Avid Inkling

The other day we went to Market Basket. Market Basket is the only grocery store I can think of where shopping for groceries is a contact sport.

This incident happened by the yogurt: a woman in an electric wheelchair felt the need to stop all traffic and yell loudly at a worker to get her the kind of yogurt she needed. She stopped in the middle of the aisle, in the middle of an intersection. All cart traffic came to a stand still for about ten minutes while the woman then proceeded to have a conversation with the worker.

I agree, the world needs more friendly people, but there was plenty of space for her to park her chair and not block the flow of carts. I also wasn’t thrilled when the little tiny woman behind me, literally little, she was barely visible over the cart, felt the need to use her cart as a battering ram, and complain loudly in some foreign language (at least it sounded like complaining, I couldn’t understand a word she uttered).

Once there was even the slightest hint of an opening everyone tried to ram their carts through at once, which created another problem because no one was going to give an inch of the precious progress they had made down the diary aisle. The cart-jam was really quite something to behold and caused more mutterings.

Market Basket is also continually restocking their shelves, that’s a good thing, but it also means that there are huge pallets with boxes in the already rather narrow aisles waiting to be shelved, or in the process of being shelved. This creates more special cart traffic issues, and it is particularly fun when the item you want is hidden by the pallet.

When I told Gavin about this, he simply grinned and said “Wait until you shop there before a snow storm.” I can hardly wait.