Rejected Submission: For your reading pleasure

This is a submission a wrote quite some time back, I never managed to get it published, but thank goodness I have a blog where I can publish anything I like. Enjoy!

Buying groceries is not exactly rocket science now is it? At least, that’s what I used to think, before I emigrated to Australia. Upon my arrival, I had an endless list of things to sort out, a bank account, medical aid, transportation and accommodation. With all of that settled, I had to eat eventually. I had been putting off the dreadful visit to the supermarket subconsciously. I tend to avoid the unfamiliar, and the supermarket to me was as unfamiliar as it could possibly get at that point in the resettlement race.



On any usual shopping trip back home, I used to enter into an almost semi-automatic hypnotic state. The shopper inside of me knew the layout of a typical supermarket all too well; milk and bread in the back, magazines in the front, and the most important thing on your shopping list, is somehow nowhere to be found. My hands would almost automatically reach for my everyday, regularly consumed items. No need to think about the size, the brand, the price or the flavour, it was all too easy.


But even the most simplest of grocery lists can prove to be a monumental test of patience and skill when conducted in a foreign country. Sure the layout is still the same, but that’s just about where the similarities end.


Let’s start from the beginning, the entrance in this case. I realized soon enough that some supermarkets in Australia have a motion sensor operated sliding gate at the entrance. At first, this blew me away, I thought I was part of some sort of “hidden camera show” and started looking around me very suspiciously in anticipation for the host to jump out behind a trolley somewhere. Now I have become so accustomed to just standing in front of the little metal bar for a few seconds for the gates of consumer heaven to open up for me, that I have often found myself becoming just a little too comfortable. Nowadays I have found myself standing in front of the gate just long enough to irritate the shoppers behind me to realize, that this is one of the stores that actually has a manual gate. Oops.


The difficulty and unfamiliarity of the task at hand does not ease up upon entrance. In fact, this is where it really gets hard. I often find myself strolling through the fruit and veg section thinking that variety might not be the spice of life, but in actual fact, a foreign shopper’s biggest nightmare. I am slightly intrigued by all the exotic fruits, veggies, meats and cheeses on the shelves, but at the same time, their presence confuses me, I long for the simple days when my trolley almost filled itself. And how great it would be if it even paid for itself!


Shopping in this fashion does of course have some obvious advantages. I can try out any new chocolate or ice-cream and simply convince myself that the only reason that I am buying it is to experience all that Australia has to offer. My selection of yet to be tried lollies is running out at an alarming pace.


I guess I thought that the one part of the shopping experience that I did not have to fret about was actually paying and getting out of there, how naïve of me. I remember the first time I went shopping at a store with an automated payment system. My, oh my, of all the weird and wonderful things that I have experienced since my arrival here in Aus, this was probably one of the most awe inspiring. I just could not wrap my head around the idea that people could simply pay for their own groceries and leave. For someone like me, coming from a country with an extremely high crime rate, this concept was simply absurd. How could the store possibly trust patrons to pay for their own groceries and simply let them walk out the door? I decided to give it a go anyways. I immediately felt like I had time travelled by an unthinkable amount of years into the future. Here I was, paying for my own groceries, without the assistance of a check-out person, just me and the machine. Or at least for every second item in my basket, I seem to trigger some sort of reaction out of the poor thing; I end up having to call for assistance way too often when I opt for this method of payment. Maybe I should just stick the old fashioned way. Then again, that didn’t work out too well for me either initially. The very first time a check-out lady asked me if I wanted “cash out” I thought she was crazy.


I said: “yes, I want to pay with cash”.


She said: “yeah, but do you want cash out?”


I said “huh?”


This carried on for quite some time, until she managed to eventually explain to me, that the pay point doubles as an ATM. How convenient, and confusing at that time.


For now though, I am thinking of my grocery shopping as an adventure, an exploration of sorts. Who knows what I might find in the diary section next, what unfamiliar sweet delight will catch my eye at the counter?


So next time you go shopping and you effortlessly just reach for your favourite brand of lavender printed 2 ply toilet paper, take a brief moment and appreciate the fact that years and years of shopping and brand exposure enabled you in that moment to simply pick and pay. Think of us less fortunate confused shoppers. And if you happen to see me wandering around the isles of your local super market, with my empty basket and a bewildered look on my face, do me a favour, and simply say “Try the chicken flavour, it’s quite nice”.