Reasonable Rant

I don't rant very often. Not on my blog, at least. This is partly because I don't get very stressed about things, and partly because rants tend to be somewhat unreasonable, one-sided and hypocritical. Not always, of course. Obviously my rant will be reasonable and contain no hypocrisy whatsoever. Actually, I'm not sure it's violent enough to be a rant, but it's the best I can do, I'm afraid.

Last week I went to the supermarket during the day. I went quite early, because I imagined that this would be a good quiet time to go. I was wrong.

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There were a number of old people there. I expected that. Most of them were there when I was out shopping at the weekend, and still hadn't got to the till yet. I'm sure I've remarked before about how odd it is that the very people who don't have much time left before they die are the ones who seem to do everything so slowly.

I'm not going to rant about old people, because I don't want someone showing me this post when I'm old and pointing out that I'm slow and doddery and indecisive and manage to block the whole aisle for an hour whilst deciding which brand of denture fixitive to buy.

No, I'm much more concerned about the number of SAHMs that there were ahead of me at the checkout. What happened to those magic words "Stay At Home"? They should be indoors blogging, not making me queue. They should order their groceries on line - after all, they can be at home to take the delivery.

The lady in front of me had got almost a trolley-full of fresh vegetables. Now, I appreciate it isn't her fault that it takes so long to put this stuff through the till. This is down to those selfish good-for-nothing scientists, who instead of working out how to genetically engineer fruit and veg so that it grows with machine readable bar codes, are spending all their time inventing invisibility cloaks and boring people at parties.

I do wish, though, that she hadn't decided to buy a small dolphin-shaped something (lotion, body wash?). That didn't have a readable bar-code either, which meant a wait whilst someone went off to find out that the item in question cost 50p, or whatever.

She also bought some clothes, so I had to wait and fume and watch the checkout assistant carefully and neatly fold up said clothes...

Finally, it was my turn. The supermarkets have all decided that they won't have bags by the tills any more, to encourage people to use the recyclable ones. They had an announcement about it in the shop over the PA system. They could have told me before I left home. Then I might have remembered to take my super-green reusable bags (only used once). Instead I had to ask for some evil disposable ones. "Forgotten your bags?", asked the checkout lady.

This is terrible moral blackmail. I think that we shoppers shouldn't stand for it. We should make a point of asking for disposable bags. Then only half-filling them. In the face of civil disobedience they'll be forced to abandon this silly green nonsense.

I had managed not to buy anything without a bar code - none of that fresh healthy food for me, thankyou. I'd also got some clothes. I do all my clothes shopping at the supermarket where at all possible. It's so much easier. The lady was very good, and folded my clothes neatly - what excellent service, and how nice to find a shop where they're prepared to spend time on their customers.

I sneaked out of the shop, the nasty bags in my trolley screaming "Environment Wrecker!", especially as everyone else appeared to have reusable ones. Needless to say, I won't forget my bags next time...