Please...help me get my queso!

Sometimes, something as simple as going to the grocery story becomes fraught with the peril of annoyance and delay. This is particularly true if you shop at the Giant Eagle in Squirrel Hill on anything like a regular basis. There, nasty old ladies prowl the aisles like grizzled owls looking for poor mice to pick off and slaughter. When the aisles narrow because of some special display or an abundance of shoppers, these ladies get particularly spiteful. They never say “excuse me” if they want to get by. Oh no. Instead, they gently, then not so gently, ram their shopping carts into my ass, as in bump-BUMP. Then comes the eye-narrowing glare.

At first, I didn’t quite know what to do in these situations because I felt uncomfortable about getting snarky with an eighty-year-old woman. So I’d just kind of look down and move out of the way. Then the mean old bird would push past me and sigh as though my mere existence affected a greater offense to grocery shopping than Heinrich Himmler’s efforts at work affected upon the Jews.

Now, when I get the bump-BUMP, I imagine shoving the cart back so hard that it knocks the lady backward onto the floor. One swift push and that little grey-haired asshole would be on her back. I smile when this thought occurs to me, then I turn toward the old woman. Usually, I say something like, “Oh, it seems that you’ve just hit me with your cart.” This causes the woman to narrow her eyes even further, maybe even to let out an aggressive sigh. After this, I say, “Oh, I’m sorry, would you like to get by? You could just say excuse me.” I smile at the woman. The most recent woman, rather than saying excuse me, let out a whole series of aggressive sighs, backed up until she could turn the cart around, and proceeded to head in the opposite direction. All of this rather than saying “excuse me.” I’ll probably never know who these women are or why they act so snarkily toward me, but now I derive a great deal of amusement from being polite and smiling at them only to see how obnoxious they are even in the face of niceties.

Of course, the peril of annoyance and delay at the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle doesn’t end with those old ladies. It doesn’t even begin there. But for the sake of quasi-brevity, I’ll skip to the final peril—checkout. If you go during the busiest times of day, this is when you’ll find the geriatric cashiers working along side the baggers with downs syndrome. I don’t want to rail against people with mental disabilities, but there is a reason that I’ve never seen anyone buy eggs during those busy times. But the most obvious thing going on is the snail-like pace at which the cashiers scan items. And if something doesn’t scan, they try to scan it at least five or six times before they enter the code manually, again at a pace slower than Kendal Simmons’ 40 time. Even when the problem is incredibly obvious, like a bent or ripped bar code, or a bar code that is clearly a manufacturer’s barcode rather than the store one and hence won’t work, the five or six additional attempts are coming. This causes the lines to back up halfway up the aisles toward the back of the store, which exacerbates the old owl problem (see above).

Then, there’s the matter of using my own bags. I have my own grocery bags, like many people seem to these days, for reasons of efficiency. There is absolutely no reason for the continued production of those awful plastic bags just so that they can end up mostly as waste in landfills. Anyway, I’ll put the bags on top of my food on the belt so as to be sure that the cashier will see them. Once, the cashier removed my bags from the top of my food, put them behind my food on the belt, then proceeded to scan everything and bag the groceries himself in plastic bags. What, I still wonder, did he think those bags were there for? I was awestruck watching him there, unable to speak. After he finished and I paid, he didn’t even hand my own bags to me or anything. I said something about how I’d been hoping to use my own bags when he handed me the plastic ones. “Oh,” he said, looking at them on the belt like they were some exotic space metal, “Huh.” More recently, I took my own bags, handed them to the cashier, and said, “I’d like to use my own bags, please.” He said, “No problem,” then proceeded to double bag everything in plastic bags, then stuff the double-plastic into my bags. What, I still wonder, did this guy think my own bags were for?

What, I often ask, if anything, goes through these guys’ heads at all? I mean, where does it end? They don’t understand what grocery bags are for. Do they understand what an ATM is for? A stoplight? And, no, in case any of you snarkies were wondering, this guy was NOT one of the employees with downs syndrome. I’m not THAT kind of douchebag.