There are several reasons why I don’t grocery shop on a regular basis. For your consumption, here they are.

(a) I am constantly drawn to the Check Out By Yourself area because I really like making the beeping sound.

Listen. I know that it’s not really me making the sound, but I’m responsible for it and that provides me with the only moment of control during my pilgrimage to the dairy section often buried within the darkest confines of the grocery store.

Why is the control necessary?

(b) Because I can never find a grocery cart that I can control. That girl, bumping into walls and knee-capping people with her cart? That girl, red faced and sweaty from her on-going skirmish with the bastard grocery cart? That’s me.

Of the 7,926, 832 shopping carts available, I will choose the one cart that doesn’t work. Embarrassingly, I can’t control it enough to navigate it back for another one, as I fear  that my lack of control will result in my taking out one of the creeps milling about at the entrance asking for a donation. The creeps are what some people call “children.” But, I mean, I don’t understand why we need to be so technical all the time.

Instead, I trudge along with my bastard, smashing into everything and having absolutely no direction whatsoever. I end up buying diapers because that’s where the bastard cart takes me, instead of to the toilet paper section.

(c) Another trauma inflicting object in the grocery store? The swirly thing on which you’re supposed to place the items you’ve already checked out. It measures everything by the gram and then slaps you across the face if you’re missing a piece of lettuce that once sat on the other side of the machine before you swiped it.

If you take too long, dust accumulates on the ‘already swiped’ objects and the machine thinks you’re stealing cotton balls. One by one.

Don’t ever place a long loaf of bread on the swirly thing. Or flowers for that matter.

WHY?

Because they will get stuck and they will break and split and draw everyone’s attention when you’re panicking and turning the little wheel like an overgrown rodent in lipstick, trying to access the next shopping bag that you can’t open because panic means sweaty palms.

And you may as well have dipped your hands in trans fat because that’s what it feels like when you’re trying to open the plastic bags and there’s a crazy woman behind you tapping her feet and smacking her gum while she reads Soap Opera Digest and her offspring is screaming because their hands are stuck to the on-sale frozen chicken bre@sts and the machine is yelling PLEASE PLACE PURCHASED ITEM ON TRAY and you can hear it actually giggle as the grocery store comes to a screaming hysterical halt to listen to your heavy labored breathing and the slip n slide of yours trans fat covered hands scraping away at the plastic bag right before you start blowing on the top of the plastic bag with the final prayer that maybe, just maybe, the air will magically open the bag for you. And when it finally does open, Chariots of Fire starts to play in your head and then. Then. You realize that it didn’t actually open, but that you managed to separate two plastic bags from one another and there’s still no bag available into which you may shove your dairy products and eggs are so fkn overrated ANYWAY.

(d) People aren’t friendly in the grocery store. It’s all about them and their carts and me and my bastard one. The other day, I was standing quietly in an aisle thinking about the effects of more cookies on my ass, when I got bumped.

I was literally “bumped” by a man’s grocery cart. He was about 361 years old and he decided that rather than going around me, he would just go through me. Maybe he couldn’t see me.

But surely he could hear the “Excuse me”
bump
“Pardon me, sir?”
bump
“Uh. Can you please stop…”
bump

My choices were to either throw a box of cookies at him or move. So, I moved, but while cutting him very severely with my eyes, which is something I have been practicing at home because: If I can’t be cool in the grocery store, I am going to at least be tough when facing children and the elderly.

(A not so funny variation originally published: 06/02/26)

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Image from StyleList.