Drama at the Grocery Store!

Yesterday, I was getting my groceries.

I was nearing the end of the task, trundling my cart to the fruit section.This part of the store is usually at the entrance, I know - "Why were you finishing up in the fruit section?? LOLOL!!"

The reason is because I usually shop through the grocery store backwards. See, store designers, they want you to get your essentials at the back of the store - the milk, the bread, the eggs, the meat - after you've gone through all the other aisles first. It's no accident that the food you actually need is past all the other crap. They want you to put stuff like cookies, coloured cereals, pastries, or anything else sold in boxes into your cart before you get your true essentials, the stuff you must eat to survive. You're way more likely to toss a box of Pop-Tarts into your cart before you've "spent" your money on bread and chicken thighs. Anyway, this is kind of a meandering digression from what happened yesterday. But think about that the next time you go buy food, and how the store is set up so that you'll walk around their products, just like cows through a slaughter chute. You could airlift the entire middle section of a grocery store out, fill your cart with everything left that's stocked at the edges of the store, and still walk out of there needing nothing at all. Try it at home! The psychology of food marketing irks me, so I resist the forces as mightily as I can. When I get in there, I head right to the back and fight my way out.

So I was standing by the bananas, kind of lost in my little world, when I heard the scuttling of running feet. This is rare in grocery stores, and broke whatever reverie I was floating around in. I look up, and two employees, a young kid and an older lady, burst around the corner of the aisle, bumping into each other.

The woman, she spotted me right away, and pointed. "LOOK! There he is, hurry!" And they started running, right at me!

I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I got ready for it. Go down swinging, I always say. Instinctively, I dropped into my old karate "horse-riding stance", and cocked my right fist up behind my ear. I've never popped a woman before, but I've been ready for the opportunity ever since I saw Dirty Harry do it a few times in his movies. Punching out a woman - I always appreciated scenes like that in a film. There are times when they just ask for it, but never get it in the nose because of the social taboos involved in mainstream filmmaking. Splat! Who says that only a girl can hit another girl? Anyway, it looked like I was going to have to do the deed, and had my boys all set up.

The woman though, she rushed right past me, and the kid, seeing me getting wound up a bit, skidded to a stop, putting his hands up in a, "hey, take it easy, man," kind of way. I looked around, and there's the woman, bent over my grocery cart.

"You left a trail all over the store!" she yelled, grabbing my bag of milk. When she did, an arterial geyser of milk sprayed three feet in the air, hosing down the bananas I had been thinking of buying moments earlier. I looked down, and sure enough, a white splatter of milk was trailed behind me all over the floor, ending in a little puddle under my cart. It seems that when I threw a box of Pizza Pops into the cart, a sharp edge must have popped the bag.

[An aside for Americans: most milk in Canada is sold in 4-litre bags. According to an online conversion calculator, that's about 4.2 of your alien quarts. It's not just one big bag of milk by the way, it's actually a sack with three little bags inside that you mount in a pitcher and cut the corner off of with scissors. It's a more efficient way to package up the milk for sale than cartons, and Americans who come here always wonder about these big, honking sacks of milk we've got for sale. "Where the hell are all the cartons? This bag thing is retarded!" they always say.]


See, in this demonstration, the corner of the milk bag
is cut for easy pouring. It's not retarded, and if you're
like me, the "bag" method of packaging means you
can latch your mouth onto the bag and inhale a
litre of milk in about 3 seconds!

"We'll get you a new bag, man...don't worry about it," said the kid. He scurried off to the back of the store, returning momentarily with a replacement bag for me.

The "delicious" irony of the entire episode: Because I went to the back of the store and got my milk first instead of last, I left a Hansel & Gretel trail of milk all over the damn store, and was the personal cause of anguish and hysteria. To my amusement.

Take whatever lesson from this that you will.