Grocery Store Behavior
I hate the grocery store. Is it the act of shopping? The cashiers? The decisions? No. I hate being around the customers. Is it a requirement to place leave your brain in the car before shopping? I don’t get it.
Biggest complaint: people who place all of their items at the far end of the conveyor belt, leaving a huge gap between their items and the items of the people in front of them. Worse is when they still use a divider. The reason why I hate this so much? I’m usually right behind these people holding a basket (I never use carts) with my items in them and this means I have to wait for the person’s stuff to finally move forward before I can unload. Move your stuff to the front and give others a chance to set out their items. It makes the line move quicker.
Shopping carts. People leave them all over the store and just wander off. Worse yet, they leave them in the middle of the aisle or blocking the end so others can’t go around. Or even more annoying, leave the carts on one side of an aisle and stand in the other half of the aisle browsing products, oblivious to people who want to go by. It wouldn’t kill you to be a bit aware of people around you.
People who shop with lattes. How many times have you seen an empty Starbucks cup just sitting on the shelf with other products? The other day, I saw one inside a freezer case next to the ice cream. Are you for real?
Also, if you pick something up and decide later that you don’t want it, you can leave it with the cashier when you pay for your other items. It saddens me to see previously frozen items sitting on a shelf in the cereal aisle. The store is going to have to throw it away because you were so inconsiderate. If you don’t want it, don’t just leave it anywhere you feel like. I’m not even an employee and it irritates me.
Paying with $15 in coins. Just don’t do it. Eat the fee and use the Coinstar kiosks. Don’t hold up the 10-item-or-less Express lane because you want to pay with the pennies you’ve saved for 8 years. Also don’t leave a pile of pocket lint on the ATM pad. That’s just disgusting.
Share your grocery store annoyances and horror stories in the comments.
Ah grocery shopping. My favorite topic! I actually love the grocery store because it’s fun to see all the women. I only hate it when I have to line up to pay for my items. Since I shop everyday and buy few things on each trip, I’m a heavy express lane user. So I am extremely sensitive to:
1) abuses of the express lane–yes, I do count the number of items you have in your basket, Mr. Have-a-Lot-in-the-Basket in front of me.
2) people who write checks and don’t start writing them until they see the amount–hey you can still write "QFC" and sign the damn thing. Why do people use checks still anyway?
3) people who pull stunts like disputing the price of an item–do it in a not express lane please
4) people who go through knowing they might not have enough money, and when they don’t have enough money, they try to figure out what they don’t need
5) at the QFC on 15th, people who buy cigarettes because the cashier has to go fetch them
6) not express lane, and this may be ‘agism’ but old people shouldn’t use robocheckers at the QFC on Broadway. It’s too much for the pre-Atari mind.
However, now I am in a large/medium sized city in France for a couple of months, and I’d tolerate all that for a 24 hour grocery store. The grocery store across the street just recently started staying open between noon and 3pm instead of the siesta, so they are making progress, but still, I need groceries (and eye candy) from more than just 8am to 8pm or 9-noon on Sundays. Gee, people in France start eating at like 9pm, and the grocery stores close at 8pm? WTF?
because it’s fun to see all the women
What?
Yes. When you reach this thing called "puberty," instantly a large portion of the population causes feelings of joy and delight just because photons bounce off them and land on your retina. The nice thing about a large grocery store, is that it is 99% people you’ve never seen before so there are always new people to see i.e. who passively cause joy and delight just because gazillions of photons are bouncing off them–photons that would have bounced off them anyway had they not impinged on my retina.
If I offended you, I apologize for being born in the phylum ‘chordata’. Isn’t it sad when the reality of evolutionary biology interferes with our desire to be attractive only to those whom we are attracted to and nobody else? Next reincarnation, I’ll try to come back as an asexually reproducing animal, but since I am a chordate, I’ll go to the grocery not just for my food, but also to delight in the vast array of feminine charm and beauty that shops there as well. Hence, I’ll always love the grocery store–until Mr. Twelve-Items tries to go to the ‘nine items or less’ express lane–and then whips out his checkbook when the total finally comes up.
agism and sexism all wrapped into one
let me just propose a rule: no cash at the self-checkout line.
We switched to Amazon Fresh for most of our grocery needs about 3 weeks ago and couldn’t be happier!
Except it makes actually going into a grocery store even worse.
Wow, now it’s sexist to appreciate the beauty of women. Only in Seattle. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster I don’t live there.