Supermarket Bastards

If you really want to know where the bastards are, then obviously head for your local English Defence League committee meeting, City bankers’ wine-tasting brunch or night-club frequented by Z-list celebs who would sell a kidney to get on page 10 of Heat magazine. That’s if you want a concentration of society’s arse-waste. For sheer numbers, though, I recommend a supermarket. Not Waitrose or Morrisons’s, because you’ll end up with a polarisation of bastards. For a healthy, comprehensive range of common garden shitheads, spend a Saturday afternoon at Tesco or Sainsbury’s.

For some reason, when I go to a supermarket, I always end up parked at a 25 degree angle to the car next to me, which almost impossibly manages to ensure that 3 of its 4 over-sized tyres are touching a white line. But who’s to say that this car isn’t in fact straight and the rest of the car park is crooked? It’s relative, isn’t it? In the same way, disability is a matter for interpretation. Who am I to argue with someone who has been refused a disabled badge, because “being a selfish cunt” doesn’t come under the disability act? I don’t argue when these people park in a disabled space. Not unless they catch me pulling their windscreen wipers outwards or flobbing at their side window on days when I am blessed with a build-up of superfluous phlegm.

I eagerly await the day when trolleys are fitted with parking sensors. Such a device, completely unnecessary for anyone other than those drivers who are retards by choice, would bring harmony to the supermarket. As it is, a shopper’s invisible blinkers slip into place automatically the moment that person’s hands grip a trolley and the sort of belligerency you’d encounter on the roads of south-east England is thus transferred to the supermarket aisles.

The barriers you walk between on the way in, which most people think are there to detect stolen items, actually emit high-frequency sonar waves designed to fuck up your spatial awareness. Handicapped by this assault on your brain and encumbered by your invisible blinkers and general piss-off attitude, you the shopper are now a helpless slave to bastardness for the next 45 minutes.

When you’re not looking to take a layer of skin off someone’s ankles with your trolley, you are parking it at a right-angle to the shelves, blocking the entire aisle while you wander back to fruit and veg for something you’ve forgotten. With typical English self-righteousness, someone will tut loudly and give your trolley a slight push. The brave might even drop something small and expensive into it. That’s as far as I’d go, seeing as there are no windscreen wipers and a grolly in this situation would be a little beyond the pale.

When these bastards are not leaving a trolley in your way, they manage to plant their bodies in such a position. If I leave more than an arm’s length between myself and the shelf full of products that I am surveying then I expect someone to move into that gap and completely deprive me of both my view and ability to pick up what I want. The only place in the supermarket that this doesn’t happen is in front of the Pot Noodles, because anyone buying these tends to do so at speed. Personally, I like to browse and give myself time to decide between the two flavours that only moderately taste like the inside of a rubbish truck.

I worked part-time in one of those now obsolete small branches of Tesco in Palmers Green for a year when I was younger. The store manager conformed lock, stock and barrel to the archetypal nasal-voiced, petty autocrat you’d expect to find wielding small amounts of power in retail. He told us to call him Mr J, because he was Polish and he didn’t think we’d cope with anything more complicated. His full name was Janus and I suspect that the J stood for Justin. He’d wander round the 5 aisles telling us in his oily voice to “face up tinned meat, yeah.” A thoroughbred bastard. I hope he has syphilis now.

My days treading the aisles, facing up tinned meat and other products, were days of missed opportunities. There are so many things you’d hope to be asked by customers, but never were:

Customer: Have I passed the pasta yet?
Supermarket assistant: I don’t know; when did you eat it?

Customer: Can you direct me to mince?
Supermarket assistant: Certainly. Walk this way, ducky.

I think the policy they now have of walking you to where you want to go was fine in 5-aisle supermarkets like the one in Palmers Green, but now when you ask the whereabouts of frozen chips and some slow fucker escorts you 30 aisles to the east wing of the supermarket, you want to grab them by their tasteful brown and orange nylon lapels and shout in their face, “Just-fuck-ing-point!”

In the old days, of course, supermarkets weren’t monopolising the entire range of retail products. You certainly wouldn’t dream of doing your Christmas shopping in Palmers Green Tesco; not when you had “Boots” across the road for the obligatory boxed sets of Old Spice and lavender bath products. Nowadays, the concept of “all under one roof” means “we sell a limited range of cheap, lowest common denominator products so you don’t need to bother going elsewhere.”

Or am I being cynical? Perhaps, in fact, Tesco is aiding the cultural and literary education of society with its wide selection of Danielle Steel novels, Mills and Boon and witty coffee table compendiums. Fucking hell, I hate those coffee table books. Presents bought by the unimaginative for the undiscerning. Should anyone ever buy me one of those twee and corny coffee table books, I am likely to marinade it in anthrax, reduce it to a fine pulp using a Molineux blender and feed it directly into that person’s stomach using an endoscopy tube that has been left overnight on the floor of a Piccadilly public lavatory.

You have to hand it to them in regard to clothes, though. When my generation was growing up, the idea of wearing supermarket clothes was as much of a social anathema as having sticky plaster on your NHS specs, riding a bike with stabilisers after you’ve reached 14 or not finding Jim Davison’s brand of casual racism and misogyny hilarious. It was an inspired move for Asda to brand their fashion as being by “George” and for Tesco to use “Florence and Fred.” Who would have thought that applying the name of 1970’s kids’ TV characters would create such immediate kudos? Maybe the inspiration came from the fact that the clothes are all made by children earning the same amount of pocket money per week that I was given in 1976.

Good old Tesco, supporting the global economy! And hopefully, one day selling everything everyone ever needs. I was hoping that the move into car insurance would lead to the provision of car parts, because the manufacturing companies pretty much fist us mercilessly with their prices. I’d gladly wander along to aisle 453 for Ford Parts in my local supermarket if it meant paying less, although I might balk at the idea of “Tesco Value” brake pads and discs – guaranteed to bring your car to a halt on most occasions.

To paraphrase Mr J. Anus, we have to “face up” to the fact that Tesco are indeed taking over. In Hertfordshire, they are the second biggest employer after the NHS. Given the government cuts, they might soon become the biggest. We might find ourselves going to Tesco for routine operations. From an entrepreneurial viewpoint, removing an appendix or an in-growing toenail would help support sausage production at the Deli counter. But perhaps the most useful medical care Tesco could provide would be psychiatric, because one of these days it won’t just be windscreen wipers…