The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I just came from a would-be shopping trip to my usual grocery store, the big box one in downtown Stanwoodopolis (name withheld by advise from my attorney).  With my cart only a quarter full I rounded the final corner in the last lap to the checkout stand, hoping for one that might have one or two carts, a short wait, but no, the three lanes were backed up into the aisles, the self-check back to the rear of the store, so with my usual penchant for patience I settled in and waited my turn behind a couple of carts crammed with enough groceries to weather a winter, plus two or three small carts with about the amount I had.  I figured five minutes, I’d be at the conveyor.

Five minutes nothing had moved.  It was like a Twilight Zone episode, the one where the shoppers never move an inch.  Fifteen minutes and everyone is looking around, wondering same as me, what the ?%$#.  Since I couldn’t see my checker, I assumed we had a new hire, some poor victim stressed beyond anything manageable and who had suffered either a stroke or had simply gone catatonic, frozen over the barcode scanner.  The guy in front of me gave me a quizzical look of frustration so I asked what day he’d gotten here.  Comedy, you might not need to be told, isn’t much appreciated when you’ve become trapped in long lines that do not move.  Down at the other checkouts some progress seemed to be made, not much, but some and by now it was too late to lane change.

Twenty minutes and a couple of pass-bys from the Manager, a mackerel faced administrative type unbothered by the fact that ten minutes ago he had tried not to make eye contact with me and yet here I was again, rooted to the same spot.  I asked if they would be bringing porta-potties soon for the folks with incontinent problems.  Again, humor is not what was needed here.  Maybe a couple more of those unopened self-check lines might be, but no, I guess not.

Twenty five minutes later I’m expecting Rod Serling to wander out of the produce section, maybe offer a short summation of this day’s episode.  ‘The townsfolk may have asked themselves if this was nothing more than an alien experiment to determine if grocery line gridlock might lead to civil unrest.  Some may still be there with their thawed pizzas and their melted ice cream.  But rest assured, they’ll always be checking out … in the Twilight Zone.’

Thirty minutes later and another pass-by from the unharried Manager, I noticed a cart peeking out from Aisle 6, queued up for the checkout stand half a dozen of us had been waiting for in Aisle 5.  It didn’t take Rod Serling to script the moment when the two lines converged, each confident that we were next.  My cart would be the one to meet Aisle 6’s cart  and obviously the lady who never quite figured out where the end of our line had been would think, well, you know damn well what she’d think and then ….

I gave up rather than lock carts with another frustrated customer and pushed my way through a forest of stalled grocery wagons to the self-check, figuring anything was better than another half hour even if I bullied my way in front of the lady in the wrong line.  Course when I reached the self-check at the other end of the store, that line stretched to the end of the aisle, possibly out the storage area and into the loading area.  A guy at the head of the conga line jabbed an angry thumb at me in case I tried to jump the line, pointing off into an infinity of basket carriers and shopping cart victims.

I don’t know how many shoppers succumbed to dehydration or heart failure.  I don’t know if the Red Cross set up shelters by the dairy department to tend to the fallen.  I do know I was the only one to abandon his cart and stumble to the front door.  When they count the fatalities, I hope my cart doesn’t send the authorities looking for its owner, some poor schmuck frozen back in the freezers when confusion sent him reeling, another casualty of the grocery industry prior to its proposed merger of the two national supermarkets.  The merger that should, little doubt in this former shopper’s mind, solve most of their checkout problems.

Right.

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