The Great Transfer - On Supermarkets

I ended up going to the supermarket rather late tonight, a Saturday night. I got there and there were trolleys and trolleys filled with reduced stock; items which were either going off that day or were so badly damaged that they could not be sold as normal.

This should have been my first clue. However, I had my MP3 player in and Devildriver were Driving Down the Darkness, so I continued on without giving these trolleys further notice.

I went about my shopping, periodically calling my girlfriend when they didn't have the specific item which she'd asked for (how did men do the shopping on their own before they invented mobile phones? I would rather suspect that the answer was only in dire emergencies).

I get to the checkouts and there are only about three people manning, womanning, and, in the case of one unfortunate soul, trolling the tills. Two of the tills had long queues behind them and one didn't.

This should have been my second clue.

I, still listening to music and floating through the task of shopping, unthinkingly choose the shortest queue and find myself at the front of it.

In front of me is an Asian man buying an inordinately large amount of the faulty merchandise from the front of the store; cans of coke removed from their multi-pack, dented tins of salmon, damaged boxes of Daz and the like. Each of these items requires the person, or monster, at the till to enter in the handy, dandy ten-digit code, thank you Eddie Izzard, and therefore this shopper is going to be some time.

My natural instinct was to mock this man. After all, who would need two-dozen eggs which are no longer guaranteed to be safe for consumption in a few hours; what possible ovulatory emergency could there have been?

But then I remembered when I had worked at another supermarket, many years ago, and had been in charge of pricing such damaged stock. You usually get three kinds of people buying these poor, malformed products; students, the defiant poor and the shameless elderly.

The students would giggle upon picking up some cream, to be used in some unsightly sexual deviance in the next few hours, possibly even minutes. The poor would look around shamefacedly as they picked up their items but would confidently look at everyone around him after they had, daring people to say something or roll their eyes so that they could cause a scene.

The elderly were the best, though; they'd pick up almost gray meat for some unsuspecting dog at home, they would purchase cheese in the firm belief that they could freeze it and a couple more weeks out of the decaying curds, and I can only assume from their continued repeat purchases that they were either entirely correct in this belief or that they used these foods in some kind of subtle geriatric version or Russian Roulette, where a mere sandwich could be part of a delicate battle of life and death.

This man in front of me wasn't old enough to be considered elderly, nor young or vague enough to be a student, so I put him in the third category. When I saw that he was buying a reduced price Speed Racer branded toy car as well, after my initial understandable revulsion, I realized that this was probably a gift for his child. In my imagination, I saw a small, dirty child gratefully accepting this tacky toy because it was a surprise, a gift from their father which they would always cherish.

I felt like a complete wanker for wanting to mock him and waited, happily and patiently, for him to complete his purchases.

When all the items had been entered into the till, the man's wife swept in from nowhere and picked up the Speed Racer toy. "What are you getting him this piece of shit for?" she asked and casually tosses the toy aside.

"I thought he'd like it," the man replied and asked the till operator to take it off the bill. He then pulled out a massive wad of cash and paid for his items, before taking out both of his expensive-looking mobile phones and checking them.

I mean seriously...