The tale of why I hate food shopping

Say you’re on your way home from college, and you need to pop into the supermarket for a cheeky bit of grocery shopping, even dropping by the reduced section to buy a whole cheesecake that not only you’re never going to finish before it goes off but you end up paying more per unit of cheesecake eaten despite the reduction, but you buy it anyway because it has a yellow sticker and you grab it like a magpie in a jewellery shop. There’s also that sense of accomplishment that you’ve ‘beaten’ the supermarket by not paying full price, even though you’re probably playing straight into their hands.

As you turn around to move on to the next isle with your booty in tow, you bump into someone you know, whose beady eyes were probably eyeing up that cheesecake you just took. Ignoring them is out of the question now: you’ve made eye contact within talking distance and both of you are stationary. Plan B: you exchange pleasantries, talk about the weather, ask redundant questions like “doing a bit of shopping, eh?” and generally lubricate the conversation until you part, before it grinds to an awkward halt.

The problem is that supermarkets are designed specifically so that you traverse its isles in a scarily predictable manner: fresh produce, then meat, dairy, the frozen section, and finally all the sweet, carbohydrate-laden goodies at the end. So you’re browsing the milk section calculating how much you’d save by buying four pints instead of two and weighing that up against the odds of you finishing it before it goes sour, all the time looking like an idiot because the saving you make is something like five pence. You decide to take a walk on the wild side and take a six pint bottle, turn around, and… oh it’s you again. Hi. Buying milk, I see? It could be your best friend, housemate, mother or girlfriend: there is no way this isn’t going to be painful.

... the machine blares in that voice that reads “my words say you made an honest mistake but by my intonation I’m accusing you of trying to steal"

If it is your housemate, you now need to navigate the logistical and etiquette nightmare ahead of you: you’re obviously going to wait for each other since you’re walking exactly the same way home, but you might be at different stages of shopping or one of you has bought way more stuff than the other. So one waits for the other, looking on, not in an annoyed way, but still wishing they’d hurry up – while you feel their unintentional glare pile the pressure on you to get through the self-checkout sooner. You scan your items more quickly, except the scanner fails to read the barcode so the moment you bag that box of cereal the machine blares in that voice that reads “my words say you made an honest mistake but by my intonation I’m accusing you of trying to steal”.

Sometimes if you really addle its silicon brain you’re forced to call one of those people with the store ID card to save you. This not only defeats the purpose of self-checkouts to minimise human contact during shopping, but also that of theft – if on the off-chance the employee sees you’ve paid for 5 kilos of carrots yet all you have in your bags are chorizo, you’re not going to be able to explain it by saying you thought the sausages were just a different cultivar.

Finally, with your groceries bagged and paid for (or stolen), you and your housemate now just want to get home.

Then you realise you forgot to buy bread…