Grocery Store Gremlins and the Holiday Apocalypse

Grocery Store Gremlins and the Holiday Apocalypse

My apologies for the silence. The Thanksgiving chaos swallowed me whole, chewed thoughtfully, and spit me back out sometime this morning. I’m functional enough now to resume chronicling the public’s seasonal unraveling, while we wait for the late-afternoon and evening holiday festivities to begin.

The Pre-Holiday Grocery Gauntlet

This week, I watched the city’s busiest grocery store buckle under the pressure of a holiday no one seems capable of preparing for in advance. The customers looked overwhelmed, irritated, and vaguely betrayed by the concept of other people existing, but the workers — god help them — were the ones actually holding the entire circus upright.

Every employee I saw was doing three jobs at once: stocking, straightening, and absorbing emotional debris from strangers who clearly believe grocery shopping is a competitive sport. Meanwhile, customers moved through the aisles like spatial awareness was optional programming.

A stock worker rolled out a cart of canned goods. Before he could fully stop moving, customers were already reaching into boxes, plucking items from his hands, and blocking him in as they rummaged through inventory that wasn’t even on the shelf yet. He didn’t argue; he simply stepped back with the resigned look of someone who knows that resistance will only lead to HR paperwork.

In produce, an employee tried to refill apples while a woman nudged her aside with her cart to grab “just one thing.” The worker didn’t react. She didn’t have the luxury. She simply continued working with the quiet determination of someone who has survived enough holiday seasons to know that personal space is more of a theory than a practice.

A man in the spice aisle stared at a jar labeled “Sage” like it was an unsolved riddle. He asked an employee if it was the right kind of sage. She confirmed it twice. He still wasn’t fully convinced. Sometimes the label isn’t the problem — the reading is.

The bread aisle collapsed entirely. A woman demanded a specific type of fresh roll the store had sold out of hours earlier, sighed dramatically when told they were gone, then immediately asked a second employee to confirm it — because apparently truth is only valid when delivered by two separate witnesses.

One shopper left their cart sideways across the aisle to take a phone call, forcing everyone else to squeeze around it like contestants on a low-budget obstacle course. When an employee nudged it an inch to clear the path, the shopper glared at them as if they’d just reposessed her car.

At the deli counter, customers floated around like they were waiting for divine intervention. Numbers were called repeatedly into the void while people insisted they were next — even when the number in their hand suggested otherwise. One man waved off his turn entirely because he “wasn’t ready yet,” despite having waited long enough to memorize the rotation of the rotisserie chickens.

Checkout wasn’t much better. Cashiers handled expired coupons, incorrect assumptions, and customers shocked that groceries still cost money. Through all of it, they worked with steady efficiency — the kind you only see in people who understand that their shift has an end time, and their sanity does not.

The workers weren’t just running a grocery store. They were maintaining the fragile structure of society during its annual collapse, keeping shelves stocked and the peace intact while customers behaved like the cranberry sauce shortage was a personal attack.

Diagnosis

A complete collapse of spatial awareness, self-regulation, and basic empathy triggered by mild seasonal pressure. Symptoms include aisle-blocking, cart-abandoning, label-ignoring, and treating employees like stress relief valves.

Treatment

Mandatory public retraining in “How Not to Be a Menace”: wait your turn, don’t touch stock carts, don’t interrogate workers about items the store has never carried, and try the revolutionary act of saying “thank you.”

Moral

If your holiday meal makes it to the table intact, thank the workers. They’re the only reason the grocery store hasn’t collapsed into anarchy.

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