An essential truth of modern life is that people are stupider when I’m in a bad mood. This is especially true inside my local grocery store.
I’m not sure how the entire store’s behavior is calibrated to my mood, but the correlation cannot be denied. My local grocery store has the cosmic accuracy of a thousand mood rings. I can chart my emotional state by carefully watching other people’s behavior while I’m shopping.
When I’m in a good mood, the staff are friendly and familiar personalities providing their best level of customer service to me and my neighbors; when I’m in a bad mood, the staff are unfortunate laborers stuck serving a community of cart-pushing morons who stop short in the aisles to marvel over a display of Coke products designed to look like a football.
Other customers rarely bother me when I’m shopping in a good mood. But if I’m shopping hangry, someone dreadful always falls into my shopping rhythm.
Falling into the same shopping rhythm is when you mostly walk through the entire store in tandem with a complete stranger. While there are certain disconnection points, the general path is the same and you become cohabitants of the same shopping trajectory building to an inevitable Supermarket Sweep dash to beat the other to the least populated check-out lane.
A shared shopping rhythm is established in the produce section, noticeable by the deli counter, and inescapable once you reach the gauntlet of dry goods aisles. I often pull an audible to change my trajectory when someone insufferable is on my route.
Insufferable shoppers include parents with out-of-control children, bickering couples, play-by-play commentators, oblivious cell phone conversationalists (especially FaceTime users), and those who’ve made questionable hygiene decisions.
The worst, however, are the people who loudly complain about how early the store has stocked items for an upcoming holiday.
Yes, they’ve already started putting out Easter merchandise. What’s wrong with ushering in a little spring cheer? If you don’t like it go suck on an egg – there are at least a dozen delicious candy varieties to choose from.
I do NOT need negative energy in the seasonal goods aisle. It is easily the best section in a grocery store. If you can’t find something delightful among holiday treats and five-dollar-or-less toys, you’re broken as a person.
Then there are the dairy case diggers – hunched over old ladies as nearsighted as moles clawing their way to the back of the cheeses and sour cream in search for the best expiration dates. While I respect their game, it desperately needs a shot clock.
This group appears to be made up entirely of retired egg inspectors. The USDA can classify their egg inspectors as non-essential employees in my neighborhood because the Real House Widows of Wallingford have the entire department covered.
I’ve seen them open every carton rejecting more than just those that are cracked. If you want to make sure you’re getting good eggs, just avoid the shakily stacked pile that looks like it was sorted by someone named either Vivian or Midge.
The most erratic part of grocery shopping comes at the end when trying to gauge which aisle to choose for check out.
I used to go by the shortest line, but now I go by which bagger appears most engaged, on the rare instances when the store actually has an on-duty bagger.
One of my first jobs was bagging groceries and the training was hard-wired into my adolescent brain. I hold my baggers to the same high standard embodied in Big Y’s 1996 training video but often find myself repacking a bag in my car’s trunk while muttering about proper box foundation formations, or clutching my pearls in horror when discovering fresh vegetables placed in the same bag as raw meat.
The parking lot serves as my final mood barometer. Because I’m not a sociopath, I always return my cart to the right place. Amateur shoppers look for the closest parking spot to the door, but seasoned shoppers know to find the closest spot to the cart-return stall.
As a former professional cart returner, I have great reverence for the cart-returner’s jurisdiction over the outside of the store and save my utmost disdain for the lazy shopper who abandons their cart in the corners of their parking spots.
Seeing my hard-working brother or sister collecting these discarded carts always resets my mood and lets me leave with a sense that order is being restored to some corner of the world – even if it is just to the median outside of a grocery store parking spot.
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