Advice To The Filthy Rich

(And The Terminally Stupid)

I just got home from the grocery store, doing what was supposed to be a simple “fill in” trip like I do two or three days a week. My “big trips” usually involve driving all the way across the causeway from the island to the mainland to visit…gasp…WAL-MART—once every ten days or two weeks.

Oh my God what a freak show Wal-Mart can be much of the time. Does someone hand out the clothes and do the hair of these people and send them to the Jerry Springer Show if they win the wardrobe or hairdo prize at Wal-Mart? Maybe I’m just being snobbish myself, but it is all I can do to not laugh out loud at some of the circumstances and people I’ve seen wandering the isles at Wal-Mart.

Likewise, it seems that there is an equal proportion of snobby, self important people that live here around us on the island that have to put on a stupendous show when they arrive for the weekends and holidays and are forced to rub elbows with the great unwashed masses, including myself, in our local Harris Teeter.

They do things like insist on parking on the curb rather than waiting their turns for a parking space, and park their voluminous butts and carts in the middle of the isle and glare at you when you politely ask to pass by after 30 seconds of mindless dithering. I recently watched a woman pick up and carefully study the same dozen packs of chicken for at least eight or ten minutes while I spun around in circles and made side trips to pick up other items in an effort to avoid disturbing her ritual.

Today the tittering, ill mannered, older teenaged children of our seasonal visitors, complete with college fraternity T-shirts, got on my last nerve while in the grocery checkout line. There were five little college aged girls, each dressed like French Whores (or Brittany Spears) standing in front of the only self serve register terminal that is designed for people like me that are buying fifty dollars worth of stuff and actually KNOW how to operate a fly swatter, let alone a self serve register terminal.

These silly bitches were each buying 3 dollars worth of junk food and paying with a debit or credit card. They had obviously never operated anything nearly as complicated as the Harris Teeter equipment because the register attendant that was supposed to be overseeing the self-serve terminals basically held their lavishly painted hands and could hardly hold her tongue through the process.

This babbling group of five had already started checking out while I waited and I managed to move to the other smaller terminal and ring up $49 worth of stuff while they giggled and tittered and mindlessly wasted everyone’s time, instead of getting their frilly asses into the express line or the full serve registers where they belonged.

Excuse me while I go fix myself a stout drink and light the grill to cook dinner--

I think that my head might explode.