Rehab - you have just described exactly why I loathe and detest supermarkets !

What happened to the Customer is always first? Im often nearly run over or knocked down by staff ,who just have to get past you no matter what,or,as mentioned park their trolley in an asse so you cant get pastor to the goods you wantthen there are the kiddies who can do no wrong ,picking up / putting down items of food, or 'sampling' the open fruit, one mother actually pulled off several grapes to give to her 2 small children, when I asked if she was going to pay for them she replied "What do you think",not to mention the toddlers intent of commiting hari kari by walking into your trolley,or their older siblings playing chase me,yet were I to bump one of these little people Id be held to blame,Oh the JOYS of supermarket shopping

One parent family I suppose Tiff, we have a large ethnic minority (am I allowed under current pc regulations to say Asians?)..they seem to shop mob handed, husband..wife...kids..grandparents etc etc .
Maybe it’s a day out?

We usually see two parents with kids, both two & one parent families should shop in the day time, so the kids are in bed at the right time & not annoying elderly & not so elderly people who prefer to shop when they hope the shop is quieter.

That thought has crossed my mind Mups...but then I would resemble the rest of the coffin dodgers..THE WALKING DEAD.....

Warning...Due to the graphic nature of this post reader discretion is advised.
For those with a nervous disposition please click the link ...here
to go straight to the Disney Channel.

Now, I'm no more stressed than your average brand-aware psychotic, but supermarkets really do it to me. If there's one place where the UK gun laws should be relaxed (in fact, allowed completely), it's while wandering the aisles of the local Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, or whatever the hell else there is. Here's why...

First of all - you walk into Asda my local happy supermarket. I need money. Where are the cash-points? They're placed (for your convenience) behind the rows of shopping baskets, and there's 4 idiots milling around either trying to remember how to use new-fangled things like cash-machines, failing to remember which page of their diaries they wrote the PIN number on, or just stood there, watching. And then there's one person, just waiting for the other morons to get the out the way. and the stress is going up already. Yes, that person is me.

I can't deny it - I'm Type A...all the way when it comes to shopping. I know what I want (pretty much), I know where it all is (unless they've moved it all around again - a joyous marketing ploy to make us see what else is in stock at the store, and custom designed to annoy off those of us who wanted to shop quickly), and I simply want to go in, get money, put the stuff I need in a trolley, take it to a till, manned by that fat bugger Elton John, (he looks 12 and has an enormous fake diamond in his ear) exchange money for goods, and get out. Rapidly. Is that too much to ask?

Obviously, the answer to this simple question is "Yes.". Because it never happens. By the time I've finally managed to get to the cash-points - and before you ask, no, there isn't another one on my route between home and nearest supermarket - all the idiots who preceded me, as well as all the ones who were already prepared with money, are in the store. The day was going downhill - rapidly.

First - fresh veg. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd start wearing a tinfoil hat to block my brainwaves, because there is always some coffin dodger ( I hasten to add that I am in that age group, just in case anyone takes offence) who's parked his trolley in front of the veg section I want, and is away weighing his single onion, or counting cloves on garlic bulbs or something.
And as soon as you move their blooming trolley, you can hear the "tut" from over your left shoulder I start to wish the old bugger would croak, but then I might feel guilty as I stepped over them to carry on with my shopping.

And so it goes on - and on and on and on. The bread counter is populated by morons who either
a) can't remember what sort of bread they like or
b)can't work out whether 2 loaves for 99p is a better deal than buying a white one for 44p and a brown one for 55p.
(I couldn't make this crap up - I've seen it happen, and been forced to listen to the ensuing conversation, and all without resorting to ripping their tongues out),

In the dairy section, there are people who still haven't worked out the colour coding on milk, nor how to read the labels on the shelves beside the milk. "Is the green label semi-skimmed, or full fat?" I hear them ask. And I know they've asked this many times - because I've seen them many times, always in the same place, always asking the same bloody thing.

Invariably, there's a screaming brood of kids somewhere in the store and I find myself praying for them to walk into a shelving unit, and disappear under a rain of falling tins. But no, it never happens. Instead, they just wander the aisles, screaming like recently departed lost souls in some particularly vile purgatory.

Dante was wrong - the ninth level of Hell is populated by people who think supermarkets are great places to take kids. Personally, I think that we should fence off a couple of the trolley parks, and leave toddlers out in the rain, chained to the railings the same way people have to leave dogs outside shops. They can't run away, and they'll still be there when you come back for them.

There's always some pair of coffin-dodging weirdos, who have to walk side-by-side down the aisles. it's like they're symbiotically attached, siamese twins joined at the shopping trolley. They have no knowledge of the other people in the store, most of the time I'm not sure they even really know they're in a store, but they successfully manage to block the traffic flow for half the store.

In along with all the customers, there's the staff as well. Just to make life more fun, they haul around cages full of stock, and then leave it in the aisle - just far enough out from the side that it makes life more difficult to get past them when you're shoving the trolley.

Finally, the tills. There's some poor person sat there, whose whole life consists of sweeping other people's good over the laser, listening to it beep for each item. The entire process is scripted to a tee, from saying "Hi" in the world's most bored voice and asking whether you need help with packing your purchases, through the beeps and straight into handing over the cash - it's all just a process, fuelled by dangerous levels of tedium and boredom .

And the worst of it is - there's none of the other stores that are any better. They all seem to have a policy of employing people who think that working for superstores is the best that they can aspire to. They're all just as bad - they all attract the same kinds of people, both as customers and employees. There is one way of avoiding most of this crap - not all of it, but most of it - it involves shopping at about 3 in the morning. I really should try that internet shopping thing on that world wibe web thingie

Disclaimer: None of the above is intended to be a personal attack on the elderly (coffin-dodgers), check-out assistants, children or Elton John. So if you are elderly, a checkout assistant, a child or Elton John, know some-one or are related on your mothers side to either a coffin-dodger or check-out assistants, or know a child or a in way related to a child, or where one previously, a relative, boyfriend or live in lover of Elton John this is all a bit of fun ok?
There is a checkout lady that I rather fancy who I often go to..I like the way she handles my shallots as she smiles at me.

Anyway moaning about the above.yes you...or activating the complaint button will only make me depressed and I will have to hang myself from the cistern chain in the outside loo, which will bring tears of joy to the eyes of my missus.


‘And breath’.....

You and I should shop together...a double grump would work wonders.. but I agree late night shopping is not for young kids.

Excellent! And I can relate to all of that.

One other thing, though, which perhaps you have been fortunate not to have encountered yet, is what happens at the checkout.

There are queues at all of the open ones, of course, and the usual procedure is to find the one with the shortest queue.
Having found one that has the shortest queue and/or the queue with the least number of items in the baskets, you join it.

The most annoying thing, though, is when you find a checkout with what appears to be the most favourable queue only to find that the woman (it's always a woman) directly in front of you pulls out from her purse a large wad of vouchers. Extricating them alone usually takes a few minutes, but then the checkout operative needs to look through each individual voucher to check the date and even whether it may be for a different supermarket. Then there is the typing the codes into the cash register procedure.

What appeared to be the quickest checkout, then turns into by far the slowest. Worse, it is now too late to do anything about it. I have, on occasion, thought about piling everything back off the conveyor and into the basket and to go to another checkout, but soon realised the futility of doing so: there would quite likely be another 'voucher woman' at that one too.