We desperately needed to take a trip to our local big box store to replenish our almost non-existent supplies of pretty much everything we usually buy there. By "we," I mean "me," since I am usually the one getting stuck with that particular errand. Since I have also had kidlets home from school sick for some time now, my window of opportunity had been slammed shut on my fingers, figuratively speaking. Since no one was sick today (and here's hoping I did not just jinx myself on that one), I left the kidlets at home with my husband, grabbed my coupons, and got ready to have one huge shopping excursion.
My first clue that my timing stunk should have been the fact that I had to park a couple of stores away from the big box store because the parking lot was full. I'm not the brightest bulb in the bunch in that regard, so I found a spot and hiked in to the store. That was where I discovered a lack of shopping carts. Alrighty then. I returned to the mob-scene parking lot to look for a shopping cart only to discover none for pretty much miles around. I happened to hear a little girl singing and looked over to see her mother almost done emptying their cart into the back of their car. I asked the mother if I could possibly take her cart when she was finished, and the little girl expressed concern that I would take her pajamas away from her since they were still in the bottom of the basket. I assured her I had no need for her pajamas as they would not fit me, and her mother allowed me to take the cart once it was empty.
Armed with the squeakiest cart in the world, I re-entered the store. Beggars cannot be choosers, but let me assure you that if I had the option, I would have used an entire can of WD-40 on those awful wheels. At least everyone could hear me coming.
The store was packed. There were aisles in which nobody was moving. I swear it was worse than the whole month of December rolled into one day. There were times when I seriously wished I had a cattle prod.
There were customers who stopped in the middle of the aisle for no reason other than to stare blankly off in space. Some customers blocked all of the space around those annoying food sample carts while they tried to make off with ten sample containers for each member of their family. (For the record, my family never takes any of the food samples at that store. In fact, I have complained to management about those carts because they have set off my food allergies and I've had my throat start to swell shut in that store. I now make sure I have taken allergy medicine before setting foot in there.) Some customers let their zillion children go all over the place around their carts, and no one could safely pass them without risking bodily harm to themselves or those running amok kidlets. Then there were the customers who were blocking traffic to look all over the place to see where they put their glasses so they could read the various products' boxes to see if they wished to purchase them. Invariably, the glasses were on top of their heads or in their hands. Finally, there were those annoying people who saw traffic stopped on both sides of the aisles, saw someone coming towards them through the path in the middle, and still insisted on walking up and blocking anyone from continuing to move around the stopped traffic. I am pretty sure my IQ dropped just from being in close proximity to those individuals.
And seriously people, if you are walking by yourself without a shopping cart and you see an overwhelmed-looking woman struggling to push an overloaded and extremely squeaky cart towards you, please walk around and don't make her have to attempt to steer around you. She might be tempted to keep going straight at you and prove that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Just sayin'.
Eventually, I made it onto a checkout line. There were around five families ahead of me in line, but I was unable to find a shorter lane. I had been unable to get a number of items on my list because I did not feel like waiting for half an hour to inch down certain aisles. Despite that, I still managed to spend close to four hundred bucks.
I'm pretty sure the store won today.
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