The older I get, the less tolerant I am of old people. Any empathy generated by my own mental lapses is more than offset by a serious case of curmudgeonliness. I don’t like the way some old people drive. I don’t like the way some of them remain in political office beyond their expiration dates. Mostly I don’t like the way some of them shop in grocery stores.
I thought I’d already encountered all of the ways that doddering seniors hold up the checkout line. They extract pennies one by one from coin purses, they don’t take out their checkbooks until all of their purchases have been rung up, and they cheerfully tell long-winded stories to the cashier only to argue with the very same cashier when she won’t accept an expired coupon.
Yesterday, however, I encountered a new delay tactic. I was pleased to see that the old woman in front of me at the checkout was going to pay for her groceries with a credit card. Unfortunately the cashier asked the woman if she had a preferred customer number. The woman said, “I do, but I’ve forgotten the number.” She then dug into her purse, pulled out her cell phone, and started scrolling through her contact list. I didn’t think that she would find her customer number that way, but since I don’t know a tenth of what my own phone can do, I had to concede that the old woman might know something I didn’t. After what seemed like a full minute, the cashier told the woman that she could look up the number with a first and last name. It turned out the number was 700. Who can’t remember 700? I might not be able to forget it.
Worse than bringing the checkout process to a grinding halt is the way old people completely block an aisle in the store itself. With two lanes of traffic in any one aisle, they frequently prevent other customers from using either one. They leave their carts unattended in one lane while they stand in the other lane to do their shopping. Yesterday, the holdup was in the coffee aisle. A husband and wife were trying to decide which coffee to buy. The man, standing in the lane that did not have his cart, was holding what looked to me to be two identical containers of Folgers coffee. First he elevated the coffee in his left hand and looked at his wife. Then he elevated the coffee in his right hand and looked at her again. Both times the woman shrugged. Eventually the old man returned one container of coffee to the shelf and put the other one in their cart.
I was trying to figure out what the old couple could have been discussing, when I finally was able to roll my cart up to the Folgers display. It was then that I saw that there really were two choices. All of the containers looked exactly the same from a distance, but once up close I could see that some were marked “Colombian” and others were marked “Black Silk.” These old people had had an actual quandary to resolve. They’ve probably been drinking Colombian or maybe Classic Roast for sixty years, and now effective marketing from the Folgers people had tossed in a new option. Do they stick with the old reliable or give Black Silk a try? Even though the coffee snob in me doesn’t buy Folgers or Maxwell House or Eight O’Clock Coffee, I had to admit that anything called Black Silk would be appealing. I was tempted to track down the old couple and surreptitiously look in their cart to see which coffee they got.
One way for me to avoid pokey senior citizens would be to not shop at warehouse supermarkets at all. Almost everything I need can be found at the local food co-op. Customers at the co-op are just as old as those at the supermarket, but because the smaller store has fewer options, there is less indecision in the aisles. The problem with the co-op is that I can never remember my member number, and I always hold up the checkout line while the cashier looks it up.
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