Shopping

Supermarket shopping in the last few days before xmas is a personal hell of mine. I had to fight my way around Tescos to do my regular food shop. When you see the amount of food people are piling in their shopping trollies you would think that the shops are going to be shut for at least a week rather than just a day or two!

Firstly its the people who seem to have no concept of the world around them. They leave their trollies in the middle of the aisle, or decide to have a full on conversation with a few friends at the end of the aisle getting in everyones way. I have developed a tactic of barging trollies out of the way which is not the most subtle, but makes the point.

I have realised recently that the biggest problem in my Tescos is all the staff with the big trollies doing the shopping for those people who have ordered their shopping online. That's really thoughtful. You can't be arsed to go to Tescos to do the shopping so you order online and clog up the aisles for those poor buggers who have decided to actually go into the store and buy it in person. I'm glad you get all the almost-out-of-date stock just for that!

This week my Tescos has decided that the mix of chavvy families, screaming kids and bewildered old people just wasn't enough to really drive me insane, and so they had added the extra bonus of playing bad xmas carols over the store speaker system.

Now I don't mind stores that play christmas music as long as it's in the last week before xmas and not in bloody September. I am quite partial to well sung xmas carols or Fairytale of New York. But Tescos seemed to have decided to rope in four cleaners to shout out some carols at the top of their voice with some the sound of sleighbells on a repeating loop. The end result was that it was hard to differentiate each song as they all sounded the same.

The only comfort was that due to the way the speakers were placed in the store, certain aisles were quieter than others. Whether by fluke or design the Wine aisle was the quietest so I tried to retreat there.... Maybe that was the whole plan all along.

I feel really sorry for the shop staff that have to listen to this. There was a recent study that likened it to Acoustic Torture. Some stores have been known to play Jingle Bells over 300 times. Thankfully, when I worked at Sainsburys as a student they had a policy of no music so I was saved from having to listen to this kind of thing.

But I do remember working as a teenager in a 7/11 type Convenience Store. Staff were allowed to put their own music in the store tape player, a decision they later regretted when my mate put in Guns n Roses "Appetite for Destruction". All was going well until "It's So Easy" with the subtle line "you think you're so cool. Why dont you just Fuck Off" which coincided with the store going quiet just beforehand. The little old lady I was serving looked rather shocked.

Strangely the tape player broke soon after that and the manager never rushed to replace it...