Grocery Wars

Yeah, that's me, from a photo taken in 2000 while I waited at our old house for Halloween trick-or-treaters. Sad that I can't pull this stuff on French children, but I'd probably leave them scarred for life...

I posted a quick article on BlueVicar.com over the weekend and thought it was worth copying over here too, just for entertainment value. The discussion topic was grocery stores, and how the shopping experience differs here from everyone's various homelands. For once this was an easy question to answer, because hordes of French people in big stores can just be astoundingly rude until you learn to play the game their way. And so:


Trever Talbert Says:
September 25th, 2006 at 8:14 pm

I relish grocery store trips as an anger release. Seriously!

On arrival here four years ago, my wife and I were both terribly put off by the sheer rudeness of French behavior in grocery stores, especially as they got more crowded. The people walking right into you, standing two inches behind you, squeezing directly in between you and the shelf you are obviously staring at just to stand there and stare themselves…. the whole American “body bubble” was terribly lacking and basic manners nonexistent. My wife still finds such trips annoying and frustrating, and gets easily offended by the rudeness of others.

I, however, have accepted that this lack of manners isn’t deliberate rudeness, it’s simply culturally-ingrained that it’s perfectly OK to shove, push, etc, and isn’t personal….. so I take a delightfully malicious thrill in shoving right back. Yes, I’ll stand there in the middle of the aisle blocking the carts. When the old lady behind me in line shoves against me, I shove her right back and give her my best, “I am a psycho foreigner, do you want me to gnaw your arms off?”-glare. If someone steps in front of me when I’m looking at something, I’ll reach over their head and knock off their cap to get what I want, or just shove around them. I don’t step aside when walking down the aisles, as my American politeness would dictate.

I love it. There’s a wonderfully vicious thrill in just going, “To hell with polite behavior. GRAGHH!!” I think my ultimate dream now would be to go shopping at Super-U during the holidays, carrying something like a really long rake or shovel around the aisles, just for the fun of ‘accidentally’ whacking annoying people with it as I turn this way and that.

The secret of adaptation - making your fun where you can find it