Shopping advice

in

This is for the benefit of anyone who's ever used a supermarket. Friendly advice, even, inspired by the behaviour of an entire extended family operating in some kind of evil alliance at checkout number six this evening. WHEN YOU REACH THE CHECKOUT, STOP SHOPPING.

The usual strategy when shopping for groceries is to enter the store, obtain either a trolley (cart) or a basket, put stuff you want in it, then proceed to a checkout and pay for it.

The family I encountered this evening had a different tack. FAMILY MEMBER ONE, who I shall call MRS. SHOPPERNAZI proceeded immediately to checkout six with her innocuous two items of purchase, trailed haphazardly behind by her small herd of children, brothers, sisters, grandparents and other bewildered brainwashees. I step into line. Gosh! thought I! A short queue! I can leave the supermarket in blistering time!

Nein.

Mrs. Shoppernazi then proceeds to COMPLETELY OCCUPY the checkout, while her HORDES OF MINIONS are scurried about the place collecting foodstuffs she requests and depositing them on the conveyor. All the while I'm stood back a good six paces behind the checkout to allow room for the fucking armies to mass in and out of the space between the checkout and the barrier thing that's designed to provide room for only one person-width to leave the store through that thoroughfare.

Which leaves me in the awkward position of NOT LOOKING LIKE I'M ACTUALLY IN LINE. So while Mrs. Shoppernazi is waging war on the supermarket with her evil squadron of MiniShoppernazis, I'm fending off a border assault from assorted scalliwags who've concluded that since I'm stood back a distance from the checkout, I'm not really waiting to be served.

AND, the great wonderous being that Mrs. Shoppernazi gloriously presumes to be somehow manages to only purchase items that have no shelf price, which forms a third onslaught of troops on the checkout as various store officials pander back and forth relaying prices for the absurd shit this woman apparently cannot live without.

If her teller card hadn't worked, I'd have killed her.