After work yesterday I went to Loudwater Tesco to do what is basically my monthly shop. I spend less than £50 a month on groceries and to achieve this I do things like make my own bread, prepare meals that will last a week and generally reduce the art of cooking to that of a chemist trying to get the greatest yield out of as few reactants as possible. I’m the only person in Britain under 80 still writing shopping lists, but I find it is the best way to make sure you get what you want and no more. I’m immune to impulse buys.
Christmas week is not ideal when it comes to doing a general shop and the shoppers of Loudwater aren’t courteous at the best of times. I was cut up on the roundabout into the car park and for some reason my shouts of “fuck you, you blind fucking fuck” didn’t get through. It’s much the same in the store, with trolley control near zero and consideration for fellow customers about the same. It’s frowned upon to scream “fuck you, you blind fucking fuck” so I figured I would just quietly finish the shopping, get home and watch Seinfeld until bed.
I approached the clearest checkout I could see, my trolley laden with such treats as BOGOF strawberry jam, and laid everything out onto the conveyor. I’ve never been called out on my purchases before, but I could see that the checkout assistant was eyeing my groceries with a gaze that incorporated suspicion and bewilderment.
“No offence, but are you a student?”, he asked, reasonably but probably breaking a billion data protection laws.
“No,” I said, as I packed the fourth carton of soya milk and put it in the trolley.
“It’s just that most people who come through here and buy so many cheap beans are uni kids.” he continued.
My free OU course doesn’t qualify me as a student nor excuse my behaviour.
It was at this point that I was probably coming across quite odd, like a mentalist who is paranoid about an impending nuclear winter but still too cheap to buy anything other than no-frills beans and carbonated water to sustain himself during the apocalypse. I mean, who buys these things if you have a job that pays more than the minimum wage? The only way to counter this was to, illogically, invent myself a wife and kids and present an image as a responsible family man.
“Well, I’ve gotta feed the family,” I painfully explained before joking, “hopefully wont have to come back before the new year.”
This silenced the checkout assistant, who was presumably trying to calculate how somebody fitting my demographic could have wife, kids and a smart suit yet not be able to afford some Heinz. And wondering how badly my house must smell of sulphur if everyone was eating all those beans.
Still, I was suitably ashamed. While I thought I was presenting the image of a careful shopper who doesn’t just go for the brands but looks at value for money, I had come across firstly as someone who must budget on whatever the student loans people will hand me and then, having corrected the checkout assistant, as the head of a household who is so mean that I will be feeding my children food that the starving of Africa would turn down.
Obviously, the conversation with the Tesco employee-of-the-month was heading nowhere, so I paid for my goods, said “cheerio” and left to drive home to feed my fictional family on a diet that, if they existed, would kill them within weeks.
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