Shopping

Remember the days when you could just pop into a shop when you felt like it and pick up what you needed?
Now it’s a major expedition planned with military precision. A list is made, to ensure nothing is forgotten. A day - and time - is chosen when you hope the supermarket will be quieter. Taking hand sanitiser with you is as important as taking shopping bags. But the biggest change for me personally, is that we now shop for at least the next seven days so we don’t have to go back again until next week. We tried getting a fortnight’s worth at the start of lockdown but didn’t really have the room to store everything so settled on a week. And we try and get everything in the one place. Not always possible - M&S is great for food but not so good on other household essentials - so the occasional foray into one of the bigger supermarkets may be required.
We don’t wear masks or gloves, and I still find it quite unsettling when I see those who do, though I absolutely respect their choice. It’s just that when you see someone pick something up and then move the mask to scratch their nose or face, or take off a pair of “single use” gloves and carefully put them in a pocket to use again, you do wonder if they truly understand how it should work! And another thing - why do OAPs still insist on shopping together? We have a simple system. I go in first with the list and then Mrs C goes in afterwards to get the things I forgot or “couldn’t find”, plus all the things she wanted herself but didn’t put on the list!!
But this is - to coin a phrase - the new normal for shopping and we have to get used to it. “Clean” and “Used” trolley bays, tape on the floor, guidelines notices, sanitiser everywhere and a cap on how many can be in the store at one time.
It will be interesting to see how the non-essential shops cope when they are allowed to reopen later this month. The smaller ones will struggle with social distancing and there is a limit to how many people can be queueing outside. This may be the final nail in the coffin for high street shopping as retailers are forced to move to the wide open spaces of out of town sites, solely to provide room for customers to maintain the correct social distances.