Supermarket Sweep.

I’ve opted for the Turbo-Chrome 9000 model shopping trolley for this blog’s picture, complete with optional child ‘seat’ and wheels that have a moderately high chance that they’ll all head in roughly the same direction. You get what you pay for in the trolley world, let me tell you.

Supermarkets are fun-filled places which will usually involve all manner of annoyance. From the very beginning, choosing the trolley…

It’s a fine skill, like wall papering or making fire with sticks. Choosing a trolley that works, hasn’t got something spilled all over it and has a functioning coin deposit mechanism can really seem like an uphill struggle unless you are that man in the anorak who’s spent the last five years of his life researching the Turbo-Chrome 9000 and its counterparts and knows just what to look for.

And the coin systems are half the problem. If you go for your trolley and it turns out to be the Lada Riva of the mobile basket world, what can you do? Do you take it? Or do you hang around for some other unfortunate shopper to take it away leaving you with the next random choice? You could always search around the car park for a decent one I suppose…if you had nothing else to do with your life.

So, you’ve armed yourself with your trolley, you’ve made it past the miserable security guard who really wishes he’d stuck in at school and into the badly organised and constantly shifting myriad of aisles. This aisle shifting malarkey. As soon as you’ve got used to where something is, they move it. Maybe its some kind of weird game all of the managers play, or something to do with inter-dimensional forces. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Borg were involved somewhere along the line.

Working your way around the supermarket, there are all kinds of characters.

Slow-Trolley Man. I don’t know how this guy drives a car but its a fair bet that if he drives it the same way as he pushes his trolley, he’s got a fine career in hearse driving ahead of him, if that’s not his current profession already. You can have Slow-Trolley Woman too of course, but women generally seem to know what they are doing a little bit more. Mind you, with the Borg in control of the aisles, nobody can be sure.

Entire Family Unit. I can understand taking a full complement of bodies if you’re MS-13 facing off to a rival gang but when you’re in Asda, it’s not really necessary. It’s possible that they think, by adding numbers, they will reduce time taken but alas, this isn’t the case. They just take up entire aisles to themselves and move along them as one, like a school of whales looking for plankton.

Checkout Chatterer. A close relative of the Chatterbox you’ll find in the Post Office, they suffer from a similar problem, the inability to shut up in situations demanding brevity. Youre at the checkout, pay for your shopping and move on, the cashier is not your friend, they don’t care about the weather and really, could think of better things to be doing at that moment in time. These people, they are insistent that we have any interest in their trivial information. My life is far from exciting, petrol dropping 2 pence is enough to get me going, but I don’t feel the need to tell every checkout operative I happen to come across. Pardon the expression.

Greedy Guts. We’ve all seen them, wandering around, munching on some snack or slurping away on a drink. Before they’ve actually made it to the checkout. These are the guys that just can’t hold off their craving for a packet of biscuits, or a sandwich, or a bottle of Cherry Coke. They just have to have it, right then and there, even though conventionally, this isn’t really how its done, their trolleys resembling land-fill with the remains of their in-shop feast. Dump that empty carton down on the conveyor, that chocolate covered wrapper, that packet of crisps. Seriously, eat something before you go shopping, you might find that you don’t have to eat your way through half of the shop before you’ve actually paid for it.

So, we have the characters. We have the complete lack of common sense at the checkouts themselves too. I’m all for trying to combat underage drinking, I think 12 and under shouldnt touch the stuff but the ID check thing is becoming a little ridiculous I’m sure you’ll agree. Check 25 now is it? What next? If you don’t look like you’re drawing your pension, we need to check for ID? Given the number of occasions reported in the news where pensioners have been asked for ID, maybe even that’s not looking old enough…

Other things suggested by fellow grumblers also include:

- The people who wait until they actually get to the checkout before looking for the correct change. Soldiers in WWII didn’t have to contend with that much shrapnel.

- Empty shelves blocked by the very product that’s supposed to be filling them, on giant racks. Worse, shelves full of the stuff but you can’t get to them because of the racks…

- Unintelligible tannoy announcements. The store could be burning, we’d just have to assume that the croissants were on two for one, for all the sense we could make of it.

I’m sure there are more, suggestions welcome.

I give the impression that I really dislike supermarkets but I don’t, I could just do with an empty one to do my shopping in, free of stresses, screaming kids, munching families, tannoys and Dale Winton.