Grrr…

Patience.  Not that I ever had much of it to begin with.  But now? I’d say that my patience is inversely proportional to my age.  The older I get, the less of it I have.

Case in point.  Shopping carts, too small aisles, and seemingly clueless people.  That right there is the trifecta that will send me running for a crisp glass of Sauvignon Blanc to ease my stress. That or my meditation app. Breathe, 2,3,4, hold, 2,3,4, and exhale 2,3,4,5,6,7.

I used to not have any problem shopping.  So I ask you, did the shopping aisles in any store today, get smaller? I know the carts did not get bigger, because some of them have in fact, gotten smaller.  Have some people gotten more clueless and now have zero knowledge of aisle etiquette?

Let’s start with grocery shopping.  Now granted, my local Giant is one of the smaller stores.  So given that, perhaps the aisles are tighter. 

I always choose the smaller cart, because, well, the whole point of this blog.

By choosing the smaller cart, I am already giving myself the advantage to help manage my impatience, which I know is coming.  In fact, as soon as my car sees that I am pulling into the Giant parking light it sends me a signal.  Most cars have low fuel, oil, or washer fluid alerts. Mine has Irritating Shopping Experience Ahead alerts.

I take the small cart.  I put my reusable shopping bags in the bottom of the small cart, thereby limiting my space for food even further.  But darned if I will pay 10 cents for a bag.  We have to check our groceries out ourselves and bag ourselves since now there are 5 aisles for self-check out and only one for the good old-fashioned way where a store employee does it for you.  And that aisle is usually 10 people deep, all of whom are over the age of 55. That, or they are harried parents with ginormous carts filled with enough food to last through a nuclear winter and a bunch of kids buried somewhere within.

Anyway, you’d think they could spot us the bags for all the work we are doing, ergo saving themselves significantly in staffing costs.  Ooh.  See how this works? There goes my impatience meter. Ding ding ding.  And when did they decide to do away with the fast check out aisle of 15 items or less? Yup, irritation levels are up and running.

Ok, let the shopping process begin.  First problem, is clueless shopper number one who has stopped right in front of the entrance in order to peruse the strategically placed produce case, (advertising what the store thinks is a good deal, but most of us are like, a pint of strawberries for $10.00? No thanks, I’ll pass),  as well as the weekly flyer for coupons (Why are you just now looking at the weekly coupon flyer? Why don’t you have the app and have already downloaded your coupons to it?).

That aside, if they’d just scooch their carts over a tad bit, me, and the others coming in behind me, could get by.  Not even in the store yet and there’s already a back-up.  Grrr…

That’s bottle neck number one.

Once past that congestion, you get lulled into a false sense of security because the produce section is fairly wide open and you are able to maneuver fairly easily there.

However, the minute you turn up an aisle, any aisle, more bottlenecks await.  Similar to the shopper clogging up the entrance, there are more shoppers like that, that are clogging up the aisle. 

Proper Aisle Etiquette calls for parking your cart on the side of the aisle, not leaving it in the middle of the aisle while you look for your items on the shelves.

Additionally, one must maintain a constant awareness of one’s surroundings. For instance, you may have correctly parked your cart on the side of the aisle, say in front of the salad dressings, while you are looking at the condiments section next to the salad dressings.  But you need to maintain awareness, because now your cart is potentially blocking someone else who wants to look at the salad dressings.  Proper etiquette is that when that happens, you say, “Oh, sorry! Let me move my cart for you!”. They reply, “Why, thank you very much.” 

Seems to me that lately, very few people are aware of this etiquette. 

Then there is the matter of these too small aisles and two shoppers with their carts entering the aisle at each end.  It’s a bit like playing chicken. Who’s going to move over first? There is only the merest millimeter of space for two shoppers  coming in from opposite directions.  You really have to hug that shelf to your right and they need to do the same on their side.  The other person’s failure to negotiate this properly will result in your extreme irritation (well, mine anyway).  Grrr…

Nowhere is this more prevalent than two places that require taking a Xanax before going or you will be sure to pop a blood vessel.  Not only that, they really require a specific shopping cart strategy, and a Plan for How to Shop with Minimal Stress Impact.

I am talking HomeGoods and Trader Joe’s.

HomeGoods, that magical place where you can wander the store like you are on a treasure hunt. Discovering that amazing home décor item that you didn’t know you were even looking for or needed, but that will somehow transform your world from blah to beautiful.

I have tried to shop there without a cart.  That’s pretty darn impossible, because pretty soon you find yourself holding more than your arms can carry.  So, you grit your teeth and you take a cart.

Now, unlike the supermarket where, while it is challenging, it is indeed possible for two carts to pass each other from opposite ends of the aisle.

The same is not true at HomeGoods.

Two carts cannot pass coming from opposite ends of the aisle. There simply isn’t enough room.  One must do the Pause and Peer before entering a HomeGoods aisle, assuming you are even brave enough to enter an aisle with a shopping cart.  If you are not going to do the wise thing, which is to park your cart at the end cap, you can do the Pause and Peer.  This involves pausing before entering the aisle, and then peering down it to verify that it is free and clear of any other carts.

This happened to me the other day.  It was like the Gunfight at the Ok Corral. I successfully executed the Pause and Peer. I entered the aisle.  I wasn’t in the aisle but a minute or two when a breach in the Pause and Peer occurred.  A fellow shopper failed to execute it. There she was coming at me in the tableware aisle. Proper etiquette would have called for her to not turn into the aisle.  But no. She didn’t care.  We stood there, cart to cart, looking at each other.  Who would make the first move? One of us had to back up. She was a cool customer.  I’d like to say I was even cooler.  But all I was, was really irritated.  Since I was closer to the end of the aisle, I smiled and said, “No worries, I’ll move.”  Grrr….

Generally, my strategy for HomeGoods is to not drive your cart up any aisle.  Best to leave it parked at an end cap while you look at what’s in the aisle.  But beware of the etiquette here.  Because the aisles are so tight in HomeGoods, you’ve got to park your cart up against the end cap.  And then you have to really multitask here so that you can maintain awareness if someone wants to look at items on that end cap while you are looking at other items in the aisle.

Shopping HomeGoods is a constant challenge of negotiating carts, people, aisles, and etiquette.

Trader Joe’s has a whole other strategy.  You can’t really park your cart on the end cap. Generally, there are way too many people in way too small a store, all trying to occupy the same space at once.  My strategy here is simply to go when no one else is likely to be there.  In other words, at the crack of dawn. On a weekday. Grrr…

It's not just the other shoppers however that can cause the irritation levels to rise.  Sometimes it can be the store workers themselves.  The other day, I was trying to look at the probiotics, which my doctor recently suggested I get.  This is a new item for me, so I am not familiar with them.  Don’t you know there is a store employee with a big a** loading cart that’s piled so high with product, almost to the top shelf where the probiotics I needed to look at were located.  I stand next to him and he sees me standing on my tippy toes, stretching myself to reach up and around his cart.  Do you think he offered to move his cart? Nope.  Just kept doing whatever it was he was doing.  Grrr…

Similarly, when I was in Sam’s Club the other day, where there are no small carts only big a** carts, a store employee blocked the aisle as she was offloading food from her cart to the shelves.  Now, all she had to do was scootch her cart over.  Did she? What do you think? I stood there politely for a minute so she could clearly see I wanted to get by.  Nothing doing.  I had to turn my cart around (a challenge in and of itself) and walk all the way back down that aisle, and then come around to the next aisle over in order to get where I needed to go.  Grrr…

So, there you have it.  My patience levels are dropping significantly.  The older I get, these things that I never even noticed before have me strategizing how to successfully enjoy a shopping experience without raising my agita.  Because back to that formula, it seems that my patience and age are inversely proportional.  And I am only getting older.