I have a lot of adventures in grocery stores. That either means I’m preoccupied with food, or my life is redundantly boring. Or it could mean I need to consider a new title for my blog: The League of Extraordinary Refreshments, or Victuals of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Eatables. How about this one? A Day in the Life of a Guy from a City Where Compulsive Eaters Attack the Son of Armageddon, Part 2.
Ok, granted, that is stretching everyone’s gastrointestinal fortitude, but last week I had such a traumatic event at the grocery store that I’m implored to fill you in with its details.
Setting the stage here, I was having one of those mornings where everything was falling into place. My coffee tasted particularly refreshing, and as I headed out to pick up a few things at Schnucks, the traffic parted on my left and right to let me pass without pause, and lo and behold, I found the one shady spot to park, albeit slightly outside the borders of the store, but hey, one can’t be picky with temps soaring in the nineties, right?
All was smooth inside the grocery store also. Clerks were pleasant, the items I wanted were all in stock, (an anomaly in itself) and the smell of fresh kumquats wafted throughout the store. All was right and good in the world. At one point, I even entertained the thought that I was somehow ahead of life, leading the pack in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Rat Race of Life. With pep in my finger, I poked in my rewards points, put my half-cart in high gear, and positioned my cruise for the scenic route through the parking lot.
However, somewhere out in space, the wake of a comet began an undetectable series of events, a fractal if you will, a land between shadow and object, another dimension in the Twilight Zone of grocery store events. My grocery cart, now moving at a steady clip towards my car, stopped as if it had hit a brick wall and tipped completely over, spilling all the contents into the parking lot. If I had not been so busy balancing myself like a circus performer over the top of the cart, I would have noticed that every single item I had purchased had a rolling quotient far beyond the legal limit. In layman’s terms that meant that everything that I had bought was spilling uncontrollably somewhere out of reach, as if they were part of some supermarket prison break.
My first thought was that I had caught a wheel on a giant pothole, making the cart tip over. However, no matter how I tried to turn or move the cart, the wheels remained immobile, and it wasn’t until I looked down at the attached red box contraption that I realized a GPS had detected I was beyond the store’s perimeter, signaling the wheel to slam on the breaks.
And by the way, for the record, this was a full-on lock up, not a skidding or rolling stop with air bag deployment. The slow-motion re-play on the big screen would not be pretty: I was the crash test dummy flying over the cart headlong in a seven inning stretch hoping to snag an avocado clean out of mid-air.
To be fair, I have never entertained the idea of stealing a grocery cart or taking my groceries home by way of one. I am intrigued by the fact that someone could simply walk down the street in broad daylight, leisurely pushing their stolen item home. I have seen people do that, but until I researched it, I didn’t know stealing a cart was punishable by up to 90 days in jail, or that stolen carts are a multimillion-dollar problem for the retail industry.
I also learned that it wasn’t worth parking in the one shady spot in North America if it means my cart is going to eject me onto 150-degree pavement like Tom Cruise out of a F-14, then scramble under another vehicle to retrieve my prescriptions.
“Where am I?” Cruise asked after a similar ejection in the Top Gun sequel.
“EARTH,” came the answer from a young boy.
That’s not what the GPS on my grocery cart said.