Northamptonshire Tesco shopper gets into a tizzy over shelf movements and furiously compares matter to wartime
The Northampton Chronicle & Echo’s Jack Duggan plainly couldn’t find anything relevant to write about this morning and thus decided to publish a story titled: “’I will never shop there again’: Northampton shopper fuming over ‘unnecessary’ shelf rearrangements.”
Featuring an unnamed person “so angry with [Tesco] rearranging its shelves during the coronavirus lockdown that they have vowed never to shop there again,” the story focused on the vitally important fact that said individual had to “back-track and walk around unnecessarily looking for products.”
The customer concerned – who unsurprisingly “wished to remain anonymous” given the amount of stick they subsequently got on the Facebook group Angry People in Local Newspapers – managed to find everything they’d set out to buy in spite of the alterations, yet ranted:
“This practice of reorganising shelves is highly annoying in peace time, but is it really sensible and safe to do this during a highly contagious, killer pandemic?”
“We, along with the majority of other people, are adhering to the rules. We don’t want to catch this awful virus or, worse still, be in any way responsible for the suffering or death of others.”
“I felt very strongly that the midst of this awful pandemic is not the time to re-organise the shelves!”
Amongst the 215 comments on APILN, one ‘top fan’ named Whitby Vlad remarked: “Anyone who invokes WW2 imagery for any reason, apart from either objective academic analysis or to highlight the cost of human suffering caused by global conflict, is the sort of person that would have been right on the phone to the Gestapo to say Mrs Smith at number 4 must have black market butter, had the Germans invaded.”
Of the “plonker” complainer, another, Mike Lewis, added: “Since I don’t know where anything is, in Tesco, apart from the booze, I would not notice them doing such a wicked thing” whilst another ‘top fan,’ Steve Larrad, quite correctly concluded: “Christ, that was a harrowing read.”
But shelf re-arranging so that you pick up stuff you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of buying while you look for what you want is the very cornerstone of capitalism.
Giving you a special deal on products days before they increase the regular price, and hoping you don’t realise, is another one. God bless supermarket store owners.
It would not be so risky if he had ordered online, had it delivered, and stayed at home to avoid infecting himself and others.