I Hate: Supermarkets

Let me tell you a story.

Yesterday I travelled to my local Tesco supermarket to pick up the weekly shopping. I walked in, got my basket, filled it with food items and various toiletries, paid for my goods and walked out again. Doesn't that sound easy and pain free. Well no it fucking was not, it was a gigantic fuckfest and I hated every millisecond of it.

I have many issues with Supermarkets and they start before I even enter the frigging places. The layouts of most stores are a complete shambles. You walk in and are usually offered a choice of three isles to begin your journey. Most of the time these isles are for fruit, veg and various fresh produce essential to any shopping trip, great, but this causes the herd of cattle that forms our public at large to wander around aimlessly banging into one another about like a bunch of drunk toddlers on crack. This then continues throughout the store, the isles becoming a life or death shopping trolly version of the dodgem's ride with small children instead of bumpers.

People are at their most trying when in Supermarkets. There is always some sodding child screaming atop of their lungs as the parent either ignores them or yells louder back at the child which only ever pisses me off more. There are the ignorant tag nuts who insist on stopping right in front of you while leaving the trolly mid isle so as to get in everybody's way, then never pick up the item they stopped to look at making the entire event a pointless waste. There are the lazy parents who let their teenagers push the trolly, which would be great if they didn't try to ride the trolly all over the place as if it were some kind of sport for the mentally ill.

The product placement bewilders me too. Why put the fruit at the start, where it will then become a challenge not to squash for the rest of the journey? Surely that would be a great thing to put at the end? Instead of say, I dunno, the heavy cans and bottles. I mean seriously its like the spanners at the head of these uber conglomerates want their produce to be brought back to them, and doesn't that defeat the whole point of what they are trying to do?

Once the horrific ordeal of picking up the items is over you then get to face a plethora of irksome treats at the tills. You have drunk, crack toddler syndrome all over again as you are given three choices. One being a till manned by a manic depressive mid lifer who has been stuck in the same dead end job since they left school and were too stupid to advance further. Two being the spotty little shitlets fresh out of school/college or who gives a fuck where else, with their monotone groany or annoyingly chirpy voices designed specifically to get on my tits. And finally the last choice, the self service tills which were designed to speed up the process of paying for your goods but in actual fact do the exact opposite.

Needless to say supermarket shopping is not my favourite activity and sadly I can only see it getting worse as time goes on. In ten years time there will be more products, more people and less space, a truly winning combination of fuck-upery that makes me want to comfort eat, which inches me closer to my next shopping trip.

Thanks a bunch Tesco, thanks a fucking bunch.