People you meet at the Grocery Store

Hey all, this is a little work-in-progress of mine that I started last night - who knows? someday it might be funny ...

"People you meet at the Grocery Store"

We've all been there. The Grocery Store. Filled with food, and people. Sometimes they are hard to tell apart. In any case, I've noticed over the years that people in a grocery store can be broken down into 10 types or so - find out which one you are!!

• The First-Time Parents: These are the people who actually use those ridiculous grocery carts shaped like a truck (or a plane or who-knows-what) for their nine month old first child and buy those stupid Gerber brand bottles of baby formula - news flash: kids somehow lived prior to Gerber. The father is still interesting in spending time with his family, but already is secretly hoping to be caught doing so by his boss. The wife is blissfully unaware that in a matter of years she will become the Frazzled Mother of Four. The baby will have forgotten the entire experience of going to the grocery store within an hour after leaving. The trauma of being strapped to an airplane-shaped grocery cart with no working controls at ground level will create an eventual need for psychological therapy - no high-profile transatlantic business trips for you, billy!

• The Frazzled Mother of Four: She uses two carts – the first one rigged into a mobile prison house for whatever kids she can keep incarcerated, and a second for the groceries. The FMofF spends the entirety of the trip yelling at, chasing after, and cleaning up the kids. Then she returns home. Then she returns back to the grocery store for the other half of her grocery list that she forgot. Then she returns home. Then she returns back to the grocery store to claim child #3 from the lost & found.

• The Health Food Freak: How do you recognize this one? He or she is the only one wearing a pleated earth-brown skirt, a necklace of sea-shells, and a t-shirt sporting a bright blue caption that reads "save the north-western atlantic sea otters from pulminary arrest syndrome." A laborious expression on their leathery face continuously, the HFF spends most of its time reading the nutritional contents on the back of food products. And they understand them, too. The HFF will spend 20-25 minutes deciding whether to buy soy-enhanced tofu-cream or tofu-enhanced soy-extract, and then go across the street to the specialty health food store and complain about life “on the other side.”

• The “Live-Ins”: This is the couple that is clearly living together, but not married. For them, purchasing food is a delicate balancing act of budgets, a battle-ground of egos and emotions, and an attempt to avoid the landlord who is doubtlessly knocking on their apartment at this moment. A measurement of the stability and overall health of the relationship (read here – time since relationship has started) can be determined by a variety of factors, such as whether they are using two carts or one, whether one person is clearly buying all the food or not. Danger: a serious mishap in the grocery-store sphere can and sometimes does relegate the male side of the relationship back to the “one week stubble bachelor” position and the woman back to the “only public appearance today” situation.

• “Only-Appearance-Today-Woman”: These are the women who inexplicably arrive at the grocery store to buy two bottles of Starbucks vanilla frappuccino, and quiet obviously have spent about half-an-hour to forty-five minutes preparing for the venture (if not more). Warning: “OATW” normally ends up being asked for her number by “One week stubble bachelor.”

• “One-Week-Stubble-Bachelor”: We’ve all seen it – this is the excuse for those “buy 40 cups of ramen for $10 dollars” specials, the “Buy 10 cases of Budweiser for $80” specials. This is the reason America is losing the war on illiteracy. The OWSB arrives in his t-shirt and pajama pants, probably hung-over, definitely smelling, and proceeds to acquire the two things that keep him going in between drunken binges and failed attempts at picking up “Only-Appearance-Today-Women”: food and beer.

• The Coupon Granny: Coupon Granny spends 30 minutes locating the “Buy 6 cans of applesauce get two free” special in Aisle 5 and another hour and forty minutes locating the coupon for that special while she is checking out as well as counting out $16.23 cents in change… including those really stupid denomination coins that were discontinued in 1911, like the hay-penny. The 8 cans of applesauce, on the other hand, will spend the entirety of their existence in the pantry of Coupon Granny’s house.

• The Triad of Teenage Girls: Inexplicably present in grocery stores, one can only pray that they didn’t have access to their own cars to bring themselves to the store. Everything done by Triad of Teenage Girls annoys the average person around them (with one exception). Arguments over price, degree of fat content in food to be purchased, and the probable number of girlfriends Heath Ledger has had in the last 3 months will be discussed 2 octaves above decency and 10 decibels beyond tolerance. Their arrival can be anticipated by the sound of flipflops. They will pay with credit cards that have a higher spending limit that this author will ever have.

• The “Cool-Kid-Stuck-With-Mom”: The cool kid, whose trip is spent with the horror of being spotted in public by one of his friends while shopping with his mom, will spend the entirety of his trip thinking of ways to assert his independence. Tension is caused here by the fact that, while he is distinctly aware of the presence of Triad-of-Teenage-Girls three aisles down, (who of course, wouldn’t you know it – happen to attend his school), PCKSWM has no way of financing food for himself. He will make random comments to compensate for his insecurity, such as “Boy, it’s nice buying food with you mom, it’s like old times, before I moved into my 12th floor townhouse as part of my internship for International Oil and Money, er, I mean Electric.”

• The “Embarrased-To-Be-Near-Food-Fat-Person”: Poor soul, the clinically obese person is distinctly aware of the spectacle he is creating by the mere fact that he is in a location traditionally dedicated to the purchasing (and eventual consumption) of food items. He spends large portions (no pun intended) of his time in the vegetable aisle, then being unable to bear the thought that people will think he is dieting, and so admitting to his problem, he will then move to a safer aisle, like the one where they keep dog leashes. +++

Wow, that was a long one. My condolences to anyone who read it all. Somehow it felt alot funnier at about 3am last night when I first thought of the idea. Maybe it would be better as a stand-up routine... or, actually ... far, far worse. :-)