Fear and loathing in the supermarket

A trip to the supermarket is not for the faint of heart, and lately it has gotten worse.

Shoppers push those metal carts up and down aisles like they're trying to win NASCAR points. When you reach the end of an aisle, you need a traffic signal light to proceed into the crossing aisle to go around the end displays and into the next aisle. Those not so lucky may need a paramedic. It's like a demolition derby in there sometimes.

If that weren't bad enough, some yahoo invented the miniature shopping carts for children to push along while Mom ignores them in favor of checking labels on cans of dog food. Get two or more of those cart-pushing brats in one aisle and the next thing you know they're having a contest to see who can bruise the most ankles of other shoppers who had sense enough to leave their kids at home.

And then there are the shoppers who have to march two abreast down the aisles in unison, chatting all the while, oblivious to anyone who wants to get around them. And we all know about the people who slip in 26 items in the 20-items-or-less aisle claiming that six cans of cat food should count as one item because it's all the same product.

Now we have the extreme couponers. These people are lethal! At the checkout counter, they're worse than people who buy in bulk through WIC. Look for determined-looking women (men wouldn't bother with extreme couponing) with loose-leaf note books full of coupons separated by category.

In the aisles, you can see them balancing their binders on the shopping cart handles while they clear the shelves of every jar of peanut butter, every box of cornflakes, leaving none for anyone else.

They lie in wait at newspaper vending racks, put in enough money for a paper, then clear out the rack of papers to get the coupons. They rifle through stacks of papers on a store counter to get the pages of coupons.

A leisurely stroll among the rutabagas and bottles of ginger ale is a thing of the past. You take your life in your hands just running in for a quick loaf of bread, assuming there's any left after the couponers get there.