American supermarkets are true wonders of choice and convenience. You can practically find everything you need at almost any time that you want it. You can also tell a lot about people by observing what they put on the conveyor belt in the checkout line.
I love to cook, and my shopping list is built exclusively around the menu for the week. My product choices are almost never driven by coupons or discounts – they are largely driven by what I want to cook and eat in the upcoming week. Admittedly, I’m a very pragmatic shopper and don’t diverge much from my list. However, if I see that tri-tip is on sale as I’m cruising through the meat department, I’ll grab one and save it for a future meal. Pragmatic, not foolish.
My shopping basket of groceries is practically all-telling with the protein, produce, baked goods, canned items, and condiment choices. I also like a wide variety of foods and cuisines, so my list is never static or based on a standard meal like meatloaf every Thursday night. I don’t even subscribe to the Taco Tuesday craze.
I can also always tell who the personal grocery shoppers, are, i.e., the Instacart and Uber Eats types. They are always in a rush and often have two or three shopping carts in tow clogging up the aisles while scrolling down their shopping lists on their phones. Can you really trust these people to buy produce for you? Like, do they really know how to pick out a ripe watermelon?
The produce department is also an interesting place to watch people. I have personally seen a person squeeze every single lime in the bin and pick out only the ones that apparently have the most juice potential. There are also the ones that grab a handful of string beans and eat them while they shop; grazing while shopping (GWS?), if you will. This is why it’s imperative to wash your produce before eating it.
While waiting in the checkout line, I look at what the shoppers in front of me are putting on the conveyor and play a game where I try to guess what they are cooking, essentially, foretelling their menu. I’m probably mostly wrong, but sometimes I do get some inspiration.
But some shopping carts make me scratch my head. For example, the ones with cases of soda pop, a dozen frozen pizzas, ten cans of canned stew, a liter sized yellow mustard container, and the largest bags possible of potato chips or cheese doodles. Maybe these are the coupon only driven shoppers.
I can ascertain a couple of things from this:
This person absolutely does not cook at home.
If this is what this person consumes on a regular basis, they are not going to live very long.
They are likely diabetic.
And sometimes there’s the female 3-item shopper buying a box of white wine, a frozen Lean Cuisine dinner, and cat food.
There’s also the male counterpart buying a six-pack of beer, a Hungry Man dinner, and dog food.
It’s not hard to guess that they are probably single. I think the supermarkets should use AI to identify shoppers like these in their expansive database and maybe play matchmaker.
There are also the single-minded shoppers purchasing a bottle of tequila, a bottle of orange liqueur, a bottle of agave syrup, and a dozen limes. Margarita, anyone?
Self-checkout is generally limited to 15-items, but people regularly exceed this limit and slow down the entire quick checkout process. The other night I witnessed a woman with two full shopping carts using the self-checkout. These are also the people that often cut in line. They should be banned.
The most interesting and sometimes comical interactions happen between the shopper and the cashier, and the shopper and the payment terminal.
I have seen people with what could be considered a purpose-built coupon wallet pulling out dozens of coupons. Sometimes a coupon is rejected for one reason or another which always prompts some often-intense verbal interaction between the shopper and the cashier. I have seen these people remove items from their purchase because the coupon expired, or it was the incorrect size per the coupon restrictions. I think these are also the people who never pay full price for anything – no ifs, ands, or buts.
Then there are the people paying cash, sometimes with fistfuls of coins. This coin counting takes way too much time and should be outlawed.
An honorable mention goes to the old-timey check writers. Albeit writing anything in cursive these days is becoming a lost art, writing out a check takes way too much time:
Date (after asking the cashier what the date is): 10-seconds.
Pay to the Order of: 5-seconds.
Entering the dollar and cent amount in the $ window: 5-seconds.
Writing out One hundred twenty seven & 32/100: 15-seconds.
Signature: from 2 to 10 seconds depending upon the number of syllables.
So, 10+5+5+15+5=40-seconds in total, the time of which you’ll never get back. It’s almost exclusively the old folks that do this.
How about using a debit or credit card instead? 5-seconds tops unless you fat-fingered the PIN code and have to re-enter it. The old folks almost never use these because they still don’t trust the system.
Writing checks is definitely a generational thing with the exception of someone intentionally “kiting” or “floating” a check which is to make use of non-existent funds in a checking or other bank account “until payday,” which is technically illegal. Others are “paper hangers,” that intentionally write bad or stolen checks. No matter how good the economy is, there are still lowlifes like this running around.
Anyway, this last Tuesday, someone had the following on the conveyor:
Flank steak.
Corn tortillas.
Two white onions.
Six Roma tomatoes.
A half-dozen Jalapeño peppers.
a half-dozen Serrano chilies.
One head of garlic.
One dozen tomatillos.
One bunch of cilantro.
One 12-pack of bottled Modelo beer.
I’m guessing carne asada tacos with salsa verde and pico de gallo and cold beer on a Taco Tuesday night. Hell yeah! Oh, wait – that was me!
To the contrary of Laundromats – Part 1, my extremely frugal paternal grandmother Mary Alice never stepped foot inside a laundromat. She had an old electric semi-automatic open top 1940’s era Maytag washing machine with a wringer that sat out on the back patio. Nothing fancy. I saw her doing a load of laundry once in that odd machine. Odd, in that it was cylindrical and didn’t connect to any plumbing and had to be filled with a combination of garden hose water and boiling water from a tea kettle. It also had an external drain hose that was connected to a wye cleanout plumbing fitting on the back wall of the patio. There was a foot switch, a lever, and a knob to control it. It had a clutch. It also required the user to have one or two rinse tubs full of water available.
The semi-automatic washing machine process went something like this:
Place dirty laundry in the tub and fill with water of the desired temperature.
Add laundry soap.
Turn the machine foot switch on, engage the wash tub agitator, and set an egg timer for 15-minutes.
Disengage the wash tub agitator.
Engage the pump.
When the wash tub is fully drained, disengage the pump.
Engage the wringer.
Wring out the clothes and place them into rinse tub 1. Agitate by hand.
Wring out the clothes from rinse tub 1 and place them into rinse tub 2. Agitate by hand.
Wring out the clothes from rinse tub 2 and place clothes in laundry basket for clothesline drying, or place directly into dryer.
Disengage the wringer.
Engage the pump to drain the tub of the water collected from all of the wringing.
When the wash tub is fully drained, disengage the pump.
Turn the foot switch off.
Drain the rinse tubs.
Obviously, this was really only a semi-semi-automatic process, and a very hazardous and ridiculously tedious one, but she didn’t mind doing it. Thank god for the modern automatic washing machine. I hope the person that invented them won a Nobel Peace Prize!
Mary Alice didn’t have nor apparently need a gas or electric dryer. Instead, she had one of those rotating umbrella clotheslines that looked like a TV antenna that she used for drying her laundry naturally with only sunlight and a light breeze. She also knew not to dry laundry on the clothesline if the gusty Santa Ana winds were blowing, shrewdly circumventing the possibility of having to fetch her undergarments from the neighbors sycamore tree.
Fast forward to when I was about 19 and lived in a 2-story 20-unit apartment building with my younger brother and my mom at 6037 Hazelhurst Place in NoHo. The apartment building had a small room on the ground floor near the pool equipment that had one heavy-duty top-loading coin-op washer and one heavy-duty front-loading coin-op dryer that were situated to the left side of the room and a small, convenient counter to the right side for folding your clothes. Above the folding counter was a soapbox vending machine. It was ostensibly a micro laundromat. Sorry, no fluff ‘n’ fold services available.
However, there were rules for using the laundry room to prevent any conflicts. On the back of the laundry room door, the apartment manager had posted a framed 8 ½ x 11-inch mimeographed schedule with gridlines for which apartment had access on which days of the week and which 2-hour time slots. There was another larger, 2-foot by 3-foot professionally hand painted sign from Erroll Sign Company in NoHo (I actually worked for the owner, Erroll Biggs, over one summer) that was screwed to the back of the door that had the following:
LAUNDRY ROOM RULES
HOURS – 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM ONLY!
NO SMOKING!
CLEAN OUT THE LINT SCREEN IN THE DRYER WHEN YOU ARE DONE!
DO NOT LEAVE ANY TRASH BEHIND!
They went a little overboard with all capitalized letters and the exclamation points which gave me the impression that they were a little bit angry and very shouty. Reading between the lines, the sign inferred that people used the laundry room between 10:00 PM and 8:00 AM, regularly smoked in it, didn’t clean the dryer screen, and left trash lying around which probably consisted mostly of empty soapboxes, empty beer bottles, and flattened cigarette butts extinguished on the floor with a shoe.
One Sunday night when our apartment number had the scheduled laundry time of 8:00 – 10:00 PM, I went downstairs to do my load of laundry at 8:00 sharp, but someone had apparently lost track of time and there was a load of laundry in both the washer and the dryer. Looking at the schedule, it was apartment #10 that had the 6:00 – 8:00 time slot. Not wanting to wait (nor should I have had to wait because of the established rules), I moved the clothes that were in the dryer to the folding table and moved the wet laundry from the washing machine and placed them in the dryer. I figured if the person came back while my clothes were still in the washer, they would just start the dryer and when I came down later the dryer would be available to me.
In the meantime, I went back upstairs and smoked a little weed and was feeling alright when I realized it was time to pop my clothes into the dryer at around 8:30 PM. I went back downstairs, and nothing had changed; the wet clothes were still in the dryer and the dry clothes were still in a pile on the folding table. No biggie – I decided to move #10’s wet clothes from inside the dryer and put them on top of it and put my clothes in the dryer and carry on with my business. But while I was loading the dryer, I noticed a rather large, middle-aged woman in a muumuu with these big curlers in her hair looming in the laundry room doorway, standing there in silence, and puffing on a cigarette. She was straight out of a Gary Larson cartoon.
I turned to say hello when she started in on me in a very nasty, throaty, gravelly tone of voice – the kind of voice brought on only from years of smoking. “What do you think you’re doing touching my clothes, you pervert!” Pervert? I don’t believe I deserved that. I defended myself by saying, “Actually, ma’am, this is my time slot (I gestured toward the posted schedule on the back of the door), and you left your laundry unattended, so I just moved it out of the way to make room so I could do my laundry.” I was talking in a low-key matter-of-fact tone of voice. Then she said, sarcastically, “Actually, it is against standard laundry room etiquette to touch anyone else’s clothes!” Standard laundry room etiquette? I didn’t know this was a thing – they certainly didn’t teach this is school.
Sensing the mounting agitation and wanting to avoid conflict, I said, “No problem. I’ll take my clothes out of the dryer and let you finish drying your clothes first and then I’ll come back later.” I grabbed my little white plastic laundry basket and filled it with my wet clothes from the dryer. Then she said, in a very demanding femdom-like voice, “Now you put my wet clothes back into the dryer!” I was shocked at her talking at me like I was her BDSM partner, and so I looked her straight in the eye and sarcastically replied, “I thought I wasn’t supposed to touch anyone else’s clothes, you know; standard laundry room etiquette!”
This snarky rebuff made her snap – she was apparently an angry woman who likes to get her way – she clenched the cigarette in her teeth and then she stepped into the laundry room and took a right-hand swing at me with all of the flabby power that she had in her big, puffy arms. I ducked and took a quick step backyard like a boxer in a prize fight. She missed hitting me by a mile. I said, “Are you crazy?” Then she said in a huffing voice, “You little bastard!” and took another step toward me as she was cocking her right arm back in preparation of taking another swing at me. I noticed that now there was just enough room behind her to squeeze between her body and the doorway. With newfound cat-like reflexes, I grabbed my laundry basket of wet clothes and faked a step to my right, which she jerkily followed while she was swinging at me which took her off balance making her fall softly against the dryer with all of her mass but catching herself from falling on the floor at the last moment. I took another quick step to the left and ran right by her, slightly bumping her, ah, equally puffy butt which prompted her to yell out loud, “DON’T YOU TOUCH ME YOU LITTLE FAGGOT!” So, within about a minute, I was labeled a perverted little bastard faggot. She was batshit crazy. Good job, Karen.
I had half a mind to call the cops on her for aggravated assault but thinking it through to the logical conclusion where the both of us are interviewed about what transpired while the cops are trying to keep a straight face and ultimately advising us to forgive each other and go back to our apartment prevented me from doing so. That, and I may have had a little bit of weed in my pocket.
This experience made me wonder about the frequency of laundromat violence, what was considered the ultimate unforgivable offense, and what the fatality rate was. It both slightly amused and somewhat disturbed me thinking about people snapping over such a trivial thing like touching someone else’s clothes. How about this, Karen: Follow the laundromat rules and don’t leave your damn clothes unattended!
Fortunately, laundromats have changed much from their utilitarian roots over the decades and have become much more civilized, but nowadays it costs like $5 to wash and dry a load of laundry. There are newer, fancier attended laundromats with attached sports bars where you can get a cheeseburger and a beer and watch a baseball game while you are doing your own laundry, or have someone else do your laundry for you, vis-à-vis, Fluff ‘n’ Fold service.
The fact of the matter is that I really don’t mind if someone else touches my clothes. As far as I’m concerned, standard laundry room etiquette can go to hell.
msnarky 