I’m not shoppist.
I’ll shop anywhere when I need to.
I have my favourite supermarket, where I go regularly, usually with bad hair and a wonky trolley, but go I do, and have, it can be said, a whale of a time.
OK. Maybe not that great an experience, but it’s OK. Not what could be described as an horrific experience.
However, I do go to another supermarket occasionally. One where they don’t play music to transport you out of yourself whilst looking at the labels on the cans of peas. One where you have to ‘pay’ for a trolley by inserting a pound coin into it, to release it from the chain it is connected to. I don’t like paying for trolleys. I use a shopper’s disk.
The good thing, I’ll succumb, about these trolleys, is they never seem to be wonky. But trolleys aside, there ends the good experience.
The cheap and cheerful shop isn’t exactly cheap, when compared to the usual supermarket I frequent. Well, cheaper in some regards, but not all.
Some items are so tightly packed in the cellophane you have to gather as much strength as you can muster to free the one item that you need. Piercing a hole into the industrial-strength, reinforced cellophane first zaps your power. Then trying to remove said item from the cellophane, as it is locked into place by some kind of alien static electricity, removes any remaining strength. And, with hair like mine you don’t need a sudden build up of static electricity.
Then, you have to manoeuvre your way around the forklift truck pallets that the shelf-stackers have hauled into the aisles to top up the shelves. When there’s a line of shoppers trying to get around, all with their paid-for trolleys, an oversized pallet and a shelf-stacker in the way, and a build up of static electricity, things can get rather hairy. Congestion builds. Nobody moves.
Eventually, we start to move once again. Somehow, someone kindly moves out of the way. A customer, that is, not the staff member.
I walk past a lady asking another shop assistant where the croutons are. The shop assistant looking blankly at her, as they are stood in the bleach aisle, the lady then describes a crouton to a still expressionless face.
I walk past another shopper telling her friend (and possibly all of the other shoppers in the place, as she’s speaking at eight times the normal human voice volume level) about where she and her friend went to last Tuesday. I tried to ignore. Now I try to forget.
And then I arrive at the checkout. Worn out, with hair that looks like the branches on an old Weeping Willow, with a long queue of people before me. Loud lady is somewhere behind. We can all hear her.
The lady in front has a trolley far more full than mine. Just before it’s her turn to get served, she sends her daughter to their car to get her shopping bag. I start to add my shopping to the conveyor belt when I have room, trying to keep sizes and squashables together, as you do.
Eventually, the daughter returns with three small carrier bags. Nowhere near enough for the overflowing trolley. I don’t watch to see how they get on with packing.
My turn to be served. I smile at the lady on the till who’s glaring back at me. Instantly, she whips things from my neat pile and scans them, before stacking them, haphazardly, on a packing area that is no bigger than a postage stamp. Tomatoes underneath, obviously.
Another glare as she demands payment, and that’s it. The shopping of the customer being served behind me is now being flung in with my shopping on the postage stamp packing area. I grab my items swiftly and hurl them into the trolley just to make space.
And then, after eventually packing things neatly, shop done. Apart from getting a ‘refund’ from my trolley when its all over, that is.
Cheap and cheerful doesn’t always mean good. Or cheap and cheerful, for that matter… but there’s always something fun at the end of it… a tale to tell.
The Mansionic Perspective 
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