It kills me to see refrigerated products in the pantry aisles. I see this sometimes at the grocery stores I shop in. The condoms near the knives or rum doesn't bother me as much, at least they can be restocked and sold.

When I was visiting my folks over Christmas, we went to the grocery store and saw an otherwise perfect rotisserie chicken parked on the seasonal-goods isle. What a waste - an entire animal, hatched, fed, raised (however badly) just to be thrown out because some A-hole changed their mind and can't be bothered to walk a few steps.

It really shows contempt for store staff, too, who already have plenty to do without reshelving stuff.

AAAUGH this is a huge, huge pet peeve of mine. The waste is bad enough, but the sheer self-centeredness of it gives me the urge to slap people.

Huh. I've walked away from full carts of groceries because the lines were too long and the store was so crowded as to induce a panic attack. Yes, this can develop quickly in a store - you can't tell when you walk in. If it is crowded when I walk in, I walk right back out. Don't sufficiently staff your store? Eat the cost of my groceries.

If I change my mind while shopping about something perishable, I will put it in some refrigerated space, or freezer to freezer, but not necessarily in the right place. Otherwise, yes, I do this.

That's why whenever I see misshelved items like these, I always take one of the items it's placed in amongst and go put it with the original item's like, in retaliation.

"They put one of your guys in the dairy? You put two of theirs in the produce. They put two of yours in frozen foods, you put five of theirs in housewares." And so on.

Also its evil twin, clothes all over the floor in retail stores from Walmart to Macy's.

What is more frightening is the underpaid wage slaves who might not throw the yogurt/chicken that has been sitting unrefrigderated for 4 hours out, but rather sticks it back it on the shelf for you, unaware consumer!

Don't sufficiently staff your store? Eat the cost of my groceries.

It's not always possible to staff a store fully because demand isn't totally predictable - such as when a snowstorm is approaching, as one example, or before a sports game, or before a really pretty summer evening early in the summer. There are a lot of variables that send people grocery shopping that aren't that easily predicted.

I can understand why a panic attack might make you have to leave, though. I'm thinking maybe if that happened to me I could just tell someone I have an emergency and have to leave the cart -- at least that way there's a reasonable enough time elapsed that perishable items won't have to spoil before they can be replaced. But depending on how much my act was together or not, that might not happen.

I dunno, I've had enough joe jobs myself that I don't like to make extra work for the people in them. it's not their fault if they're understaffed, and if anything they suffer more from the understaffing any more than the customers.

And typewriter, you're right on. I've taken home at least one package of chicken that was totally spoiled, enough for the smell to knock you flat, though it looked new and the date on it was fine. I'm sure that kind of thing is one of the results of this habit.

and the store was so crowded as to induce a panic attack

This is one of the things I assume when I see abandoned things in stores: that the shopper had some sort of emergency, that they dropped the item without noticing, that a cart-riding child put it on the shelf, that whatever thing I don't know happened and this is the aftermath.

Logically, I know that some subset of the misplaced (and sometimes spoiled) goods were put there by someone sheerly too lazy or self-centered to walk a few aisles back, not by accident or in an emergency, but I can't know what proportion of them were... so I choose to be a Pollyanna and pretend to myself that I think better of us all than I actually do. The grocery store is a place where I routinely lose faith in humankind and am overcome by the desire to KICK EVERYONE REALLY HARD, so when I'm there, I use whatever measures seem reasonable to keep my spirits up and my mind open.

Gosh, that's charitable, Else. I think maybe, generously, up to 25% might be the result of an emergency, screaming/wet child, realizing you had to run to something right away - but you can see it happen in the store regularly when there's not an emergency - people do it right out in the open. it's really THAT that's the lousy behavior.

It's not charitable; it's sheer self-protection. For whatever reason, at the grocery store it's one quick step for me to go from Everything Is Fine to I HATE EVERYONE, so I choose to interpret things in a way that doesn't make me HATE EVERYONE.

(I'm sure part of it is my own displacement of irritation from all those years in retail finding goods damaged by careless handling; finding a $400 silk dress crumpled up behind a chair in the dressing room where the splinters tore its fabric, or a gorgeous handmade hat crushed because someone put it under a stack of sweaters? That will stay with you and make you HATE EVERYONE.)

And I've had enough emergencies of my own to know that some of us don't get to handle them the way we'd like to, no matter how hard we try.

if you hate to shop so much, then don't do it. most grocery stores nowdays have a delivery service as far as I'm aware. Check your local grocers' website, I bet this option exists.

I know in Boulder all you have to do is sign up online on [local Kroger affiliate's] website for delivery, and you can even use your member discount card online for card-only coupons. They deliver all over town, including most of the outlying county / rural areas, and delivery charges in most cases are (to me) less than the cost of gas / hassle / time wasted to go shop; like $10-15. If you're organised enough to get all your shopping done in something like two trips per month then it's very worth it, and particularly so if you're fighting time constraints, transportation issues or dealing with cranky toddlers, etc... Yes you have to plan ahead a bit and be home to receive delivery as well, but they deliver outside of "normal" working hours (as late as 7PM) and on weekends, so to me it seems like an easy solution.

I'm with Miko; I've worked enough McJobs that those who do this sort of thing just make me stabby.

I've worked enough McJobs that those who do this sort of thing just make me stabby.

Yup, me too, and that's why I mentioned a small coping strategy that I use as a customer (in addition to replacing the non-perishable items when it's reasonably easy).

In addition, I think it's all too easy to interpret our own actions charitably and those of others as definitively the actions of assholes and solipsists, so my own approach is to remember that others have emergencies and bad days, and that I'm not always capable of judging what's happening to someone else. And neither is anyone else.

I'll step out now.

This irks me plenty, but let me tell you the grocery store thing that REALLY pisses me off -- all the idiots who can't be bothered to return their cart, even to the cart collection spots located everywhere in the parking lot. I mean, how selfish and lazy (and potentially dangerous, since carts are very hard to see from a car) is that?

I know it is a minority that tosses their trash out their car window, leaves bathroom stalls with the toilet unflushed and paper all over the floor, parks in no parking zones and handicapped stalls because they are "just going to be a minute," dumps items in the store willy nilly, and won't even move their lazy butt to return a cart, but BOY they tick me off.

...the idiots who can't be bothered to return their cart, even to the cart collection spots located everywhere in the parking lot.

Move to NYC. Most of our grocery stores don't have parking. Or carts. =D

I think maybe, generously, up to 25% might be the result of an emergency...

Of my therapy clients who have panic attacks, a full 100% of them get triggered in grocery stores. I don't have panic attacks, but I pretty consistently get the "I'm going to need to stab someone, NOW" feeling Elsa is talking about when I go grocery shopping and it's at all crowded. I don't think it's actually being that charitable to assume that a fair number of people are trying to preserve their mental health, especially when you start factoring parents-shopping-with-small-children into the mix.

a full 100% of them get triggered in grocery stores.

What do you think that's about? I don't like grocery shopping [it makes me hatey, but usually I can get out of there without being hateful] but clearly some people have bigger issues with it.

This blog concerns me in a meta-way that people will misplace stuff specifically to photograph it and screw around, ergo this blog will cause the problem it's trying to highlight.

Yes I am borrowing trouble, it's a new year!

Move to NYC. Most of our grocery stores don't have parking. Or carts. =D

I used to live in NYC -- Manhattan and Brooklyn. I was there for 8 years. I recall being a lot more bothered by the high prices, poor selection, general dirtiness of the grocery stores, and constant aggravation of toting heavy bags home, than the inconsiderate laziness of fellow shoppers.

Also, I am convinced the cart-abandoning folks in my current neck of the woods are not suffering from any panic attacks. They can be seen, calmly unloading into their cars, shoving their carts aside, and waltzing off. Diagnosis: lazy and selfish.

I return carts to the collection areas of lovely, breathable parking lots. If there is carry-out help, I am pleasant with the person. There is a thing that is small space/trapped space/no end space that gets triggered in grocery store lines. I'm not going to apologize for it, I need to get out, sustainability be darned. It's one of those things you don't understand unless you've been there, and that's cool.

I can't afford delivery, and I don't consider myself that challenged that I need to pursue that option, but I do avoid peak times at the grocery. Like I said, it can trigger hair like, on a dime. I just don't know when I enter the store. Kind of like traffic. There is some kind of flow metric that predicts traffic jams, or something. It just takes a little unpredictable thing to get you trapped for twenty minutes, and I just can't do that.

I do this sometimes. Not because of panic, sometimes I'm just lazy- I'm ready to go, I've decided I don't want something, boom, I abandon it. I wouldn't do it with something that needs to be in the fridge or freezer, but anything else, I might.

A couple years ago I had a near panic attack in a Walmart. I haven't been in a Walmart (or Walmart-type) store since then. The mister also took over grocery shopping. I have been in a grocery store since then, but only a few times and only when unavoidable. I don't know what it is about them, but they set me off. Just typing about it has my hands shaking.

Anyway, on occasion I have left non-refrigerated items where they don't belong, but I do try/have tried to keep that to a minimum because it is unfair to employees. And I always tidy up after myself after clothes shopping. Working in retail will give you much empathy for people who work in that kind of environment.

I actually find grocery shopping soothing, until the check-out, unless it is really crowded, like Holiday Shopping. And one of my current favorite life-hacks is to choose the line with the least people, not the least stuff, because any given transaction can go wrong. One person, lots of stuff is less likely to go wrong than three people, small volume of stuff.

So I am aware, and I try to minimize, but hey. It's their business, and it's my mental health.

This isn't on my list of grocery store pet peeves, but I've never noticed it done with perishables. That would piss me off a little. A DVD left wedged in the beef jerky, though, doesn't rate.

Okay there's only one thing on the list of pet peeves, and it's a general reference to people who stand in the way like doofuses and just wont $#@!ing move of their own accord.

None of my grocery chains advertise delivery here, I just checked. Delivery that I know of is a high end private service.

Of course, in the library they yell at you if you do try to put it back on the shelf.

Grocery stores are definitely the most stressful places by several orders of magnitude I encounter in my daily life. I buy everything I can at the little natural food store now -- even things where I don't care about the quality, even though everything is ludicrously marked up -- just because it is so much calmer.

I can't recall ever seeing this here in Japan.

I loathe shopping so I try to avoid busy times in which I will get cranky. There's a local supermarket that is open 24 hours and so I can go at 2am if I want to avoid people.

the grocery store thing that REALLY pisses me off -- all the idiots who can't be bothered to return their cart, even to the cart collection spots located everywhere in the parking lot. I mean, how selfish and lazy (and potentially dangerous, since carts are very hard to see from a car) is that?
Yeah, I hate hate hate this. Especially when they leave the cart in a parking spot and I turn into the spot only to find that I can't get in because there is a cart there. How hard is it to take the trolley to the proper place? Don't even get me started on the people living close to a supermarket and who will take the trolley home and leave it on the side of the road for some poor pleb to collect.

Don't even get me started on the people living close to a supermarket and who will take the trolley home and leave it on the side of the road for some poor pleb to collect.

Increasingly in the States, you can be charged with a misdemeanor for taking a buggy off of the store property. I know they passed this law in Texas a few years back.

Of my therapy clients who have panic attacks, a full 100% of them get triggered in grocery stores.

That's interesting, it really is. I had a spate of panic attacks in the late 90s that was pretty intense, but resolved after a while. The grocery store didn't trigger them, though. However, I was rarely in the store at busy times because I worked weird hours.

I love the variety of words for the cart: cart, trolly, buggy, carriage, basket. I grew up with 'cart' but where I live now they're called carriages.

In addition, I think it's all too easy to interpret our own actions charitably and those of others as definitively the actions of assholes and solipsists, so my own approach is to remember that others have emergencies and bad days, and that I'm not always capable of judging what's happening to someone else.

I do admire this and think it's very kind, but I'm also acutely aware that real inconsiderateness does exist. No, we may not always identify it correctly, but there's enough empirical evidence - and honest admission by people directly - that it's not a stretch to say that simple me-first-i-tude is one of the causal factors for this behavior. Not always, but at least sometimes; and that's a sad thing. I feel within the realm of comfort in saying that if a person has the wherewithal to avoid doing this, the more considerate choice is not to do it.

There are carts here (BC Canada) that have wheels that lock up if they are outside of their area. They must have some sort of transmitter that keeps the wheels unlocked within a certain radius (or something like that) because if you get far enough away from the store/parking lot, the wheels will no longer turn. Between people taking them home for convenience and homeless folks borrowing them, some of the stores were racking up big expenses in order to keep enough carts in their stores.

A few stores use the quarter/dollar slot in order to unlock the cart from the others, with the incentive being you get it back when you return it to the collection area.

Increasingly in the States, you can be charged with a misdemeanor for taking a buggy off of the store property. I know they passed this law in Texas a few years back.
Here, I think it is the shopping centre who can be charged and some local councils enforce this quite rigorously. Shopping trolleys have also been known to be a significant hazard in stormwater drains etc, leading to increased risks of flooding, which is the 'official' reason for enforcing the centres keeping trolleys within their property.

More and more places are using coin systems where you have to put in a $1 or $2 coin to get a trolley and you get it back when you return the trolley and lock it back into place.

I love the variety of words for the cart: cart, trolly, buggy, carriage, basket. I grew up with 'cart' but where I live now they're called carriages.
Here, they're called trolleys. No matter that they're called, though, they all have that one wonky wheel.

jessamyn, I'm not sure, and I suspect (as people on this thread are saying) that it's individual, but I think grocery stores have a number of things that are common triggers: Crowds of generally indifferent or hostile people, lack of windows (feeling trapped) but too large to feel safely protective, fluorescent lighting (which is one of my anxiety triggers), lots of noise bouncing off bare walls and floors, narrow aisles, a lot of choices to make, and (as rainbaby said) the "OMG I can't get out" feeling that can come from slow-moving lines. On top of all that, there's the feeling that you can't "just leave," because it's rude/inconsiderate/difficult to abandon your cart and get to the exit, so there's the meta-anxiety that comes from worrying that if you have a panic attack, you won't be able to get help, and so you start getting anxious about the possibility of getting anxious (which is actually what causes panic attacks in most cases, at least after the first one).

Speaking of shopping carts:
In Thousand Oaks, CA, the local K-mart is (was?) at the top of a small hill. Their carts were equipped with a brake system. Squeezing the handle released the brake and you could push the cart. Of course the inevitable happened (as the inevitable always does!) and the braking system would fail. People would watch in horror and/or amusement as carts went careening down the parking lot to crash against cars, trees, lamp posts, sleeping policeman, etc. Once in a while one would get all the way into the store driveway/street before crashing.

I grew up with "cart" (SoCal) and they're called "buggy" (which, for some reason, makes me think of "rubber baby buggy bumpers") here in BC. Also, the grocery stores I've been at use the coin return thing.

I don't get panicky in grocery stores, just angry. Actually, furious. I invariably want to punch people after about 5 minutes. Luckily we do have a good online grocery option in NYC, so I haven't set foot in a grocery store for years.

I actually love grocery stores and never noticed those panic factors. I guess those just aren't really triggers for me. For some reason, I have really positive associations with grocery stores, and in times when I was suffering through episodes of depression, I found them incredibly comforting and cheering and would enjoy just wandering the aisles. The bright lights really helped, especially in winter, as did the bright colors and freshness and aliveness of the fruits and veggies. The sheer abundance of having all that food available, just right there for people to buy, no shortages, no running out ever, was so hopeful. And I always loved the changing seasonal goods aisle, with whatever was going on for the season..the coolers and lawn chairs and sparklers in summer, or the Halloween gear and autumn-scented candles, or the Christmas stuff or the canning jar arrays that came out in September. I actually found them healing environments.

Again, they can only be that if they're not full of harried people in a rush, some of whom are doing things that irritate - or failing to do things that would ease irritation.

[Incoherent swearing here] Publix doesn't HAVE cart returns. Doesn't HAVE. I can walk all the way back to the front of the store and then back to my car (presuming I can, which isn't usually true by the time I'm done shopping), or I can prop it up on a nearby curb. If I let them send a bagger out to load it into my car, then the bagger will take it back inside, but that makes me extremely uncomfortable for a number of reasons.

I could probably get a handicapped sticker and thus be that much closer to the front of the store, but you know, I *can* walk, mostly, most of the time, and that just feels like I'd be taking up a space other people might really, really need.

When I see items in odd places, my inner store manager kicks in and I figure it's an item in the process of being shoplifted.

Shoplifters routinely pick up an item, walk around a store with it, place it where it doesn't belong in a place that is less observable than its original, high-visibility spot, then walk around the store to see if any employees have caught on, and finally when they feel the coast is clear, they go back and pocket it.

Loss Prevention 101. Then again, store managers often become as jaded as beat cops; every customer is a potential criminal, including the idle elderly and especially anyone pushing an empty stroller.

Huh. That's interesting.

I generally hate it when I see perishables abandoned on another shelf. Only once have I ever abandoned my shopping and left the store.

This was last summer. We were in the middle of a heatwave and I couldn't sleep, so I decided to go to the 24-hour Tesco to do some shopping. I wasn't the only person who'd had the same idea, because in the middle of the night it was fairly busy. I never normally use Tesco, I hate it, but the thought of going outside to shop in daylight in 100F heat was unbearable, and Morrisons isn't open 24 hours, so I decided to bite the bullet.

All was well until I got to the checkouts. They had NO checkouts open, only those automatic things where you self-scan, and which are really designed for people with just a small amount of shopping, not the couple of dozen customers queuing with full carts. I only ever use these at the small Tesco Express near work when I'm buying a couple of things for lunch and even then I always end up having to call someone over to help.

Those scanners make me want to go postal when I've only got a sandwich and a banana to scan, and there was only one poor woman in the area to help people, most of whom had obviously not used the contraptions before - people who have cartsful of shopping tend to use the normal checkouts. All you could hear was machines saying: "Unattended item in the bagging area. Please remove before proceeding."

People started shouting "open the checkouts, open the checkouts!" but the woman on the scanners said that there was NOBODY in the store trained to use a checkout. WTF, Tesco?

At that point, when I was about 15th in line, I thought "fuck this" and walked out, abandoning my shopping. I wasn't the only one.

I have no regrets. Tesco is evil and deserves everything it gets.