Shopping Nightmares

Is it just me? For Christ’s sake tell me that this doesn’t just happen to me. You’ve decided, for whatever reason, to go to Tesco/ASDA/Sainsbury/Lidl (apparently pronounced Leedel now), Morrisons or wherever else you buy your food and you’ve decided to go at a time when you think it’ll be less crowded like eight in the morning or at midnight or something like that. You get in there and every single place where you want to look there is a member of staff doing a stock check/filling the shelves/mopping up or chatting to another member of staff about her bunions… Either that or the one other bloody customer in there decides to look at exactly the portion of shelf that you’re at… Is it just me or does this happen to other people too? Then, when you get to the checkout, you get the bag with the dodgy handle, the talkative or miserable checkout person (talkative is bad if you’re in a shit mood because I personally don’t want to use boxes instead of bags and I certainly don’t want a lecture about being  “green” while I’m trying to shovel cans of drink into a bag on top of crisps). Some woman one morning said:

“why don’t you take boxes instead of bags, it’s better.”
“Better for who?” I japed, cheerily (well, grunted actually)
“For the planet,” she trilled.
“Who cares, we’ll all be dead in a hundred years,” I informed her.

End of conversation.

Oh and another thing. I’ve tweeted about this before… Self Service points. There’s never enough room to fill more than one bag and more likely than not, you’re going to get the message, which is usually on full volume (with 30 people queuing behind you huffing) say ‘Please return the item into the bagging area‘. You scream It IS in the bagging area… If I was going to steel the item, do you think I would have scanned it through in the first place?

Having said that, back at the normal checkouts, the talkative ones at least generally help you with putting the shopping away while the miserable ones just let it pile up then look at you as if you’re a fucking idiot because you can’t pack fifty items in three seconds as they come down the conveyor belt like the unwanted leftovers of some cheap version of The Generation Game (older readers will remember that ) What happened to the days when they had people to pack the bags of useless bastards like me?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not moaning about supermarket staff (except the ones in my local Tesco Express) and anyone who does should try working with the public for 12 hours a day, I’m just saying that it seems that everywhere I go someone seems to be “in my space”. It happens everywhere.

If I’m at the pictures (which I am quite a lot as you know) then nine times out of ten some idiot will come and sit directly in front of me or behind me (I usually move ) WHY? Are these people lonely? Do I look like the sort of person who is going to strike up a conversation while the houselights are up and we’re waiting for half an hour of adverts before the film starts? No, I don’t look like that kind of person…

I’ve learned over the years to avoid eye contact and certainly never to smile at anyone as they enter for fear of being lumbered with them for ten or fifteen minutes or, as happened so horrifically on one occasion, for the whole film! Smiling at women has the completely opposite effect by the way, especially young ones. Smile at them and they think you’re going to ask them out or, in the case of the younger ones, stalk them, groom them on Facebook and then cook and eat them after posing as a sixteen year old boy online for six months… (that bloke who just killed that seventeen year old girl he met on Facebook should be put in a small room with the parents and a couple of baseball bats by the way, in my humble opinion).

Shopping rant over.

No related posts.