Beep beep beep

Published on 14 July 2006 in , , ,

With Catherine off away doing another instalment of the South Downs Way I decided to have a night in with some pizza and a few beers. So on the way home, I popped into the most excellent Nelson Wines on Merton High Street which is a fantastic little beer shop with something like 200 beers, including a range of Belgium beers nothing like you’d find (even in your wildest dreams) in your bog standard branch of Sainsburys.

That done, I then popped down to my bog standard branch of Sainsbury’s to purchase the rest of the requirements.

I walk in, past the electronic beepy things that screech loudly when you try and steel something, pick up a basket, bung in a Radio Times, a pizza and a bottle of milk and head for the checkouts.

For some reason the place is rammed so I end up in the queue for the diddy basket tills – the annoying ones where you can’t pack your shopping as there’s nothing to lean on. I get out my nice big re-usable Sainsburys plastic bag, then, trying to juggle my hands, put the carrier bag with beer inside it.

My turn to get served, I put my basket down, try and lean my carrier bag on some chocolate right in front of the cashier. The bag rattles – well it would. It’s got beer bottles in it. I get a rather strange “hey-looooooo” from the cashier for reasons I simply can’t fathom.

I pay and pack my shopping then try and go out. I’m half way out when suddenly I’m being called back because I’ve “set off the alarm”. Apparently there’s “something in my bag”.

Even when end up perching all my stuff on some other similarly tiny ledge (with chocolate on), and attempt to empty out my bag with one hand, whilst holding another, do the evil glares not cease. Waving strange bottles of beer, clearly marked with Nelson Wines’s bright orange price sticker, and certainly completely unavailable from the corporate monster I’m standing in at the time, doesn’t impress her. It takes the lady at the next till to look at me pretty convinced by the fact that I’m not evil thieving scum before I get the impression I’m going to be able to walk out of there with my purchases without being hounded by security guards (who are generally too busy chatting to their mates from what I can tell).

Now call me cynical, but when you know full well that there’s absolutely nothing on you that will trigger those alarms (having just walked past one set) then you can’t help but wonder why the alarm suddenly goes off when you go past… I would put good money on there not being another set of those alarms in the entire building that would have gone off if I’d worked through. Not that I’m saying she had a direct line to the ones on her till to make them screech or anything. Cos she clearly did.

But really that’s not the thing that irks me. Because what really irks me is that only a complete simpleton would put the stuff they’re trying to steel right in front of the cashier in the first place. I mean…