Retail things

One of the benefits of the world wide web is that it by and large protects me from shopping. I have never liked it but my reasons for that have changed as I have grown older. As a youth, I would trail around with my mother, knowing that we could not afford to buy the things that I would have liked and always having to settle for what was affordable, which of course was never very much. Shops for me were placed that offered temptation and made me painfully aware that I was poor.

Of course things change, and for now at least, money is not an issue. I still trail around the shop, pushing a trolley and watching time passing so so slowly. My input is rarely required and mostly irrelevant and this morning I spent a while composing a list of reasons for hating the whole experience. Near to the top of the list are strangers. People with long faces, ambling around like myself, blissfully unaware of those around them, shuffling from aisle to aisle all probably feeling the same sort of antipathy to each other. There seems to be a rule, that wherever you happen to be you are always in someone else's way, so it is impossible just to stand in neutral and disengage from the whole experience.
Following someone while pushing the trolley is a nightmare, far worse than driving in a convoy. Take your eyes off the leader for one instant and said leader vanishes into the maze of aisles, evoking another rule, that being whichever way you go is the wrong way.
I hate trolleys - I always seem to get one that has a wheel that sticks, making steering difficult, and as the load increases, impossible. Mostly I am tempted to pick up the trolley and carry it around, though the ergonomics make that tricky and plainly it would be a stupid thing to do.
I hate the fact that it is impossible to buy just a jar of coffee without having to choose between hundreds of combinations of brand, type, size etc. I loathe the uniformity of fruit and vegetables and the fact that one store is much the same as any other.
I despise the appalling attitudes of some of the staff who in some stores seem to imagine that they are doing you a favour, and I loathe the use of psychological opportunism in the way that supermarkets display goods persuading people to buy what they do not need.
For me, the perfect shopping experience is to search through my favourite sites, make my selection and simply type in my credit card details. To enhance my experience i really do want an iPad, and that I will order online.