Does a trip to the grocery store ever make you feel mean?

Sometimes I get out of the grocery store and want to kill someone. I think that is why people drive like they do in the parking lots. The will to escape the store alive is a powerful force.

First of all, you walk through the door and get a buggy. They are, more often than not, either stuck together or strewn everywhere. I prefer strewn buggies, myself. They are easier to pick up, you just walk into them and make them lead you around the store.

Somehow I always manage to pick the buggy with three bad wheels, spending most of my shopping trip picking the thing up to get it moving.

Sometimes I want to ditch the cart and just come back later for more groceries. Then you get into the aisles, an area where some genius has decided to make displays right in the middle of the floor. A definite way to impede traffic, an indoor DOT construction zone. As I wait behind the aisle display for passing traffic, two old friends decide to chat beside me as I wait to escape into the next aisle.

Suddenly, I recall when I was a child. I always wanted to drive the buggy. Perhaps I could be the operator of the world's first demolition buggy of doom, running down hapless shoppers with the ease of a seasoned slayer, eating off their heels with wickedly shining chrome. Then I come to my senses again, saying, "Excuse me, pardon me, sorry."

Now blocked in and ignored, I hear the lady behind me and to my right say, "Why Bessie, you look wonderful." I turn to the lady beside me, who is wearing pink curlers in her hair beneath a ragged hair net and a dress that looks suspiciously like a house coat. It is early in the morning, I remember. The lady has a can of coffee in her hand and a bleary look in her eye. She seems to be talking very slowly. The conversation drags on for about another two minutes, which seems like another three hours to me, having already looked at every possible flavor of Jell-O available. I wonder why Bill Cosby isn't on the boxes of Jell-O? Then I wonder why I noticed, or why I even care.

Then coffee-toting lady, "Bessie," shuffles her well-worn little pink slippers a few inches to the right and I charge the opening like a raging bull, narrowly missing her toes.

I rush for the beans next, two aisles over. I invariably get behind someone like my dear oldest sister, a person who looks at every product on the shelf before either lamenting the price and not purchasing anything or just grabbing the first one she looked at. "These beans only have 12.4 ounces and cost 45 cents," she calculates, "while these beans have 10 ounces and are three for a dollar." Just get the name brand beans and let's go, sis. Cheap beans aren't good, no matter how little they cost, I proclaim. She even compares the vitamin content, and the fat and caloric content as compared to the price of the product. It's enough to make you want to do all your shopping at the fruit market, where the beans aren't covered with tin and useless paper labels.

Then I go for my three cans of beans. A man blocks the entire bean rack with his body and cart, carefully calculating to save his family three cents.

I mentally quote Dr. Seuss (sort of), "I do not like cheap beans in a can, I will not eat them, tight wad you am." As for my dear tightwad, I mean sister, she tells me that she has to watch her budget. I just don't think three cents per can is going to break the bank. If your money is really that tight, you should spend a little time in the parking lot cruising for loose change before going in the store.

I hold up my arms in exasperation and head for the milk. Have you ever noticed how the stores put all the milk and stuff you really need in the back of the store so that you have to walk by all the other stuff before you can pick it up? Finally I reach the milk, carefully checking the dates to get the freshest stuff. In passing, I recall the bread shortage at my house as I randomly test the loaves for freshness. Maybe we all have our annoying little shopping quirks, I realize.

The checkout line is next. Notice that I say line. There are 17 teenagers in store outfits standing by the front door, but only one of them is running a cash register. The rest of them are running their mouths. I wait (almost) patiently for 25 minutes while the lady in front of me pulls out dusty coupons that obviously came out of high-quality periodicals from the 1940s. "This is expired already?" She asks, holding up a slip of faded paper depicting a Hershe'ys Aero bar with a little airplane zooming across it. It may say no expiration date, but that coupon is only good in a museum. They don't even make those now.

Finally, it is my turn. The girl at the checkout greets me and then scans a leaking package of bloody meat and proceeds to scan everything, beginning with my pretty white Jell-O boxes, without wiping up the mess.

Meanwhile, I defend my bread and milk, lest they end up in the same bag, surely beneath my roast and beans. As I watch, the bag boy looks up suddenly, "Paper or plastic?"

"Why don't you just pick one?" I think. Paper used to be the only kind of bags. Back when shopping was simpler and.... "Plastic," I respond.

"No wait, give me paper so that I can use it to wipe the gore off of my Jell-O." The unperturbed checkout girl, loudly chomping a wad of gum, continues making the register go beep-beep while effectively cleaning the scanner window in her own special way with my food. Customer service at its finest.

No wonder I hate to shop.

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