Man vs Machine

Grocery stores are too smart nowadays.  They track what you purchase and then spit out coupons that are somewhat relevant to what was in your cart.  It's not like I need to be reminded that I spend too much money spoiling one cat with single-servings of stinky food or have a kid with bad eyes that require gallons of contact lens solution.  It's not like I need a reason to return to the grocery store; I have teenage boys.

Let me preface my story by saying that the feeding machine that is my youngest son is leaving for 3 days of football camp tomorrow morning.  His pending absence removed the usual amount of food required to stave off his unsatisfiable appetite (and those of his buddies) from my grocery list.  Don't get me wrong.  I love this kid and I love his friends but the gross tonnage of at least 3 high school football players in and out of my pantry does not always jive well with my budget.  I usually manage to hold them back with a few packages of what they call 'ghetto cookies' - the store brand with the plain packaging, serving up about 100 cookies in each plastic slab for $1.99.

Even without an immediate need to stock the training table, my grocery bill was going to take a hit.  It's Father's Day weekend.  My darling husband put in an order for Jerk Steak with Fried Plantains and Collards.  Not too pricey but the plantains require a trip to the Fancy grocery store.  And, since I'm going there, I may as well pick up some nice steaks and some over-the-top ready-made dessert.  I figured I could get the rest of my shopping done at the Not So Fancy grocery store.  Yes, that would be the store that goes overboard with it's techno-friendship/mind-reading schemes.

You also need to know that it's hot today. It was hot yesterday and it's going to be hotter tomorrow.  My husband is slaving away in the back yard, repairing and repainting the shutters from the house.  I checked on him in between stores - he was sweaty and filthy and not enjoying himself.  So I figured I'd be a sweetheart and made a mental note to pick up some beer for him, something nicer than the long-neck Buds he usually inhales on a hot day. 

While I was in the Not So Fancy store, it also occurred to me that we didn't have any wine in the house.  I grabbed a bottle of Australian Shiraz.  The next aisle offered up a 12-pack of Blue Moon, a Belgian white beer that a dear friend introduced to my husband and which, I knew, he would look upon as a 'treat'.  Score one for the wife.  Fairly close to the Blue Moon was a stack of Mike's Hard Lemonade.  I pictured myself gently swaying in my hammock, ice-packed glass of Mike's sweating on the grass beside me.  I wedged a 6-pack into my cart beside the beer.

On my way through the store I remembered that the kids had gone through all the soda so I plunked a couple cases of 'ghetto' soda under my basket .  The tonic water at the end of the soda aisle caught my eye, so I picked up a six-pack of pony bottles, thinking that a gin and tonic or a vodka tonic might be refreshing before dinner, what with our current heat wave.  Looking high and low for Bitter Lemon (do they even make that anymore?), I landed upon a funky-looking bottle with an unnatural blue liquid inside - a mixer for Blue Raspberry Martinis.  Now, it my be that my current photography fetish has awoken a sleeping eye for form and color...the bottle itself is square and weaves left-right-left, from its base to its neck.  The color is, I guess, supposed to make me think of the tropics but, to my immature eye, it looks like the exact blue of the bottom of a Bomb Pop.  That has to be a great combination - a Bomb Pop Martini.  I've got vodka at home, so I added the martini mixer to my cart.

And then I remembered that I needed a rubber chicken.  I know a great kid - not a kid, a young lady - who just had her wisdom teeth removed and, for a giggle, I bought her this disgusting rubber chicken.  It's smaller than a clown's prop rubber chicken but has the added feature of laying an egg when you squeeze its stomach.  And not just any egg but a transparent, fluid-filled bulge of an egg that emerges from between these tiny rubber chicken legs.  Squeeze really hard and a firm, yellow plastic yolk will swim downward, too.  I found out on Friday that the daughter of a woman I work with just had her wisdom teeth out so I figured I'd buy her one of these stupid rubber chickens, as well.  I swung off to the toy aisle, grabbed one, gave it a squeeze as a quick quality assurance test, and headed to the check out lines.

The woman who got in line behind must have chosen my lane because of the relatively few items that I was purchasing.  The checker kid scanned everything silently and sent it down the conveyor belt where I waited to pack it back into the cart.  Here came the beer, the wine, the blue martini mix, the 5% malt-beverage lemonade, the tonic water...a parade of booze and mixers for the Schizophrenic Alcoholics Picnic.  The checker didn't say a word and neither did I.  The woman in line behind me eyed everything silently, gauging how much space each of my scanned items was freeing up from her side of the checkout stand.  Generously, she did point out that this week's People magazine was not her's - I would've been hearbroken to leave that shirtless Zac Efron cover behind, so I thanked her for that.

And then the checker picked up the rubber chicken.  He eyed it, untangled the tag from between the fowl's legs, and scanned.  He turned to his left and placed it gently amongst the booze that I hadn't yet bagged or loaded into the cart.  Our eyes met and then he burst out laughing.  My response?  "Yeah, I'm a really fun person."  Thankfully, he just kept laughing. 

I slid my debit card through the 'we are taking all your money now' machine and waited for my receipt to print.  At the same time, the checker waited for the coupon machine to spew forth whatever bargains it had calculated, based on my current purchase pattern.  Nothing happened.  Nothing came out of the printer.  That was a first - I typically get 6 or 7 different coupons.  Today, I got nothing.  I stunned that machine into silence.  Looking back on it, you'd think that a smart marketer would have programmed an aspirin coupon or a Pepto Bismol coupon into the brains that reads your food, if only for a giggle.  I would have laughed.