One Too Many Potatoes: Grocery Store Checkout Stress

Unless it’s an emergency, my wife doesn’t let me help buy the groceries. Its not that I don’t know how to drive the grocery cart or that I throw too many nutritious items like poptarts into the cart…it’s simply that she can’t handle me not handling the checkout stress.

I am pretty calm under just about every circumstance.

Is there an asteroid hurtling toward earth? No big deal…just grab your camera! It should make for some really great photojournalistic opportunities (but leave the tripod).

Is the economy about to crash? That’s ok…we’ve stored up a decade’s worth of peanut butter and lutefisk (which has a shelf life of several centuries).

Is the car heading down the slushy highway backwards? No worries! You can see where you’ve been just moments earlier! (This really did happen to us).

Is there a tsunami heading toward Duluth? Don’t panic! Just drive UP to the mall area and check out the latest gear at Best Buy or Gander Mountain for awhile.

But ask me to bag the groceries at the supermarket checkout? Immediately my heart starts to race, my pupils dilate, my breathing gets more rapid, my palms get sweaty and the room starts to spin around.

I can pack a 24 foot U-Haul moving truck ok, but when it comes to filling a bag with groceries and making sure you don’t put the Tide on top of the eggs…well that’s where for some reason all my training as a hunter-gatherer falls apart.

And I turn into a quivering pool of Jell-O.

Like one of the times when we got to the checkout. I could tell that my wife was concerned as I inched toward the end of the checkout and I heard the clerk whisper to my wife, “Is he ok? He looks like one of those purple Minions. And why is he breathing into the all those paper bags??? Isn’t he supposed to be filling them up with stuff?”

I started the bagging process (all the while marveling at the calm demeanor of the 4 year old in the next lane filling 6 bags simultaneously). As I carefully started filling the first bag I couldn’t figure out why an avalanche of groceries was coming my way and why wasn’t the conveyor stopping and why is the clerk doing this to me and doesn’t she know she might push me over the edge AND WILL SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING FAST AND CUT THE POWER TO THE BUILDING!!!

It was then that my wife motioned that I shouldn’t be leaning against the rubber bumper at the end of the lane cuz that’s the switch and that’s why the 12 pack of coke was smashing up against the marshmallows.

Oh…

There wasn’t a reverse switch to send the groceries back up the lane to the clerk so I put my superior intellect into high gear and just started grabbing anything that looked halfway frozen or cold and I shoved that into one bag, I grabbed anything made out of steel and put that in another bag, I then filtered out anything that would fall into the soft and squishy category and put that in another bag. I then put all of the non-food items (like beets and peas) into another bag and finally, anything resembling meat into another one.

My plan failed when I realized that a bag full of soft stuff doesn’t weigh the same as a bag full of steel stuff. I bagged it that way because I remembered one of my high school teachers saying that a pound of feathers weighs the same as pound of rocks so I couldn’t see what was wrong with my bagging process. To alleviate bag rippage, I quickly put some of the steel stuff on top of the soft stuff – I don’t see the big deal on this as a loaf of bread 1 inch high has exactly the same nutritional value as a loaf 6 inches high. And as a bonus, you can get more loaves in the bread box. Although lunch guests might wonder why their sandwich is the size of a matchbook.

To finish the bagging process I put the 23 boxes of poptarts into the last four bags.

With our checkout line of crabby grocery shoppers snaking all the way back to the meat department (if looks could kill!), I finally finished jamming all the bags into the cart in one last frenzied outburst of unruffled tranquility.

I pushed the cart out the door to the car and transferred the $3,047.19 worth of Super Duper Grocery Store items (of which $2963.14 was for the hamburger) into our vehicle.

My wife got into the passenger side, grabbed my Bible and said, “Place your hand on the Bible and repeat after me…

I (your name goes here)

I Your Name Goes Here

Will never

Help me

Help me… (Help me or help you?)

With the groceries

Ever again in the history of the world

Ever again in the…what was the last part?

Unless

I am dead

I am dead (wait…who’s dead in this scene…me or you?)