Contrary to my claims of last week (who’d have thought a few words on the joys of shopping on foot would attract so many comments?!), on Sunday I found myself grocery shopping by car at Coles at Southland. This is because I’d wanted to look for something at K-Mart. It’s one of those trips that would have been by train… if there was a station at Southland.

Unfortunately the designers have laid out the aisles at Coles Southland in a very irritating manner. They’ve gone for an irregular pattern which means you can’t cover everything with the standard sweeping up and down motion. Instead you end up covering some ground more than once — a timewaster.

At Safeway, they have special bulk 1.2Kg boxes of Weetbix, which proclaim “Only available at Safeway and Woolworths”. What they don’t tell you is that at Coles, you can get 1.3Kg boxes of Weetbix instead. I thought we would run out during the week, so picked up a box.

I reached the checkout, and joined the queue. Then I noticed the box of Weetbix wasn’t sealed. It was open. Now, I’m not an overly paranoid person, but in this day and age, it probably pays not to buy something that’s not properly sealed. While I doubt there’d have been any mischief performed on it, having the box already open doesn’t do much for freshness. Rather than go back for another box and give up my place in the queue, I just popped it in someone else’s disused trolley. I’ll get it some another day.

Then as I unpacked the rest of the trolley onto the conveyor belt, I pulled out some potatoes in bag. The top of the bag was open, so I spun the potatoes around, while holding the top. Turned out the bag had a hole in it. Two potatoes jumped out, bounced to the floor, and went rolling at speed underneath one of the other checkouts.

Oops.