Grocery Shopping in Hell

This entry is going to be a rant. In an upsetting admission that I am now a middle-class woman in her thirties, it’s not a rant about how lousy it is to wait in lines to get into bars, how lame it is when the boy your crushing on doesn’t like you back or even how bad low-rise jeans make my butt look (shockingly bad, FYI). Instead, bowing to my age and social-economic position, my rant is about Belgian grocery stores. They suuuuuuck.

To begin with, Belgians, who are lovely and friendly people in most instances, are insanely aggressive in two places: The roads (witness the disproportionate number of dented-in cars) and the grocery store. People think nothing of grabbing the last box of Earl Grey tea that you were reaching for, blithely jamming their cart in front of yours in line, or even ramming your cart, if they feel you’re in their way.

I could stand this roller-derby approach to shopping, and frankly it might be a chance to release some of my own pent-up aggression, were it not for the sheer, unadulterated CHAOS of the grocery store. My brother-in-law refers to anything that is not well-planned and organized as a “cluster-fuck” and I never truly appreciated what the term meant until I ventured into my local Delhaize at 6 pm on a Friday night.

The place is a war zone. Hyper-aggressive shoppers, fuelled by their desire to get home for the weekend, barge forth, paying even less heed than usual to the implicit rules of the grocery store. People are jostled, shoved and manhandled. Tomatoes splatter on the ground, beer bottles smash against the floor, there is fist-fight in the meat section, a pineapple is lobbed in produce and there’s an attempted murder by the toilet paper. The place is like Baghdad, but instead of armoured vehicles and machine guns, it’s shopping carts and antsy Eurocrats; and, like the elusive weapons of mass destruction, a fast-moving checkout line is rare indeed.

The lines at the grocery store are particularly horrifying and they’re slow no matter what time you go. Being a student, I have the luxury of hitting the Del-Horrible any time of the day, and believe me, I’ve tried every possible hour, in an attempt to suss out when lines are shortest. The problem is that even when there is no one in the store, the place so empty it echoes, with tumbleweeds blowing down the aisles, even then, the one cash register will be guaranteed to have a line stretching all the way into the food aisles.

This situation is maddening for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it’s then impossible to go up and down the aisles in the logical fashion grocery store designers the world over had envisioned. Instead, when you get to the top of the aisle, you have to turn around and go back down the SAME aisle, because there’s an impenetrable wall of Belgians in front of you, waiting to get to the cash. Inefficient! I could, with the help of calming breaths, and thoughts of my “happy place” deal even with this except that the chocolate is kept right at the top of one of the aisles. There's no way I'm leaving the grocery store without a hefty stash of Belgian chocolate, so inevitably, my elbows go up and I battle my way through the crowds to get to the Cote D’Or bars.

The reason for the long lines is that the cashiers are incredibly slow, and the whole system of paying and bagging is inefficient. I’ve adapted wonderfully to the Belgian approach to shopping in the outdoor markets. I happily wait outside in the drizzle, just so I can spend five minute flirting with my cheese man while the little old ladies glare at me. Somehow, surrounded by the sounds and sights of the market this kind of laissez-faire and relaxed attitude is good. It’s about taking your time, enjoying the moment and searching for quality above speed. My sense of relaxed well-being completely vanishes, however, when I get under the florescent lights of the grocery store, canned elevator music filling my ears and some wanker in front of me actually UNPEELING bananas to find ones that are perfectly bruise-free.

I have a lot more I could rant about, but writing this has actually stressed me out. I’m suddenly exhausted. My shoulders are hunched up around my ears, my frown lines are so deep a bathtub full of Botux couldn’t smooth them out, and I’d feel the need for a cigarette, if I actually smoked. I’d better go lie down… I have to go to the grocery store later today.