Color Coded Shopping Attire

Identifying Parking Lot Terrorists...

Since I do most of the cooking, I visit the grocery store at least three or four days each week. These frequent visits are necessitated because I like to buy fresh vegetables and meat as our daily menus evolve.

Being a semi professional cook and a self proclaimed professional grocery shopper, I also find it amusing to watch people stuff their carts with yellow, orange, or other brightly colored packages of pre-processed "cheese food" products and crappy junk food full of partially hydrogenated oils.

While I’ve decided that I love the INSIDE of our local grocery stores for their contents and entertainment value, I also have to admit that I absolutely hate the OUTSIDE of each of these same establishments.

Why?

Because many if not most people act like complete, total, ingrates and assholes when they are in the grocery store parking lot.

These people are selectively arrogant, depending on if they are DRIVING an automobile or PUSHING a shopping cart.

When they drive their giant SUV into the parking lot to park and you find yourself already in the middle of the road walking into or out of the store, most of these NASCAR wannabe's will scare the heck out of you sailing inches past your heels at 30 MPH. You have to be a Hollywood stunt-man (excuse me...stuntPERSON) to escape the wrath of some idiot drivers.

Yet these same people (the idiot drivers) will exit the store, look the opposite way or into the wild blue yonder, and step off of the curb 2 inches in front of your front bumper when you are driving by, confidently expecting you to yield or even come to a complete stop while they mindlessly fumble with items in their carts or pause to chat with some long lost friend or relative passing by. I guess that they think that what they don't see can't hurt them.

No matter what their beliefs or motives, it makes my blood boil and my head spin around uncontrollably.

I've been thinking about the situation, and I have a suggestion that I think just might solve this problem…

COLOR CODED SHOPPING ATTIRE.

That’s right, if it were up to me, I’d put a store employee outside the front of each store watching people drive into the parking lot. Based on their behavior and driving demeanor, they would be handed a color coded vest, jersey, or even secretely issued a color coded shopping cart or have their groceries bagged in color coded bags.

Here is how the system would work:

GREEN –The color green would be issued by the attendant to courteous drivers that obey the parking lot speed limits, actually stop at the crosswalks for pedestrians, drive in the correct direction up and down the parking isles, and park in legal parking spaces—not on the curb, beside grass islands, or in handicapped spaces. Any other driver/shopper that injured or otherwise harassed a customer wearing the color Green would face the normal severe legal ramifications as well as face having their shopping privileges revoked as a result of infractions.

YELLOW—The color yellow would be issued to drivers that disobey any one of the above rules. By tracking the customers behavior on their Harris Teeter “VIC” card or other customer card, good behavior could result in the customer being upgraded back to green, but repeated violations would result in the shopper being downgraded to…

RED—The color red would be, unfortunately, issued to at least half of our local grocery shoppers. Red would represent the worst in arrogant, self-important human behavior. Driving 30 in a 10 MPH zone, parking in the fire lane, doing “u-turn” parking in front of cars already waiting on parking spaces, speeding past cars that have already backed three quarters of the way out of a space, driving down the middle of the parking isles blabbing on their cellphones, stepping mindlessly off of the curb pushing a cart in front of courteous drivers forcing them to slam on their brakes, leaving carts in the middle of adjacent spaces rather than returning them to the racks, waddling up the middle of the parking isle in front of a driver—forcing them to follow your slow progress rather than getting your fat ass out of the way of a 4,000 pound vehicle--all of these infractions would get you the hated red vest, or red cart, or red shopping bags...

And then the fun would begin, FOR ME (and all of the other shoppers with green status), because if I (we) catch you walking through the parking lot wearing, bearing, or pushing red…

MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL...

and whatever else is left of you when I and my Suburban gets through with your ass…

You'll know how a rodeo clown feels when I get through with you.

YOU GOT THAT???