I’m in agreement, other peoples groceries are endlessly fascinating to me. I’m not judging as much as coveting. Especially people with the ingredients for good Italian food. I find myself wishing I was going to their house for dinner. If I see party makings, I think, ‘wish I was going to a party’.
My hubby, on the other hand, is always on watch to see if anyone is loading up on something. He’s afraid there was a ‘deal’ that he overlooked. If someone is buying lots of something, he’ll actually go and check to see if it was on special or a real deal. Cheap prick!
When I worked at a drugstore, I would always ask cat-food buyers what their cat’s name was. I got a lot of fascinating answers and stories from people with that little question.
Because you’ve successfully opened a pack, stolen what you can, and needed to dump the evidence. Or, if unopened, you’ve reconsidered your larcenous ways.
When I worked a summer as a checkout clerk, all we had to do for fun was discuss the weird buying habits of shoppers (and to take bets on which teenage girl who worked there was going to get preggo next, but that goes without saying)
No crazy checkout for me topped the customer I had the very first day: an old lady who bought nothing but forty large packets of instant gravy. Each packet made two quarts of gravy…twenty gallons of gravy! Who was she feeding, the US Navy?
A close contender was the big, big guy who came through the express lane with a watermelon…and a huge knife.
The worst is Victoria’s Secret. Nowhere to sit and everywhere you stand you’re blocking a big shelf of bras or panties. And it’s always busy. Thank whatever for cell phone games.
I don’t often think much about what other people are buying, and try not to pass judgements on fat people buying junk food, but one time I noticed the woman in front of me had a cart full of stuff very similar to mine: lots of fresh vegetables, fruits, meat, pasta, olive oil; basic ingredients indicating that like me, she cooks a lot of delicious healthy meals from scratch. I started chatting with her about food & cooking and before long we were having a delightful conversation, exchanging recipes and cooking tips. We almost had a quick affair right there in Safeway!
I expect the people at the super WalMart must wonder when I check out with 25-30 gallons of reverse osmosis filtered water, but no one has ever asked. This past weekend, in addition to the water, I had 2 containers of deodorant and half a dozen bottles of flavored bubbly water.
We use the RO water for the biweekly water change in our aquarium. We’re on a well in an agricultural area, and something in the water spurs the growth of a red algae in the tank. Hence the bottled stuff. We need to make our own reverse-osmosis filter system and process our own water. At 78 cents a gallon, it gets expensive…
I made small talk with the next person in line once. She was a forty-something woman, and she was wearily pushing one cart in front of her and pulling another one behind her. Both carts were piled very high with pizzas, chips, ice cream, fruit, cold cuts, milk, hamburger, bread, you name it. I said something like, “Hey, looks like a party at your place.” She smiled wanly back and said, “No, I have eight boys from five to eighteen years old.”
I live across the street from the grocery store, so I probably set off some weird bells in people’s heads - a few days ago I bought a package of latex gloves, two 7-lb bags of ice, and 300 paper napkins.
Actually, I don’t think I ever get a normal variety of groceries there - there’s a greengrocer and a butcher a few blocks away that always have better stuff for cheaper, so I’m usually going to the grocery store for household goods, or stuff I forgot to pick up elsewhere - I’ll have a couple industrial-sized cleaning products plus a pint of heavy cream.
A group of friends and I once decided to have a chili cooking Saturday. We ended making I think 5 different chilis, which we packaged up and split between everyone.
Anyway, the first couple of people had just arrived, and one noticed we were low on soda, while another noticed he’d forgotten to get an onion. So the 3 of us headed off on a quick run to the grocery store. We ended up in line, 2 guys and 1 woman, with 4 six-packs of soda and a red onion.
(I’ve been trying to convince them ever since that we have to start some kind of group called “Four 6-packs and an onion”.)
