‘S’cuse me, can you tell me where the rye bread is, please?’ I asked an assistant in Tesco this morning.
There were Barbie cakes, designer loaves with a photo of the chef on the packet, nasty white sliced bread for making pot noodle sandwiches. Everything but rye bread. Muttering bread-related curses, I found said assistant arranging brown sliced loaves on the shelf (she was doing a grand job, they looked very attractive).
‘In the next aisle,’ she said. Then, as she’d been trained, ‘I’ll show you.’ took me to the next aisle where the health food was stacked. There, teetering on top of the nuts, raisins and wheat free whatnots, was the rye bread.
‘What use is it up there?’ I spluttered. ‘It’s bread. It needs to be with all the other bread.’
‘Well it came with all this other stuff you see,’ she said slightly defensively, waving a hand at the soya drinks and the wheat-free cakes, ‘so they put it all together.’
‘But, but… surely goods should be categorised according to what they are rather than how the distributers send them out?’
By now, I was bewildered yet determined to prove my point. If there’d been a barrister’s wig and gown to hand I’d have donned them and started striding up and down, turning on my heels, interrogating and asking trick questions culminating in a triumphant, ‘I rest my case, m’lud.’
But she wasn’t playing. The defendant sought refuge in the universal supermarket shrug that says ‘Dunno, I’m only the shop assistant getting paid peanuts. They can put the bread with the flippin’ dog biscuits for all I care’ and wandered off to her bread stacking leaving me with my imaginary wig and gown, baffled and irritated.
So the rye bread goes with this other pile of stuff because they were all delivered together in one batch. Right.
I can imagine the deliveries coming in and the managers barking out instructions to the shelf-stackers:
We’ve got a delivery of pogo sticks? Put them over there with the Jaffa Cakes and herring, they all came in the same van. Arrange the pogo sticks in a pyramid, make ’em look nice …..Wassat? 300 tins of Quality Street? But it’s not Christmas! Never mind, which van did they come in? Right, they go over there with the chopping boards and shampoo. Not that shampoo silly, that’s the dandruff shampoo, it came yesterday in that other van. I meant the Herbal Gerbil shampoo over there next to the Toblerones and the lawn mowers. Oh, don’t worry about that crate of Bailey’s Irish Cream, I’ll er, see to that.’
‘But… but… this doesn’t make sense! How will the customers know where everything is?’ asks the Work Experience kid, wishing she’d ticked Fish Mongers instead when they sent the forms round.
‘Don’t you worry your little head about that. They get double Club Card points if they can work it out themselves without badgering the staff while they’re arranging the bread. And next week,on special offer – a free Barbie cake with every crate of John Smiths Bitter because they came in the same van.’
Very efficient, don’t you think? After all – every little helps.
'I put it to you, that rye bread simply doesn't belong with the pogo sticks m'lud.' (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
