Sainsburys: Primal Scream Retail Therapy
But for a select few hapless victims of protracted torture, nobody could reasonably counter the claim that the most irritating, painful, cuntiful place to be on God's green earth is Sainsburys, Islington on a Sunday afternoon. Circumstance weekly draws together poor design, tedious shoppers and a poor hungover me to do battle in aisles.
Don't get me wrong - I know ALL supermarkets are palaces of irksomeness, but Sainsburys Islington on a Sunday afternoon rarifies and distills the irk into something that would test the patience of three hundred Jesuses on valium. Firstly, it's the design: the aisles are wide enough for only two trolleys at a time. Not a problem, you might think - one goes one way, the other goes the other, no fuss, no muss. But when one factors in a second term - dithering, fuckwitted shoppers - then we have not a series of streamlined quick-flowing aisles but something that more closely resembles the cardiovascular system of a Glaswegian.
See, the dithering cuntwits are the lipids that clog the already strained Sainsburys veins leading to aneurysms of impatience building up around those shoppers who hadn't timetabled regular intervals stuck fast by the carrots or tinned soup. In any healthy supermarket, these occlusions are normally just the result of an old person or two who haven't yet been decent enough to die, and are quickly dealt with by the assertive shopper with an insouciant shove or jab, but Sunday in Sainsburys is about more than just the oldies. We also have the posh liberal parents with an entourage of under-disciplined children (children called things like 'Jemima' and 'Harry') who run a wide, excited orbit around their cunty parents, grabbing items from shelves whilst still being ordered to return the last thing they got their overfed, under-belted hands on; and Islington students wandering around in couples and getting excited and theatrical about frozen pizza and ice cream when really, if they were proper students (rather than mollycoddled trustafarian milksops), they would be shopping in Kwik Save and trying to work out how to make £2 last a week. When the elderly are added to the mix, what we have is the equivalent of a stroke at the same time as a heart attack.
And when you're dealing with this with a hangover, well...
I can't pretend to have the warmest spirit in North London. Or even one that gets mildly toasty at Christmas. And when I'm hungover, the forecast is for cold Arctic winds blowing in from the far frozen North of my disposition. And when I'm in Sainsburys in Islington, you better believe that it's raining as well. Frozen rain. Whatever that is.
Linger for a second too long in front of the vegetables that I'm trying to get to, and before you can dither over two carrots a second longer, I will have already graphically visualised your bloody downfall - beating you to death with your own trolley, or breaking your neck with my bare hands and tossing your broken body into the baking potatoes. Come to a dead stop at the end of an aisle to consult your shopping list unaware of the queue of people behind you, and I'll be fantasising about pushing your face through the deli counter glass before you can open your handbag. In short, I'm a timebomb of social unpleasantness. I'm an angry, nasty little twat.
That's why I shop at Sainsburys.
And do you know, secretly I love getting wound up with the fuckwits in there. It makes me feel alive. And it shows that I'm in no danger of becoming one of them. It means I'm maintaining a realist perspective. As long as I want to vomit at the piped Christmas music, I'm not at risk of becoming retarded. And as long as I snarl at students buying big steaks, I'm in no danger of becoming accepting of others. And I think it's a very healthy way to be.
And where better to explore these feelings than the bland laboratory conditions of the supermarket? It's a controlled, homogenous, strip-lit playground for psychotic desires. It's a padded cell where you can thrash out your murderousness until you wear yourself out. That's what they're for - they're where you go to find expression for your anger at the social strata either side of you. The supermarkets provide a safe outlet for this moiling rage. When was the last time you saw it kick off in Tescos? Supermarkets are social safety valves, where class differences are aggravated and soothed at the same time. Just look at Tesco Finest compared to Tesco Value - the battle is played out on the shelves before your very eyes. They're perpetuating the class system in order to continue to profit from the slavery of the workers! And you thought they just sold groceries...
By the way, remember I emailed Dirty Harry's Contract Cleaners to tell them that they should change their slogan to 'do you feel mucky, punk'? Well, they emailed back, said thanks, and told me that I'd 'made the girls in the office smile'. NOW call me anti-social...
Don't get me wrong - I know ALL supermarkets are palaces of irksomeness, but Sainsburys Islington on a Sunday afternoon rarifies and distills the irk into something that would test the patience of three hundred Jesuses on valium. Firstly, it's the design: the aisles are wide enough for only two trolleys at a time. Not a problem, you might think - one goes one way, the other goes the other, no fuss, no muss. But when one factors in a second term - dithering, fuckwitted shoppers - then we have not a series of streamlined quick-flowing aisles but something that more closely resembles the cardiovascular system of a Glaswegian.
See, the dithering cuntwits are the lipids that clog the already strained Sainsburys veins leading to aneurysms of impatience building up around those shoppers who hadn't timetabled regular intervals stuck fast by the carrots or tinned soup. In any healthy supermarket, these occlusions are normally just the result of an old person or two who haven't yet been decent enough to die, and are quickly dealt with by the assertive shopper with an insouciant shove or jab, but Sunday in Sainsburys is about more than just the oldies. We also have the posh liberal parents with an entourage of under-disciplined children (children called things like 'Jemima' and 'Harry') who run a wide, excited orbit around their cunty parents, grabbing items from shelves whilst still being ordered to return the last thing they got their overfed, under-belted hands on; and Islington students wandering around in couples and getting excited and theatrical about frozen pizza and ice cream when really, if they were proper students (rather than mollycoddled trustafarian milksops), they would be shopping in Kwik Save and trying to work out how to make £2 last a week. When the elderly are added to the mix, what we have is the equivalent of a stroke at the same time as a heart attack.
And when you're dealing with this with a hangover, well...
I can't pretend to have the warmest spirit in North London. Or even one that gets mildly toasty at Christmas. And when I'm hungover, the forecast is for cold Arctic winds blowing in from the far frozen North of my disposition. And when I'm in Sainsburys in Islington, you better believe that it's raining as well. Frozen rain. Whatever that is.
Linger for a second too long in front of the vegetables that I'm trying to get to, and before you can dither over two carrots a second longer, I will have already graphically visualised your bloody downfall - beating you to death with your own trolley, or breaking your neck with my bare hands and tossing your broken body into the baking potatoes. Come to a dead stop at the end of an aisle to consult your shopping list unaware of the queue of people behind you, and I'll be fantasising about pushing your face through the deli counter glass before you can open your handbag. In short, I'm a timebomb of social unpleasantness. I'm an angry, nasty little twat.
That's why I shop at Sainsburys.
And do you know, secretly I love getting wound up with the fuckwits in there. It makes me feel alive. And it shows that I'm in no danger of becoming one of them. It means I'm maintaining a realist perspective. As long as I want to vomit at the piped Christmas music, I'm not at risk of becoming retarded. And as long as I snarl at students buying big steaks, I'm in no danger of becoming accepting of others. And I think it's a very healthy way to be.
And where better to explore these feelings than the bland laboratory conditions of the supermarket? It's a controlled, homogenous, strip-lit playground for psychotic desires. It's a padded cell where you can thrash out your murderousness until you wear yourself out. That's what they're for - they're where you go to find expression for your anger at the social strata either side of you. The supermarkets provide a safe outlet for this moiling rage. When was the last time you saw it kick off in Tescos? Supermarkets are social safety valves, where class differences are aggravated and soothed at the same time. Just look at Tesco Finest compared to Tesco Value - the battle is played out on the shelves before your very eyes. They're perpetuating the class system in order to continue to profit from the slavery of the workers! And you thought they just sold groceries...
By the way, remember I emailed Dirty Harry's Contract Cleaners to tell them that they should change their slogan to 'do you feel mucky, punk'? Well, they emailed back, said thanks, and told me that I'd 'made the girls in the office smile'. NOW call me anti-social...
posted by Stephen Beckett at 9:32 AM
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