I’m walking out of the grocery after a quick surgical strike trip for some odds and ends needed for dinner. Erin and little Maddie were waiting in the car. I’ve grabbed the necessities and a few other things on the way up to the check-out lanes.
The necessities are all in the back of the store, so 90% of the run is a corporate-planned walk-through of impulse buy items, like half-price 30% more-for-free celebrity-endorsed low-cal not-enough-room-on-the-box for a product-name snacks, Platinum-Chef cooking utensils, kid’s toys, and hygiene products – and that’s just the first aisle. Three more aisles of breakfast cereals, including the latest Happy Happy Corn Pops with free life-sized statues of Broadway Stars in specially marked boxes. Then the gauntlet of bulk-food barrels where the siren song of endless pantry staples has been known to suck in happless shoppers never to be seen again.
Relatively unscathed, I survey the bowling alley length of check-out aisles for my quickest escape route. Of the three open lanes, two are lined up back to the clearance meat freezer (conveniently located next to the Pepto Bismol and Immodium AD – go figure) and the last requires you to have the Big-Brother Grocery Key-Chain card.
I opt for the increasingly more popular self-check-out lanes. Anyone who can fly a high performance fighter jet and knit a sweater at the same time will have no problem with these babies. Just follow the instructions completely and you won’t set off the shoplifter alarms and have to talk your way out of the full-cavity body search from the overweight Charles Bronson rent-a-cop.
But, as I was saying, Erin and little Maddie were waiting in the car. I’m walking up to the car and my wife looks out the window and says to me, “Those are the biggest buns I’ve ever seen!”
As a dozen other parking lot patrons within hearing distance blatantly gawk at my posterior region, I realize she’s talking about the fact I was going to purchase one bag of hamburger buns, and I’m walking toward the car, with an additional load of pickles, mystery-snacks, two varieties of soda (pop, cola, whatever!), and of course, Happy Happy Corn Pops.
I opened the trunk and, without bending over to offer a better view to the still staring parking lot cart-retrieval-technician managed to put everything inside, slide sideways into the driver’s seat and drive away.
My wife told me I shouldn’t be so self-concious, but I still had to put my lifesize Phantom of The Opera statue in the basement. It just brought back too many bad memories…