Rules of the Road
Now that I have been out of the business for a few years, I feel that I am now what I would consider myself to be a “civilian shopper.” That means I don’t have to follow the rules of the grocery store, nor do I have to pay attention to what kind of shape an aisle of products looks like. Oh, I find myself doing it constantly, but that doesn’t mean I have to do it.
For example, if a cashier gives me poor service or makes mistakes, I am not going to sit there and take it. If a place is out of my favorite product when it is on sale, I don’t just settle for something inferior or more expensive, I either find a place that does have the item or I ask for a rain check at the service desk. These types of actions are standard practice in the industry and I am pretty much always courteous when I deal with the employees of the joint I happen to be in. See, I recognize just how much bullshit and bullying they take in the course of a work day. Eight hours is just about all anyone can withstand in one of those “big box” shops before the average worker wants to fall down in a dizzy faint, or grab up a firearm and start blazing away. My experience is only in grocery, but I am sure it is the same way with people in other places like home improvement stores, department stores, and electronics megastores. I tend to give a lot of slack to the employees in those establishments.
Now that we have recognized that I am a sucker for the poor slobs who work in those places, I want to push forward and discuss the shoppers of those places because those shoppers are a completely different animal. And I use the term animal blatantly. It is because of these animals that I have devised a set of rules to follow within a store to keep you from losing your mind while you shop.
While my understanding and thoughtful demeanor towards workers is forged from years of actually having to do the work myself, I also believe that my attitude towards my fellow shoppers is also melded from the years of abuse that I was subject to at their hands. So it is with great satisfaction that I sometimes get to screw with asshole customers in supermarkets and megastores when they are wrong (see Chapter One).
People are held to a set of laws that are put down on books. Society is generally held together by these laws and we elect people to make them for us. It’s a big business. We even hire thugs to carry out laws so that we don’t have to get our hands dirty when somebody breaks the laws. So far, its been a pretty good system and its been around for thousands of years. For some reason, the instant a person steps inside a department store, all those thousands of years of harmony and all those laws of society are thrown out the window.
I have seen people step on children to get to a fifty cent cup of yogurt on a dairy shelf. I have seen angry mobs arguing over the price of a dollar’s worth of deli ham; yelling at a 16 year old girl wearing plastic service gloves. I have even seen a man argue about ten cents worth of garlic bread…in that scenario, the person actually took home a frozen loaf of garlic bread, weighed it and brought it back to the store when it didn’t match up to the weight announced on the box. I actually pulled a dime out of my own pocket and said “If the item is worth that much to you, do not let me stand in your way.” Wow, that guy was pissed when I did that, but see, he didn’t really want to argue his point about the bread…he just wanted to argue with another person. He was lonely. Anybody who would go home and weigh a box of frozen garlic bread just has to be lonely…or insane.
I would be in full agreement if somebody were to come along and purpose a “Store Police” law where actual police officers cruise the aisles and departments of a store keeping the peace…protecting and serving. If the store is out of the iPods that they advertised in the local newspaper and the mob begins to riot, I think that the riot gear should be donned and the beat downs should commence. But that is an extreme case. Like most police operations on the actual street, most of the Store Police undertakings would probably be mundane and ordinary. People would be written tickets for parking too long in front of the key making machine with their cartloads of Wal-Mart goodies, would be ejected from the store for being disorderly about a pack of socks, and would be restrained and locked up for pawing at that hot cashier. You get the idea.
But the best part would be that there would be moving vehicle laws in place in the aisles. No more would you be subjected to idiots like the fat woman in Chapter One. No more would you be caught behind the slow slow slow woman using her Hoveround electric wheel chair to carry a load of two by fours that even a forklift would be hard pressed to convey. A Store Police officer would be around to write tickets for such transgressions!
I don’t think that I can enter a store these days without feeling some sort of fight or flight mechanism kick in. I know that by entering a place, like cigarette smoking, I am actually taking minutes off of my life. Sure, they are the sucky years towards the end, but still, it’s my life and I should be able to burn it the way I want. And I certainly don’t want to burn anymore of my precious time here within the four walls of a shopping center. If you are like me, you can actually feel your blood pressure rising and your heart rate jumping as you walk across a parking lot towards the mall. I just know that once I go passed those whooshing double doors and grab a cart, trolley, buggy, bascart, whatever it is you call it, I am going to be subjected to tortures that only war veterans can out-brag.
Because of all this bile that has accrued within me I have set up a group of rules that I follow. I have found that they work in pretty much all sorts of stores, but I am going to render them in terms of grocery stores since that is where I spent (and still spend) most of my time.
Rule Number One: There is always some idiot standing in front of something. I want a can of tuna, so I know that I should probably go to the produce section and look over the tomatoes because without fail there is always some dope on a cell phone or a woman culling through a pack of coupons right were the tuna is.
Rule Number Two: No matter how courteous you are, there is always some brute that will take advantage of you for it. If you hold a door open for some kind old lady, there is always some guy who comes running up to grab what he wants while you are standing there with the door open. If you go out of your way and nicely let a person go in front of you at the bakery counter, they will, without fail, buy the cake that you were looking at in the desert case.
Rule Number Three: Always buy your frozen foods last. Chances are, if you go into a store to do a week’s worth of shopping, you are going to be in the frozen food section long before you are finished with your purchases. I don’t know why they put the frozen food section in the middle of the store, but more and more often, I see it. Also, I know that from the middle of the store there is a whole lot more shopping to be done and the chances of you falling victim to some moron grow with every step you take towards the cash out area. It is best for you to skip that part of the store and do all the other stuff first, because without fail, somebody is gonna break something or trap you in some way, preventing you from escape.
Rule Number Four: Cell phones. People using cell phones in stores are to be avoided at all costs. I don’t think I need to explain this very much, but suffice it to say that cell phones are as dangerous as loaded guns in the hands of retarded monkeys. People just don’t pay attention to anything when they are talking on their little boxes of death.
Rule Number Five: Avoid the ten-items-or-less lane unless it is after ten o’clock at night. During the day, most people think they are saving time by jumping into these lanes. In the beginning, when the ten-items-or-less lanes were a new idea, they were a good plan. But as we have seen so many times in human history, plans tend to fall apart. People just don’t follow the rules when it comes to these things anymore and they usually become a time-sink…a black hole where you never get those precious minutes back. Oh God, and don’t remind me of the guy who is paying for his groceries with a sack full of change. Whoever invented the Coinstar is a saint.
Rule Number Six: Children. See Rule Number Four: Cell phones. Although I love my children very much, I often find myself losing my mind when it comes to dealing with them in a store. Kids are grabby and inquisitive by nature so I am not blaming the kids on this one; they are just built that way. Yes, my children act up in the store, but that is not my concern here. My concern is other people’s kids. I don’t know how many times I have been stuck behind a cartload of kids. I don’t know how many times I have been run into by a kid trying to escape his raging parents. I don’t know how many times my cart has been infiltrated by another parent’s kids who seem to have lost their way. There is a reason why there is such a thing as Code Adam people! Kids are all over the damn place inside of a store and that’s why all the abductor types tend to go there too.
Rule Number Seven: Never shop on a Friday night. This rule should probably be re-written to say “never shop during normal business hours and only shop after three in the morning on a Sunday” but that is not realistic, so we’ll just keep the rule to Friday. Why? Friday is payday. Friday is also the last day of the work week when people are at their most worn down and aggressive. And lastly, Friday tends to be the day when “the full moon comes out.” In other words, Friday is an insane day when it comes to shopping. The stores are more crowded, the shelves are sold down and empty, the bread is a day old. Going into a grocery store on a Friday evening after work is like asking for five bullets in the gun at a Russian roulette game instead of the customary one.
Rule Number Eight: If you can avoid using a cart, do so. Why? It is a question of maneuverability. Also a cart tends to fill up, so you’ll save money if you use one of those baskets or just your plain hands.
So those are the rules I have down so far. Feel free to add or subtract from them as you see fit, but they are the set that works for me best. And remember, they were made with you in mind and are there to keep you healthy, sane, and safe.
