Stupidity and Justice at the Grocery Store

Dumber than the usual stuff I see at the grocery store.

I'm not sure why it jerked my chains more than usual. Maybe because it all turned out just like I hoped.

I had to stop by the grocery store on the way home from work today. There's nothing real unusual about that. Sometimes I just run out of stuff. After the usual crowd of idiots on the road home, the grocery store can prove to be an even more glaring example of just what the hell has happened to this country. Complete lack of courtesy for fellow humans. Extreme moments of self-centeredness followed by lame acts of attempted recovery. At least you can survive a collision with a shopping cart being driven by some jaw-flappin', cell phone usin', useless sack of flesh. But today I saw an all new low in human behavior. At least it was followed by some sort of suitable justice.

I had to wait to pull into a parking space because a great lumbering cow of a woman was just sliding her way out of her gas-guzzling, sight-blocking SUV. After she closed her door and walked toward the front of her vehicle, I began to pull in and noticed there was a shopping cart stranded there at the intersection of the four parking spaces. There was plenty of room to go ahead and park (since the person that left it there was just too lazy to put the cart in the holding rack one parking space over) so I pulled on in, while watching the woman to make sure she didn't suddenly stop and veer into my way. She grasped the shopping cart. She moved it a little aside and walked on to the store. Right at that moment, I thought to myself "She's going to go into the store and grab another cart".

Now, you do know that one reason groceries are so expensive is that they have to pay people to go out into the lot and gather up the carts because most people are just too damn lazy to push them back into the store. Hell, that's one reason they have those little storage racks in the parking lot. To make it quicker to round them up. But people are just too lazy to even push the carts near the holding racks. Now I live by my words. Many is the time I've grabbed a cart on my way into the store and pushed it all the way in, even if I didn't need to use a cart that trip. I'm not claiming to be better than everyone else, it just makes sense. And it's an excuse to spend just a few more seconds outside. Not only that, but during busy periods in the store most of the clerks are busy bagging groceries or hiding out in the back to avoid work. So there is no one to go out and round up the carts for the later arrivals to use.

That's what made this event so damn amusing to me. This lady sure enough walked into the store and grabbed a shopping cart. The beauty of it was the fat cow had to walk all the way across the entry lobby to get a cart because there weren't many in the store. They were all lost out in the parking lot. She could have saved herself a number of steps if she'd taken the cart she so casually shoved aside in the parking lot.

Come to think of it, I could have grabbed that cart and at least pushed it back into the store. But she would have probably asked to use it. And I was so intrigued by what I was about to see, I completely forgot about the cart. I just had to see if I was right. It's the little things in life that keep that smirk on my face.