mode, she’d decide to do her own thing as if nobody else in the world existed, never mind mattered. And so we had to wait.
And thus things continued.
Next I met another lady with a trolley who sweetly asked if I knew where the salad aisle was. I indicated the answer and set off to the fruit aisle only, after turning into the aisle where live the potatoes, carrots and green vegetables, to find said lady parked awkwardly right opposite the Maris Piper potatoes … thereby preventing me getting at them. (What was she doing standing in front of the Maris Pipers, when the aisle she had been looking for earlier – ‘salads’ – was the next one along?).
Would you believe that, later on my tour speeding around the store as quickly as I could, I came across said lady again … each time standing with her trolley right in front of items that I wished to examine and purchase … not once, not twice, but on three occasions?!
Neither did I.
Everyone was moving around slowly, as if they’d each been involuntarily injected with a sedative serum somewhere between the entrance and the produce on sale.
I’d turn innocently into ‘teas, coffees and biscuits’ – and discover four or five trollies halted at various stations and awkward angles, almost as if they had been deliberately arranged thus in order to prevent anyone trying to ‘get on and complete their shop within 30 minutes’ (as I was) from negotiating a passage between them.
And please don’t get me started on the ‘check-out’ experience.
The first inevitability here – as I soon found out once again to my cost – is that, as night follows day, however long and diligently one surveys the halfwits standing in line at the different check-outs in order to try and identify the quickest or shortest queue, whichever of them one chooses to join will immediately stop moving for ten minutes minimum.
This will almost certainly be for one or more of the following reasons relating to the shopper then being served at the till:-
They’ve discovered that some item of packaging and/or a bottle has leaked and therefore needs replacing;
They’ve decided to tell the check-out clerk his or her life story;
They’re incapable of receiving items that have been ‘pinged’ through by the check-out clerk and placing them into their shopping bags swiftly … or indeed at all;
They’ve decided to pack everything they’ve bought away, and place it back in their trolley, before bringing out their wallet or purse;
They cannot find their wallet or purse;
They cannot find the ‘money off’ tokens’ they’ve been accumulating but want to have taken into account before agreeing what they’re actually going to have to pay;
Some of said tokens that they have produced are proved to be ‘out of date’ when scrutinized by the check-out clerk;
Upon discovery of that fact, a discussion or argument about them being ‘out of date takes place;
They cannot find their cash, credit card or debit card in order to pay;
If using a debit or credit card, they’ve forgotten their PIN number and it gets rejected;
If they’ve forgotten their PIN number, they then try again … and that attempt is also rejected; or
They try a different credit or debit card … and cannot remember the PIN number to that either.
By the time some – or all – of the above has happened, those of us at the back of any of the check-out queues are beginning to lose the will to live.
I’d like to be able to assert that most of the idiots described above were of the generations coming behind my own (I’m tapping this out as a gent in his mid-sixties), but sadly and overwhelmingly they tended to be ‘oldies’ of my vintage or ten to fifteen years either side of it.
This is the worst aspect of being an ‘oldie’ in the modern world.
A bunch of them walking around in public places … in a state of confusion, half-asleep, ‘the lights are on but there’s nobody in’, barely being able to remember their own name (never mind what they supposedly came out to shop for), just generally ‘getting in the way’ … is spoiling it for the rest of us – i.e. those who are focused, goal-driven, determined, active, incisive and constantly on the ball – by giving us all a bad name!
