Grocery Shopping Pet Peeves or Why A Trip To The Grocery Store Shouldn’t Not Be An Adventure!

There are certain situations that pop up in the day-to-day process of living that can and do make you want to punch someone directly in the throat. The simple act of grocery shopping can become a mind-boggling, hair-pulling-out, Elvis-shoots-a-tv, experience when your fellow shoppers display unthinking, disrespectful, outright rude behavior,  (aka-they're jerks!).

I have always thought there should be rules for behavior in grocery stores and now Abby Huegel, an award-winning humorist has come up with "The 10 Commandments of Grocery Shopping". In general, they deal with treating others as you would want to be treated. I know! A novel idea.

I'm not saying that, occasionally, in a distracted moment, I may have stopped in the middle of an aisle and absentmindedly stared at something on a shelf in a stupor. It happens. But a simple utterance of "excuse me" and I'm out of the way. Some people make a habit of stopping their carts right in the middle of the aisle and then walking away from them to shop further down the row.

A few more of my grocery shopping pet peeves:

• Talking on your cellphone all the way through the check-out line, rudely ignoring the clerk and your fellow shoppers whom you are irritating to no end!
• Leaving frozen food items you've decided not to purchase on an end-cap or shelf nowhere near the frozen food section. Who knows how long that pizza sat there before a less than intellectual employee returns it to the freezer and it ends up in someone else's cart, maybe yours!
• It is an express lane stupid! If the sign says 20 items or less, 12 items or less, or --less, they mean it! Don't pretend you didn't see the sign, don't sneak in the express lane because no one was in it and don't be rude to the cashier if they remind you that you have planted yourself at the wrong checkout.
• Don't use the grocery store as a babysitter! If you must bring your children, keep an eye on them. No one wants your kids' grubby little fingers fondling the fruit in the produce aisle!
• Those cart corrals are there for you to put your cart in after you empty it. Don't just leave it up against a light post or in the middle of the parking lot. The next person who runs into one of them might be you!

To read Abby Huegel's "10 Commandments of Grocery Shopping", click here.