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Help Make Grocery Shopping Worse!

Donald N.S. Unger

Your application to join the elite team of customers who make going to the supermarket a most special kind of Hell has been received (for which: thank you) and is currently being evaluated, which usually takes eight to ten business days.

As that processing goes forward, a few hints:

The Parking Lot: Don’t Miss This Opportunity!

It is an amateur mistake to assume that Obstruction begins inside the supermarket proper.

As Professional Obstructors well know, the parking lot and entrance are key areas in which the seeding of rage is most efficiently initiated—Olympic Level Obstructors have even extended this to the entrance to the parking lot itself, rather than the store.

In this area, as in many others, for the most part, the motto Slow is the Key! is your best guideline.  That can apply to:

The Entryway

You should understand this to be a target-rich environment (using the Dithery & Inept Guideline) and also an opportunity for teamwork.  You may choose to work alone or with friends, family members, and store employees.  There are three key “accelerants” regarding success here:

Carts & Aisles

How you navigate the supermarket is obviously the heart of every solid exercise in Obstruction.  As a parallel to Parking Lot Obstruction, you might think of the important aspects here as Parking & Driving.  As elsewhere, you have access to an extensive toolkit—and teamwork also pays off!  Your cart offers you the opportunity to:

The Aisles (Along with the Dread Checkout Line) are the perfect place for intrusive, daft, or utterly inappropriate Attempts to Talk.  Some more successful gambits frequently begin with, Do You Know? then launch into:

As an occasional variation, you may find the inclusion of “Are You Sure You Don’t Work Here?” both effective and entertaining—especially if deployed on someone who is shopping in their bathrobe (again).

Checkout Line & Procedures

This, of course, is your ultimate field of play.  If you, and other members of the team, have worked assiduously, step by step, in every process leading up to Checkout, People will have been properly Primed—likely very close to medical and/or psychiatric crisis.

Please do not take that to mean that your work is largely done and feel you should slack off!

A quick caveat here: While we do not like to discriminate, we think it best that you not use the Self-Checkout lanes if you have an IQ of over 90.  A good rule of thumb: If you know what “IQ” means?  You are likely far too intelligent to be able to do Professional Obstructing in this part of the store.

At Self-Checkout, you can take recourse to some of the strategies used in other areas, supplementing and improvising to work to your strengths.  Classics include:

While people are most reliably enraged at Self-Checkout, Staffed Lanes offer their own special additional fillips of irritation.  (Please Note: The “Getting on the Express Line with 132 Items,” approach, while both of nostalgic value and still very much in current use, has become a bit of a cliché; you would do better to try something more original.)

Staffed Lanes offer the opportunity to fully combine Slow is the Key! with Inept & Dithery and to then supplement those with Stunningly Selfish & Unaware.  (Please Note: As above, regarding cliché, the “Writing a Paper Check” routine has also been done to death; you’re better than that, aren’t you?)

We can split this into Line, Transaction, and Refusal to Exit.

On line, many of the previously discussed strategies remain effective, with particular emphasis on Trying to Talk and Physical Damage (in this case of course damage may include not merely the cart and other people but their groceries, nearby candy/publications/children).  A rich pool of possibilities is to be found in, Wait I Have a Problem! which—although, again, you are encouraged to improvise—is often followed by:

During the actual Transaction, you have natural allies in store staff (It is beyond the scope of this missive to deal with the matter of Store Employees People Would Kill If They Could Get Away with It).  The Cashier and the Bagger are your primary teammates here, but there will also be several layers of management that can be called into action as well.

The Transaction may also draw on Irritation Strategies deployed in The Aisle, On Line, and at Self-Checkout, supplementing as appropriate with:

Which brings us finally to Refusal to Exit.  The primary locus of this strategy is, of course, the checkout line itself, but anywhere from there to the Exit, to the Doors themselves, through the Parking Lot and back out onto the streets qualifies in this regard.

Refusal to Exit brings together the full trifecta:

Strategies include Blocking the Next Customer by deploying:

We appreciate your taking the time to read this.  As noted, we should have your application processed within no more than two weeks.  Be assured, we are always looking for people to augment our crack team of Professional Obstructors; we take this very seriously.

Please know as well that, while we’ve given you a lot to digest here, in the end, people are not really that difficult to enrage at the Supermarket.

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