Finneran: Eight Items or Less
Friday, March 27, 2015
It happened again. Just yesterday. Twice!!
I don’t mind food shopping at all. In fact I like it. For me it’s a respite from phone calls and meetings. I turn my phone off when I enter the store. And I let my mind wander a bit. I enjoy thinking about meals—trying this or that, pairing different things, recalling certain recipes. Whether it’s a brisk and focused walk through the aisles for a few meal-specific ingredients or a more leisurely “let’s stock up” on many basic items kind of errand, I enjoy the down time. And it seems as if my wife is happy to leave most of it to me.
But there’s a problem………my fellow shoppers. Men and women. Not all of them of course because otherwise our food markets would become scenes of daily mayhem. I attribute the fact that I have not yet been engaged in an all-out brawl to 1) my mother’s training and 2) to the mellowing which comes with age. Now my remedy to some self-centered idiot is to recall Mom’s lessons on patience and to grab some check-out counter magazine featuring an article on rock-hard abs in just seven days.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTLet’s start with the men. Is there something within the male chromosomes that make men act like jerks? I don’t want to make genetic excuses for them for they seem to be a minority of the male population, but the few certainly can cast the many into a bad light. Here I speak of the “fast” check-out line, the one which is limited to eight or ten or twelve items or less. It’s a very considerate gesture on the part of the grocery stores but it does not work if shoppers are only considerate of themselves.
Enter certain narcissists who must actually think that they are of great importance, that their time is more valuable than your time, and that the world will end if they should be held up in their haste to save that world or to make a buck. Invariably they carry in their carts a number of items which put them well over the clearly posted limit. Talk about brazen. Talk about ignorance. These guys take the cake. It’s bad enough that they think their fellow shoppers are either too nice to say anything or too distracted to notice their selfish little game.
The absolute worst of these offenders are the ones who will take a well-loaded cart into the “fast line” and proceed to split it up into two or three separate orders, each of which falls technically within the posted limit. Not so long ago, and notwithstanding Mom’s live and let live training, I probably would have given the guy thirty seconds to move his sorry butt out of the way and into the right checkout line. Now I spare the guy a black eye and a split lip, preferring to read about those rock hard abs, amused by the antics of selfish men. They are fools.
The gentler sex cannot be spared here. They have their own patterns of dysfunction, usually carried on their arms in the form of mini-suitcases—i.e.—pocketbooks. Some of these things would not fit on the overhead bins on an airline. And I cannot begin to imagine what is being carried around in them. I’ll say this for guys—we keep it simple…..driver’s license, a credit card or two, and a couple of bucks, all very functional and efficient.
Not so with women who carry more than enough items to sustain themselves on a globe-trotting mission. Each of these items of course must be moved out of the way of the thousand other items they carry while they conduct a search for a) coupons, b) cash or credit cards, and c) horror of horrors, the correct change including dozens and dozens of pennies, laboriously counted out one penny at a time. And of course the women seem to wait until everything has been rung in before they even begin their search of their luggage. Might they ever consider the option of pulling a single credit card out of a simple coat pocket to finish their business? Must they very casually peruse the several cards they carry in a James Bond type of wallet with fifty different slots? Must they dawdle over the proper placement of the card and wallet back into the yawning abyss of the suitcase on their arm? Have they always been oblivious to the fact that a payment is expected as part of the transaction? Might they anticipate that fact and prepare accordingly?
You are the jury here. You’ve seen and suffered both types. You decide which side is the worst offender. As for tomorrow and as for me, I’ll undoubtedly be stuck in the “express line”, reading about rock-hard abs.
Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.
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