Are You Being Served?

I have a love/hate relationship with supermarkets. On one hand they are fun to browse around and coo in wonderment at the retail opportunities available to me. On the other hand they are desperate hell holes of confusion and crowds, where the one item I require is so well hidden that a team of trained tracker dogs couldn’t sniff it out and, even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to reach it for all the people with trolleys, and buggies, and pensioners in wheelchairs, and supplementary screaming kids careering around on heelys. 

I find there’s always a screaming child somewhere in a supermarket. Either that or they’re piping the sound in for some reason, perhaps to force me into a quick and random retail purchase to escape the noise. That happens to me quite often, I angrily throw random things in my basket, tutting about how it sounds like a pig is being tortured, and when I get home I wonder why on earth I’ve bought 20 AA batteries, some ointment for thrush, and a family size pack of liquorice allsorts when all I went in for was a pint of milk. 

It’s not just screaming kids (and in some cases their exasperated parents) that are the problem, although I fail to see why 3 adults and their 17 hysterical children need to trawl around Tesco together, it seems to be people in general. 

 It’s the old people who walk slowly, swaying ponderously from side to side, it’s the people with trolleys who just park them wherever they happen to have come to a halt, it’s the people who are always wanting to get to the shelf where I am, and it’s the people who decide to stop and have a conversation in the middle of the aisle. I know, a conversation, what are they thinking?? 

The problem is, you think you’ve escaped them when you get to the next aisle but before you’ve had a chance to see which exciting frozen products are on special offer this week along comes mum, dad, granny, sullen teenager, howling toddlers, and the whole damned circus starts again.

That’s because the supermarket is designed so that we all traverse the same route more or less, so for the 20 minutes or so I’m doing the weekly shop our lives are briefly entwined. I have been known to utter the words “I hate people” when shopping, but when you think about it, I guess it’s all the shop’s fault. They encourage us to bimble around, stop and look at the shiny new things on offer, and provide an open invitation to bring along Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all for the shopping experience.  

Bring Granny, she’ll buy some plants or surgical stockings, bring the kids, they will harass you into buying them sweets and toys, bring a cattle prod to get these relentlessly irritating people out of my way.

It’s no wonder that I forwent the supermarket for a while in favour of home delivery. It seemed to be a more civilised way of dealing with things. Thing is, I began to question the logic of this approach given that a nice shiny supermarket had opened up on my doorstep. It seemed churlish to ignore it. 

So there I was on Monday afternoon, spending part of my Bank Holiday dodging errant shoppers in a vain search for tumble drier sheets and mixed herbs (I succeeded with one but failed with the other). 

The nightmare doesn’t even end at the till point. Firstly you have to queue behind someone who has picked up the wrong item and we have to wait while they, or Tracy with the headset, goes to get the right item because they were too stupid to pick the right thing up in the first place (or perhaps because they were distracted by a distant scream from a giddy 5 year old or became momentarily light-headed from the intoxicating smell of Deep Heat from Grandpa). 

They then pack their shopping away very slowly one item at a time and finally they seem totally surprised that they have to pay for it. It’s the only way I can explain the rummaging through bags at the last minute for money. 

Then, when I get to pay for my few items the 13 year old lad on the checkout starts asking me ridiculous questions. 

“Have you been doing anything exciting today?”

“Well, funny you should ask, I went white water rafting, bungee jumped off the Eiffel Tower and set the world record for the longest distance achieved by a human being shot out of a cannon, what about you?” 

Leave me alone. I didn’t go to the supermarket for small talk, I went for tumble drier sheets and mixed herbs and when I found them in the over lit maze of a shop and followed the generic signs that aren’t truly helpful to the casual shopper I bought the wrong herbs apparently. I don’t even use mixed herbs and won’t use the fines herbes that I picked up in my haste to get out of this cavern of screeching and body odour and I’m now too embarrassed to take back because then I’d become as bad as the rest of them. They’ll live in my cupboard for years now.

To be honest I’ll probably go back to the supermarket again at some point this week so it can’t be that bad I guess. Maybe it’s a kind of mild sado-masochism on my part, just without the whips and chains. Which is a relief really as I look terrible in PVC shorts and I can’t stand the chafing of nipple clamps. 

But I digress…