Grocery Store Pet Peeves

It seems like I spend the majority of my time complaining about things.  As my wife is always quick to remind me that I take pleasure in making sure that I dislike that which the public has loved.  She says, "Everyone loved Shakespeare in Love.  Everyone except you."  True enough, I define myself by what I do not like or find fault in, rather than what I do like or that which is meritorious. 

However, there is something to being allowed to disdain reprehensible activities, to look down on social behaviors which are negative and deserve condemnation.  Too often, people engage in activities which are not only morally bankrupt but also impact others with no regards.  Take for instant a litterer whose chucking an empty cup obtained from a fastfood restaurant out of his truck because he has not the patience or motivation to find a trashcan either at home or another commercial estalishment negatively impacts a wide variety of people.  Certainly, aethestically, trash on the roadway is displeasing and tends to encourage other litterers to throw trash on the ground.  Further, trash draws rodents and other varments and creates other health problems.  Certainly, I should not be faulted for disliking litterers.

Perhaps one of the places where my ire is raised most is the supermarket.  The supermarket is a magnet for socially irresponsible persons. 

It starts when you arrive when you are trying to find a parking space, driving through row after row of cars, many of them trucks to large to fit between the painted lines, whose doors you know will bang into you own vehicle if you park next to them, leaving a small ding, and maybe a paint chip as a souvenir.  You are about to give up when you notice an empty space in the next row over.  And so you race over, to claim your find only to discovery some car parked over the lines, taking up two spots, an act I might equate to a dog urinating on a tree, or your mailbox, just to let you know whose in charge.  So you find a place somewhat distance from the front door and begin walking.

You notice that there are several people who have already completed their shopping, their bags contained in their shopping carts.  After placing their groceries in the back of their vehicles, they place the cart right behind the vehicle that is parked next to them, so they have the ability to back out and leave, but their neighbor will have to move the cart, put the cart return for them.  What makes this even more egregious is the fact that the cart return is only a few feet away, as if putting the cart return would kill them.  And of course, on a windy day, loose carts roam freely in the parking lot like grazing cattle bumping up against cars. 

Then you walk inside the store, and notice the fortyish man, with able legs sitting in the electrical carts reserved for the diable, as if using the cart was a matter of right, a matter of first come/first served.  And he will ride that cart in a bumpy, noisy manner, sometimes letting his just as able children ride it around the store as if it were a go-cart, blocking aisles when stopped, until it runs out of juice in the back of the store, no where near the charging station.  Once dead, the cart is dead, it will be abandoned for more tradional means of coveyance, the cart which has to be pushed, the one they shouold have used to begin with.  Meanwhile, some elderly woman who clearly cannot walk five feet let alone a whole store has no means to go shopping.

And then there are the parents who let their children run wild throughout the store, touching everything with their sticky fingers, eating food and drinking drinks before paying for them, leaving the empty packaging on a shelf no where near where the items was obtained, but a mere two feet from a trashcan, children who tear open boxes that have to be taped back up again, making the next person to pick up the package wondering, "Is it all in there?"