Cleanup in Aisles 5, 6, and 7

If you ever want to drive me utterly insane, lock me in a supermarket.

I swear to all that is holy, does ANY manager really believe that having racks of overpriced shit in the middle of EVERY aisle helps the traffic flow? Not that you know how overpriced the shit is because if you should for some reason pick up something off one of those racks, there is no price sticker on it. Don't buy stuff from those racks, people.

Honestly, didn't some wannabe engineer who dropped out from RPI figure out how wide to make the aisles so that you can't pass another cart easily if they have a even so much as a small bunch of (overpriced) flowers sticking out of the end of their basket?

This afternoon I was in the market with my two kids and I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing (shaddup, it's the crappy music they play). I crashed my cart right into the front edge of this big towering cardboard thing holding a bunch of O.S. It tipped toward me and somehow I caught it, and I pushed against it to put it upright again. Or so I thought. I let go, it fell toward me. I swore, I pushed it back, let go, it tipped again. Rinse, and repeat. I looked down at the front corner of the cardboard shelf and thought "Nice move, Exlax, you wrecked it, this thing is never going to stand upright again." I had a date once where the exact same thought crossed my mind. But where was I ? Oh right....

So I had no other choice but to literally LIFT the whole thing up and lay it down on its side. Little boxes of O.S. were falling everywhere. It was so damn embarrassing. I'm sure they're playing the tape upstairs in the security department even now, saying "Look how red her face is.... have you ever seen that colour??"

I could try to blame the cart but I actually got one that didn't have a locked wheel, rolled fairly straight, and it wasn't even that freaking "car" one that my kids still try to get me to use. The market was somewhat crowded because, you know, it's going to snow this weekend. So, We All Have to Buy Lots Of Food Because We Might Get Snowed In. (After the Christmas blizzard two years ago, I was out and about the next day. Hello! My mother in law could feed the entire town with the canned goods she keeps in her basement)

So I wandered around the market trying to find other O.S., (the things that were actually on my list, that is) because, you know, a manager's main duty is to rearrange the store as often as possible so that people can't actually find anything they intended to buy when they walked into the store. It's a good thing I didn't run into the manager, I have seen him and he is obscenely cheerful, and that definitely would have put me over the edge.

After what seemed like an eternity in the blazing fires of hell, I got to my FAVORITE part of the grocery store....the checkout lane, where some dumb kid stuffs my food into bags. I know I need to seek help about this issue, but it never fails to drive me up the wall that no matter how many bread items I have, they all go into ONE bag. "d'oh, it's bread, we'll put it in the same bag to protect it..." I always want to grab them by their "1 Year of Superior Service" pin and say howcanIenjoythatbreadafteryoucramitintoabaglikethat???

My second favorite moment is when they put my gallon of orange juice in the flimsy plastic bag that the gallon of milk is in. The plastic handles start to stretch and tear as the dimwit is putting it into the cart. No way will it make it up my front stairs.

I could go on and on. The last time I was there, the kid dropped my onion, watched it roll across the floor, picked it up, and said "Do you still want this?" Since it was in one of those bags (oh! those produce bags that you can NOT open...) I just said "yeah, whatever" which translates to "I just want to go home and cram this stuff into my cabinets so that I can have a glass of wine"