Panic in Aisle 10

[plumtreeblossom]

Yesterday beowabbit and I pulled our rented Zipcar into Stop-n-Shop in Quincy for a routine food shopping trip planned more than a week ago. We had trouble locating a shopping cart anywhere. "Everyone is leaving them on aisle 10," a passerby told us. That didn't mean anything to me. We eventually found a cart and went about our shopping.

Working our way through the aisles, we saw that the passerby had been right -- aisle 10 was full of empty carts, abandoned there where the bottled water had been. I still didn't get why people were leaving carts there and beowabbit had to explain. People were taking carts to aisle 10, seeing that the bottled water was gone, then abandoning their empty carts there and leaving the store. Employees were gathering up all the carts.

Think about what kind of sheer panic would make a person ditch a cart and run like that. I'm sure the vast majority of them, under normal circumstances, would have been courteous enough return their cart to the place from whence it came if the product they wanted was out of stock. But yesterday, no. I didn't actually see anyone in the act of abandoning their cart in aisle 10, but I can just picture it. The frantic wrangling of a cart. The urgent dash to aisle 10. The dismayed horror of the sight of the empty shelves. "OH SWEET MOTHER OF CHRIST, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!" Abandoning the empty cart, running at full sprint back to the car, "THE WATER IS GONE!! GET OUT OF MY WAAAAAAAY!!!" Racing from store to store, abandoning carts and all dignity.

Maybe it didn't go down that way. But that's the way I'm picturing it in my head as I sip refreshing, chilled water that I boiled myself. It came bountifully out of my tap, free of charge (I rent and it's included); I put it in a kettle on the stove, boiled it, and chilled it. Mmmmmm, wawa.

I also returned our shopping cart to it's proper place when we finished shopping.

Comments

[bagelfather.livejournal.com]

No water on the shelves? What will we drink? If only our homes had some sort of spigot that we could turn and have water flow into a container or maybe a basin. Better yet if we were lucky there would be one of these spigots outside that the hot sexy half naked gardener would refuse to use, but instead wanted to use the indoor spigot to get water causing sexy music to play as he undressed.