The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0.
10:48am on Saturday, 24th December, 2005:
Comment
Cucumber, spring onion, round lettuce, iceberg lettuce, celery, grapes: the first 6 things I bought in the supermarket today were green. Then I got some tomatoes.
Today's shop was either going to take half or twice as long as normal. Christmase Eve in supermarkets is like that: one year you have to queue just to get into the car park, and then another year there are bored till operators sitting around waiting for someone to serve. Today was one of the latter — less busy than a normal Saturday. Yesterday, however, it was a crush; we had to wait 20 minutes in line to check out. There was a suspiciously large number of old people around then, too, blocking the aisles with their trolleys and when they did move only doing so slowly, then suddenly stopping at an inconvenient corner to chat to some other old person about how busy it was.
Sainsbury's seem as unable to predict when the rush will come as anyone else. They had a full compliment of staff, with all the tills open, as if they were expecting the same kind of mob that would descend when bananas first went back on sale after World War 2. As it was, though, there were shelves full of turkeys and bins full of sprouts and hardly anyone around to buy them. I wonder if it's the same across the country, or if there are regional variations?
The worst supermarket queue I ever got stuck in was one Good Friday. A one-hour trip to Tesco's took me three hours to complete, a third of which was spent trying to get into, then trying to get out of, the car park. The ice cream wasn't all that happy when I finally got it home. The hot cross buns didn't even make it home, I ate them dry in the car.
Normally, I only have the odd one or two green things in my trolley. Christmas sure is a weird time of year.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2005 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).