Supermarket Sunday: Queues and scales

I once wrote a somewhat surreal piece on this blog about how the queues at the local Eroski supermarket led to the police having to open fire on a rioting crowd. It was an absurd piece about what remains absurd. My advice would be, on yesterday's evidence, to avoid the bay of Alcúdia Eroski on a Sunday at all costs (and the same might apply to others in the chain).

Sunday, once one comes into season, is a day of great food hunting and gathering. The locals buy up entire stocks with which to feed their vast and extended families that congregate for the ritualistic Sunday nosebagging. Tourists, newly arrived, seek to invest in trolley-loads of job-lot soft drinks, water, things wrapped in plastic and the whole greengrocery section. It's then that the problems begin.

Limited numbers of checkout personnel cause the queues to snake around the displays of body milk and hair care. The checkout duo, for there were but two of them attending to the combined populations of Alcúdia, the United Kingdom, Germany and various other northern European countries, duly asked for "tarjeta travel" - well to those from Alcúdia - and then equally duly asked for some ID from a perplexed credit-card-brandishing Brit who is unused to the concept of ID. Or they asked the same Brits, Mallorcans, Germans etc. for some combination of coins which is intended to facilitate the giving of change but which leads to utter confusion, one only alleviated if one is in possession of a Maths degree. And if one is au fait with the coinage.

Then of course there is the weighing-of-the-greengrocery malarkey. Like the poor, who are always with us, so the greengrocery-weighing game remains very much with us. Just as one of the few other staff emerges with a ticketed-up bag of apples that had been presented minus its ticket, so another has to be called over the PA to price up a shrink-wrapped cucumber, always assuming there is another. If not, the baffled customer is enjoined to "tick-et, tick-et", which usually means that he or she has nary a clue as to what he or she is supposed to do with the green dildo being waved in front of him or her. And if or she does cotton on, he or she then races off, red-faced, and then desperately tries to figure out why he or she is racing off, normally resulting in the one having issued the "tick-et, tick-et" command to have to race off herself.

Why do they make this all so difficult? There are small signs issuing the instruction to weigh such or such an item, but few seem to notice them or understand them. They need to have whacking great posters, hanging from the ceiling, ones into which customers can bump their heads, and an oversized hand pointing a finger, Lottery-style, at the scales. Perhaps, rather than playing New Order over the PA, they could have a metallic voice repeating, endlessly, "Weigh Your Veg", in a manner similar to the "Mind The Gap" of the London Underground.

And now there is also the back-pain-inducing "Shop Roll" trolley-ettes. In theory, these seem quite a good idea, until, that is, one gets to the checkout. Reaching down into the depths of the Shop Roll, and then standing up, clutching the small of one's back. They are the medical antithesis of the altogether more sensible, flattened trolleys, those like roll-on, roll-off ferries, which were designed to avoid the necessity for chiropractors to be located at each checkout.

One day, some day, they might just sort this all out. But don't hold your breath. Rather, do hold your back and do hold your cucumber with a pained and embarrassed expression.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.