How do we manage to do retail so badly in this country? We've been doing it for hundreds of years, and we all shop. Even the most self-reliant, hippy, back to the earth, grown your own wholemeal sandals type will at some point go to a shop and buy something. It's ranked high in the Nation's top two leisure activities. It's better than sex. (Mind you that link is to the Daily Mail - they probably said that shopping gives you cancer the next day, and that Gordon Brown was trying to export all retail therapy to Poland the day after that.) For whatever perverse reason, people in this country just love doing it shopping.
Why then - given that we are all experts at it, love doing it, and presumably have some idea of how we would like to be treated when we shop - do so many Britons turn into unhelpful, surly, disinterested, pig-ignorant arseholes as soon as they step behind the counter?
Why then - given that we are all experts at it, love doing it, and presumably have some idea of how we would like to be treated when we shop - do so many Britons turn into unhelpful, surly, disinterested, pig-ignorant arseholes as soon as they step behind the counter?
The scene:
Morrison's supermarket.
The Cast:
Me (Running late and with no time to cook when I get home from town.)
The Woman Behind the Roast Chicken Counter. (A bovine lump of inertia.)Me:
(Admiring a vast array of seemingly identical roast chickens.)
"May I have a chicken please?"
Bovine Lump:
(Addressing, in a dull monotone, a spot somewhere to
the right and slightly above where I thought my face was.)
"Normal or 'Extra Tasty'?"
Me:
(Like a fool)
What's the difference?
Bovine Lump:
(Pointing)
These are normal. These are 'extra tasty'.
I swiftly bought a 'normal' non 'extra tasty' chicken and muttered dispiritedly round the rest of the shop. As I type, somewhere else in Scotland, a blogger is writing an entry about a mad hairy man pushing a chicken around a Fort William Supermarket muttering to himself.
