Because I am an anally retentive sort of a person, and because I fancy it makes the checkout operator's job that little bit easier, I like to group my groceries on the conveyor belt. Bananas with the broccoli and beetroot. Toilet paper with the toothpaste and tampons. You get the idea. Anyway, last Sunday I had a new category. Gummy eyeballs with the spider webs and pumpkin.
"Stocking up, eh?" commented the woman serving me. "Halloween's huge around this area, isn't it," she said. And then, sotto voce, "You know, I hear they come all the way from South Auckland for the trick or treating. Whole carloads of them," she sniffed.
"So?" I said it quite boldly, and it was not what she was expecting. She had wanted my indignation, that we might quiver together in shared outrage. Instead we finished our transaction in an awkward silence.
Afterwards, loading my purchases into my car, I thought about her oddly-misplaced snobbery, about her thinly-veiled racism, about what else I could have said. As I was lifting out my last bag, I saw, languishing in the back of the trolley, a round of brie. A round of brie I hadn't paid for, that sub-consciously I knew I had deliberately left in the trolley.
You see, I make a habit of checking my supermarket receipt, and more often than not find I have been overcharged, two boxes of teabags rung up when I only bought one, that kind of thing. And because sometimes I don't have time to return to the store to have the error rectified, and because I know how dishonorably supermarkets can behave towards small suppliers, and because it irks me to pay more than I owe, occasionally I take matters into my own hands.
