Ten Things Tuesday – Shopping in a supermarket on month end

Shopping is not for the faint-hearted. The days that men left it to the women are over. Shopping lists are not written in HB pencil on the back of cigarette boxes anymore. Now they’re WhatsApp’ed.

Sometimes ladies like to put these lists on Facebook to embarrass their men if they have been out in the golf club late on a Friday and it can be a tad blushing when the list includes private ladies stuff.

Anyway, there are several things one must remember when taking on the supermarket come the end of the month:

1. It is going to be busy. Do not come back after three hours of being at the coalface and tell your colleague or family ‘gee, you should see that place – the whole of the world was there’. They know that. That’s why they sent you.

2. Do not knock your trolley into the rear of any large ladies at the milk shelf. You may get stared down and these lady shoppers have a habit of moving in packs and they can easily hem you in.

3. Do not just buy a newspaper and a piece of chocolate and expect the ladies with those huge trolleys to let you stand in front of you in the queue. Life does not work like that.

4. Make friends with a fellow shopper. You may need him/her to pass you the cheese in case the crowd is so fierce that you can’t stretch out and grab that piece of pesky cheddar.

5. Remember: people use queue waiters to keep their place while they go off and get the potatoes that they forgot to buy. Do not get angry with the queue waiters. They are just going their job.

6. If you are using a bankcard to pay for your groceries, make sure you remember your pin number. It can be rather disconcerting to have a queue of people that stretches to the bread counter mumbling about you, while you try and remember your number combination.

7. Do not speak loudly on your cellphone about the latest tender you have managed to wangle. That does not impress the SASSA people – they nearly lost their grant because of a rickety tender.

8. Make allowances for people conducting loud conversations with each other across the aisles. It could just be a catch-up session and do not make snide comments. You could get hit by a rather soft gem squash or worse.

9. Be nice to the lady/man on the till. They have had a longer day than you and still have to do their shopping and go home and complain about all the people they have served.

10. Do not make comments at the till like ‘but at Spar/Pick n Pay/Shoprite – (read whichever is applicable) – the price of so and so is R3 cheaper’. The stoic like glare from the assistant actually translates into, ‘well, what are you waiting for then… go and buy it there’.