Anger in the aisles

BY SIAN PRESSWELL

I braved the supermarket yesterday, an experience that always gets me jittery. Will they have what I want? Will it be on offer? Will I make it out alive?

Trolleys. I hate them. If they’re not wobbling all over the place – I always get the one with wonky wheels – they’re being pushed by maniacs. Going to the supermarket, for most people, seems to mean leaving their brains at the door. I want to ask them: why do you leave your trolley blocking one side of the aisle when you’re looking at stuff on the other side? Why do you ram your trolley into people’s legs? Why do you suddenly just stop, in the middle of an aisle, when you know that people will be walking behind you? It’s sheer madness!

On this occasion, I avoided most of this – or so I thought – by sticking to the clothes section. The clothes aisles in this particular supermarket are narrow and stocked quite high. I found myself looking at one end, then moving round and going up the opposite end of the aisle, because people kept blocking off the middle of the aisle, ignoring any of my attempts to politely get past. The clothes browsing took twice as long.

I had a friend with me, and we decided to have lunch in the supermarket. The food itself was grand, and only £6 for the two of us (!); however, when we came to sit down, there were no clean tables. Who knows what the table cleaner was doing, but nothing was cleared. We sat down at a dirty table which remained like that until we left. She managed to clear all the tables around us, but not ours. I fumed my way through my £2 sausage, beans and chips.

My supermarket experience could’ve been 10 times better had I actually said anything to anyone, but I guess my British reserve enjoyed my silent anger much more. Read more by Sian.

Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net