Supermarket Swept

Just did the Online Supermarket thing again. Because I'm a lazy get and I just couldn't face the late trip down to the Megamart or wherever it's called this week. The site might be slower than a dead slug half the time but it remembered what I filled in last time and I just went for the same old same old.

I don't mind where I shop. I can see the benefit of all of it. After the weekly schlepp I used to have from the local Co-op up to the bus stop anything's an improvement! A six bag shuffle, coping with Yorkshire Traction's finest riding the bus clutch all the way from town. Then the one in five hill to walk up. And down. Mi mam did the same journey once a week for years until Machodad finally gave in and let her learn to drive.

I love the late night corner shop experience with its ten quid baked beans and its exotic Coke tinswith Arab writing on 'em. Time was the damn place shut at five and the only place still open was the Beer-Off on the next planet. The day the place went to the boys from Islamabad it was Open All Hours, Ronnie Barker style. Best thing that happened to the place. Instead of conversation about knitting patterns and a SHUT sign when it was still daylight it is now daft arguments about obscure Pakistani spin bowlers at half past midnight.

Of course the place is pricier than Fortnum and Mason, but it always was. If the family can keep the place open these kind of hours they can charge whatever they damn well please. There's always the local Flat Earth society (led by the former Cock Of The School 1984) who would much rather the place was boarded up with its windows smashed and its hard working occupants run out of town. But we all feel mighty pleased to see the lights on when you run out of fags and bog roll at closing time.

Shops like these are fine - you buy exactly what you want, and maybe stretch to a scratch card or a bottle of that Mango juice instead of a comfy old tin of Lilt. But you always know where you are with the brothers. If you're lucky on one of those late runs there's one of Mrs Ps homemade Onion Bahjis still hanging out in the fridge.

The shining alternative is the consumer cathedral where my Dad works sometimes fettling the carpark. The vast celestial warehouse on the site of the coal mine, which it superseded as the district's top employer. The local Tescrose. Size of Oakwell and a hundred times more profitable (and where Parkin's still on sale - hehehe...)

I don't mind that place either. I find these place pretty good fun - and I can drive our lass crazy by the kind of product dawdling I get up to in there. Whole aisles of Brekkie Cereal!! What's all that about! Half the time it's not a supermarket it's more a collectors convention. For a kid like me brought up on Variety Packs I have to try a new one every week without fail. Cost no object. Gotta have the new box. Frosted Fruit Sheddies? Mine.

Same goes for the crisp range. Time was it were Smiths or Golden Wonder. Blue pack of salt to shake and that was it. Now it's just an explosion of plastic and foil and paper and fancy packet artists of the highest calibre are screaming ME ME ME off the shelves. Of course I've got to check em all out - getting em in for Monday Night Football to test their game action and how they go down with the Stella Artois.

And that's the trouble with these huge warehouse supermarkets. The choice. There's always some fantastic new chocolate ice-cream flavour ,or some mad looking fruit you have to check out. There's that new cookie packet being advertised all over the telly and that new megapack of 3D Doritos.

And for all the cheapness of the bread and the milk and the eggs and you blow it all on that new Haagan Daz flavour that sneaked into the basket down Freezer Alley.

And you tell me - Do you really save money in those places? Or would you have been better paying ten pence extra down at Patels and wasting a few quid on the Lotto?

Anyroad I avoided the whole problem by doing the online delivery thing - Shopping that's got a touch of Blade Runner or Terminator about it. Hi-tech computerised switched on FutureShoppa!! That's me. Never mind it took an hour and a half to fill in the boxes and wait for the processing when I could have been down the corner shop in two minutes.

But it made me feel modern.

Besides. It was raining.

Blogga.