I'm fascinated by what people buy at the supermarket.I guess it's a form of people watching.Whenever I'm in the queue to pay I always surreptitiously look at the conveyer belt to see what people are buying.I suppose this is partly because of my fascination with packaged food products.Like,are they vegan, vegetarian etc.How much meat are they buying. I suppose this indicates the relative banality of my life,but people watching helps to alleviate the boredom sometimes. Does anyone else have people watching quirks?
That's like the cheque out girl..guy loads his shopping on the belt. 1 sausage, small loaf of bread, small tin of beans, 1 cake.. Cheque out girls says, so your single? Guy looks in astonishment. Wow, can you tell that from my shopping? She reply, no, your foot in ugly! Sorry, it just reminded me of that... I love going into my local coffee bar, sitting out side and watching the world go by..I could tell you how that got me on TV, but you wouldn't believe me...
People watching can never be an overrated experience. Pretty sure the cheque out girls think stuff like that all the time, but are strongly forbidden to express these thoughts at the job. Certainly in the bigger supermarkets, they mind all details. Don't wanna scare the single customers off, they buy a lot of the smaller packaged stuff (usually means more profit than when customers buy in bulk).
i am always aware of what i buy but the funny thing about it is i will go food shopping for a couple weeks or more and then just need little things. so if it is after my food shopping at walmart i might later go to food lion and buy a case of beer, a frozen pizza, pickles, ketchup, salt and a jalapeno pepper. to the person that sees my cart at food lion they would say WTF is up with that but the person that saw me buy my food at walmart they would think nothing of whats in my cart, some fresh stuff some frozen stuff some canned stuff. meats, fruits, and snacks.
I also had that thought: it is a mistake to assume a person only shops at one store. Well not always I guess But in my case it is. It would be silly to look at my shopping basket and conclude like 'this is all he has for dinner' or wtf if this is his only or main source of food. Sometimes I have only a frozen pizza for dinner though, I admit. But they're still exceptions.
Before I cleaned up my act I would,for example,buy a half bottle of Vodka, Private Eye magazine,bacon and waffles.I've been living here for over two years so the staff in my local supermarket kind of know me.Now I feel quite proud of myself when I just buy two bottles of beer a couple of times a week.
I sometimes experience a (very mild) feeling of embarassment when I go to the snackbar (dutch fish & chips thingie) and they say what I usually have with a question mark. But it is funny as well. I guess I can't deny I'm pretty consistent in my order there. I don't experience this feeling when I'm the only customer so yeah it's the idea that others might find it quirky or weird.
do you know who drank the other half? did they drink out of the bottle? i know alcohol kills germs but that is still pretty disgusting.
my mom has waitressed and bartended for several decades. she has quite a few stories about how particular some customers are. at one place she worked waitressing there was a guy named Caesar. he would do anything for the customers...anything. he would cut bananas so they had no seeds and all crazy shit like that. so he had a few regular customers that liked their food specific ways. when he was on vacation my mom was the only one that would attempt to make his customers happy. they started calling her little Caesar. she could never match his skills and dedication though. i should give my mom a call and ask her about some of them customers, i remember laughing at how they wanted their food prepared back then.
i like chicken hearts and gizzards on occasion...i always put something else on top of them so the weird nosey people dont make rude comments at the check out
One time I walked in on my Mum's partner looking at schoolgirls through the window with my binoculars.I knew it was schoolgirls because it was home time when they would walk home through the park opposite my Mum's house.I could tell a lot of stories about this creepy guy,but that's another subject.
i'm pretty sure i'm the weird guy that people are judging at the grocery store. everyone around me has a cart full of fruits, veggies, meats, snack food, etc., and here i am with a jumbo bag of cheetos, a loaf of bread, and box of breakfast bars, and some gum.
quarks are kind of hard for people to watch, being so small you can't really see them even with an electron microscope. its only by smashing really tiny things together with really huge amounts of energy, that we are even able to surmise that they're there.
My mom buys gizzard and livers for her dog. One time when I was there someone said to her. Ooh they are so good. My mom acted like they were for her. I doubt she ever had them outside of hotdogs and shit like that though. I can't stand the smell of them. My mom loves to play around like that. She will have a whole conversation about how she eats them fried and mixes them with potatoes and the special seasoning she puts on it. I am guessing she only does it to make conversation
i can remember, growing up in a really small town, sitting in a coffee shop, watching people out the window. after i had been in the air force, and discovered science fiction, i came to realize, that people often tend to be one of the more boring things to watch. better then television of course. what isn't? well from a distance, construction sites are fun to watch, at least until they're nearly done, and you can see the kind of crap, that is what most people insist on what they pay to have built being like. trains of all kinds and sizes i have fun to watch. animated abstract shapes, with pretty colors and textures, watching ones you make yourself, making them on the computer, but then making is making, and we were talking about passively watching, or i guess we were, unless we were talking about people, in which case i wish them well, but really just aren't the most interesting things to watch.
It's not banal. I totally do that too! It's interesting to see what everyone is getting. Except when it's awkward. This one time the guy in front of me at Walgreens buying adult diapers. But what else can you do? You can look away I suppose. But it's not like it's a deliberate invasion of someone's privacy. I could go on... lol.
My sister and I always gossip in a jokey way whenever we happen to hear pieces of someome's conversation Like we once heard someone at her apartment pool talking about going to spain for vacation This was like 5 years ago, but occassionally we'll still randomly turn to each other and say, "do you think our pool friends had fun in spain?" We're very silly together and people watching is our favorite thing to do when we hang out.