Men + Grocery Stores = Bad day for Nancy
By Nancy Muldoon
There are certain things that go well together; like peanut butter and jelly, a beer and a cigarette, and steak and potatoes. They mesh well; they make sense, because they compliment one another.
Then there are things that defy explanation and that annoy me to no end. The idea of men doing grocery shopping just doesn’t work for me.
Call me old fashioned but I believe that household shopping is a woman’s job. Men seem rather ill at ease at the grocery store, befuddled and confused. As a single mother and writer I don’t have time for confusion. (I’m on a deadline)
When I encounter such individuals in various shopping centers around Saratoga it’s as if I am witnessing an alien that has strayed too far from his spaceship. And if I owned a cell phone I would allow him to phone the mother ship so he could be rescued from such domesticity.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not fond of gender stereotypes and I don’t dislike men, I just don’t like them in the supermarket when I am doing my shopping. There is already a myriad of other problems to contend with while doing my shopping.
Between the elderly people who pretend not to hear me when I say excuse me five times or the women who have finally come to the conclusion that having their first child at 40 probably wasn’t the best of ideas after all; to the frazzled baby boomer women who use the shopping carts as weapons in lieu of therapy and the checkout clerks who are too busy talking to each other while haphazardly throwing my groceries into plastic bags, having to deal with men who just get in my way is enough to push me over the edge.
To be fair, women including myself should not be allowed in places like Home Depot and Lowe’s unless they work there or know how to build things. I do not work there and have no patience or expertise in fixing or building things; therefore I and other women have no business being in there.
So lets make a deal, I promise never to stray into any home improvement stores if you can promise to stay out of various supermarkets in Saratoga. There, problem solved.
I should be running this town!