Shopping Cart Etiquette

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etiquette, Fleet Farm, humor, manly activities, motor oil, proper behavior, shopping, shopping cart

There are plenty of etiquette manuals around, but I’ve never seen one strictly for proper shopping cart operation. When shopping carts leave the corral, they take on a mysterious life of their own. Just how long is one allowed to sit, alone and unattended, before someone else can claim it? Carts can look like they’ve been abandoned, but appearances are deceptive.

Recently, I was shopping at Fleet Farm. It’s basically a Guy Mall that smells like tires and sells junk food in bulk, along with fishing lures, monster-sized jeans, overstock military supplies and fitting rooms that require the help of an attendant. Her job is to monitor the fitting rooms, count your garments and flip a switch under the counter that opens the fitting room with a nasty buzzing sound. If you’re having an off day, this whole process can make you feel like you’ve done something wrong.

Fleet Farm is also the only place where men grab a cart and start shopping. Think about that. When you shop, for the most part, aren’t women the ones pushing the carts? They plunk their purse in the section where toddlers sit, heading down the aisle with a list in their hand, heels clicking briskly as they set out. At Fleet Farm, men are seen – solo and as part of a couple – pulling a cart from the corral and pushing it.

That’s where I got myself in trouble.

I stood, list in hand, in the automotive section, carefully double-checking that the oil I picked matched the list. Hmmmm…5W-20? 10W-30? Synthetic? Synthetic blend?  It was akin to asking Hulk Hogan to pick out a pair of ballet shoes. I’m not large and hairy, but everything in the automotive section starts hazing into one amorphous product if I stay there too long.

My first mistake was not taking a cart. My arms bulged with a case of oil, on top of which I had stacked a radiator belt and a box of spark plugs. Fleet Farm is rather warehouse-y inside, and the checkouts are a mile away when your arms are full. I spotted an unattended, empty cart a few rows up – oh, joy! My eyes lit up, and my arms ached ever-so-slightly less in anticipation. Surely it was waiting for me!

I approached, carefully looking down each aisle to see if I could spot a potential owner. That’s another Fleet Farm peculiarity – the men push the carts, and as they wander away from their wives or girlfriends, these women are spotted walking down the main rows, heads swiveling back and forth, back and forth, looking down the side aisles as they try to find their missing men.

For once, I had no wandering husband to locate. I walked up to the cart, and with a sigh of relief, dropped my burden, metal rattling as the load settled. As I wheeled to the checkout, a low, rumbly voice came from behind.

“Nice try.”

No accompanying laugh, nothing to ease the sting of my thievery.

The cart’s owner materialized out of nowhere, just in time to see me lay claim to what was apparently his cart. Red-faced and silent, I pushed the cart back, heaved out my load and looked at my accuser.

He smiled, the lip-stretchy kind without showing teeth. Maybe he meant it nicely, but I wasn’t feeling the love. Turning, I started my rubbery-armed trek to the checkout.

Fleet Farm really needs to clear a spot in the bulk junk food aisle for an etiquette manual.

Shopping Cart Un-Etiquette

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grocery store, humor, kids, shopping, shopping carts, weird experience, writing

It was the best of days; it was the worst of days. 

I should have known better, but I thought I had a handle on my two-year-old daughter. Back then, Eva was known for commenting on anything or anyone that crossed her path with wickedly accurate one-liners that stung as only a two-year-old’s observations can. I had been the recipient of several of these barbs, and they left me speechless and out of sorts for an hour or so after. What had I given birth to? Would it ever stop? If I left her alone with my husband for more than a few hours, I’d return home to find him slightly goggle-eyed, like Wile E. Coyote the instant before one of his experimental mishaps went awry. I somehow couldn’t summon sympathy, though – I’d been there. Oh, yes, I knew what it felt like.

The day in question started out fine – Eva behaved as well as could be expected, so I felt confident taking her and her four-year-old brother grocery shopping with me. Both of them wanted to ride in one of those carts that has a wacky race car attached to the front. They’re cumbersome, and fully loaded, they’re almost impossible to corner, but hey – they keep the kids happy and at a level where the only thing they can haul off the shelf weighs more than they do.

So far, so good.

The problem arose at the checkout. Ahead of us was an elderly lady who was slowly removing a few items from a hand-held shopping basket. How I envied the ease with which she carried out this transaction! No one snatching at magazines! No requests for candy bars! Heck, she could just grab six of them off the shelf if she wanted to, tossing them on the conveyor belt with reckless abandon. Look at me! I can buy whatever I want!

My day would come. For the time being, I resigned myself to unloading the cart, answering the innumerable questions that came with it – When can we have that? How come she got to pick out something and I didn’t? When are we going home?

I put the last of my items on the conveyor belt, just as the cashier finished with the elderly lady’s order.

That’s when Eva struck.

I heard beep! Beep! Beep! from the shopping cart (yes, they have horns) and Eva leaned out her side of the cart and called in a loud voice:

“C’mon, granny, let’s get it rolling!”

My guts congealed. I felt like a goggle-eyed Wile E. Coyote, only the experimental mishap was happening right before my eyes.

If the shopping cart was a lumbering behemoth before this, I now envisioned it roaring through the store, cutting a swath through unsuspecting shoppers as I hurtled toward the finish line, a distant speck somewhere in the parking lot.

But the lady behind me blocked any escape. I was stuck, as stuck as I’d ever been in a long time. Should I apologize? Pretend it didn’t happen? I froze, waiting.

If she had heard Eva’s order, the elderly lady did nothing. Calmly, she picked up her grocery bag and grabbed her handbag with the other hand. I vacillated between wondering if she was incredibly polite or extremely deaf. Either way, I heard the universe exhale, just a notch, and the cashier started running my groceries over the scanner.

Eva acted like nothing was wrong, and I vowed that next time, my husband could do the grocery shopping. I promised myself, I vowed, I’d sign an oath in blood that I wouldn’t care if he returned home laden with potato chips, frozen pizzas and a lifetime supply of root beer. We could pour the stuff on our cereal for all I cared, but next time, he was doing the shopping.

Hangry Pangs Strike Weird Word Wednesday…

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angry, creative writing, grammar, humor, hunger, proper grammar, shopping, weird words, writing

Welcome to Weird Word Wednesday! Today’s word is made up, on the order of “blurple” (a mix of blue and purple) or “meanderthal,” (a person who wanders aimlessly while shopping, often as a result of low blood sugar).

Thanks to unwords, I got a little help with the concept of blended words. Today’s word, hangry, is a great mix of two words, “hunger” and “anger,” that dreadful, snarky feeling that some people get when deprived of food for too long.

Over the weekend, I enjoyed a little “Girls’ Day” with my mom and daughter. We met at the Shops at Woodlake, in Kohler, WI, for a couple hours of browsing and hanging out. My daughter ate a late breakfast, so by the time mid-afternoon rolled around (after a couple hours of being a meanderthal) her stomach started rumbling.

An hour later, she was downright hangry. Thankfully, she’s old enough not to act upon it. She might have felt suck-cheeked and light-headed with hunger, but she didn’t succumb to her hangry impulses – those dark urges that make you feel like your teeth are growing pointy and anything semi-resembling food is clawed up and chomped down with glassy-eyed ferocity.

Perhaps it’s genetic – I have another family member who experiences hanger when he’s food-deprived for too long, and a dear friend also admits to hangry impulses if she’s out with her hubby and there’s no restaurant in sight when the urge strikes.

But what to do when that happens? Let’s face it – you can plan ahead and prudently pack little Ziploc bags of trail mix, but when hanger strikes, the plastic bag gets wolfed down along with the raisins in seconds, leaving you unfulfilled, seeking more substantial sustenance.

There are a lot of other great blended words out there – scrickle (a light, scratching tickle), or puffalope (a puffy, padded envelope), so if you’ve incorporated any into your vocabulary, please share!

In the meantime, we fed my daughter and the shopping trip continued without incident.

Until the next time her hangry impulses take over…

High-Heeled Bowling Shoes

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Christmas, editing, grammar, holiday, humor, proofreading, proper grammar, shopping, strange word, writing

I stopped at the credit union the other day to withdraw some money for Christmas presents. To entertain customers while they waited, the credit union installed a television behind the tellers’ counter.

Screen after screen displayed fun Christmas facts. One said that if we were to buy the original gifts from “The 12 Days of Christmas,” song today, it would set us back a whopping $107,000. That’s a big holiday budget!

At this time of year, retailers are having a field day – I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten many emails with subject lines like “The 12 Gifts of Christmas,” all designed to send me dashing back to the credit union for more wads of cash to buy  whatever’s being sold.

It reminded me of a word I came across recently: emacity. This obscure word relates to a fondness for buying things. Thanks to my handy dandy Latin dictionary, I learned that emacity has Latin roots, from “emo” meaning “to buy or purchase.”

Emacity isn’t a word we use often; despite that, we act as if we know just what it means. According to one source, 2012 holiday spending in the United States has already reached $27 billion! Yowza!

And with the media showing clips of shoppers camped out for days in front of Target and Best Buy, waiting for the doors to open on great markdowns inside, it’s really no wonder we’ve attained such crazed levels of emacity.

Nellie’s emacity reached a fevered pitch at the Spare Me Bowling Shop. She mowed over store signs and plowed past shoppers in her zeal to buy nine pairs of high-heeled bowling shoes.

Whoa, Nellie! She might want to check out “One Cent at a Time,” a neat blog that discusses a different definition of what it means to be rich. You don’t need to sell your belongings and live in a pup tent along the highway to achieve this; rather, ask yourself how you’re already rich and what you’re thankful for. I’ll bet it isn’t anything that money can buy, and if that’s the case, I’m really happy for you.

retrothing.com

So…whether you simply must have another pair of stylin’ bowling shoes, or feel the need to go on a shopping frenzy of another kind, keep a quote from Ben Franklin in mind:

“Rather go to bed without dinner than rise to debt.”