The Madness of Modern Shopping

I was going to spend this editorial pontificating about the situation in Gaza and the hypocrisy employed by much of the media and politicians with regard to events there. In particular, their apparent inability to grasp the idea that it is possible to embrace two concepts simultaneously: namely that the Hamas attack on Israel was a heinous act of terrorism which should be condemned, but that while Israel has a right to defend itself, the continued indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, focusing mainly on residential areas and targeting civilians, doesn’t constitute a rational or proportionate response and therefore must also be condemned. But express such an opinion and you are condemned by the pro-Israeli crowd as an anti-Semite and by the pro-Palestinian side as a fascistic warmonger and Israeli apologist. So, I’m going to leave the subject well alone. Besides, the world and his wife have already jumped on the bandwagon to demonstrate either their sanctimonious moral superiority or their hardline commitment to anti-terrorism. They are both full of shit, obviously, as they jostle for the supposed moral high ground as people die. So, instead, I’m going to give you a whimsical story about chocolate covered peanuts and what they can tell us about the madness of modern shopping.

So, when is a packet of chocolate covered peanuts not a packet of chocolate covered peanuts? When you try to buy it in a Tesco Metro, apparently. A while ago I was in my local Tesco Metro when I noticed that the chocolate covered peanuts had been reduced in price, so I made a snap decision to buy a pack with my newspaper, (which was my main reason for going in there). Taking them to the cash desk, the newspaper’s barcode scanned without problem, but the peanuts failed to. After attempts to enter the barcode manually, the youth manning the till told me that the product I was trying to buy was not on the system, so as far as the store was concerned, didn’t exist and therefore couldn’t be bought. I tried pointing out that the packet of chocolate covered peanuts was right there, in front of us both and therefore did exist, (I mean, we both agreed that we could see it, so it wasn’t an hallucination on my part). When this didn’t work, I tried pointing out that the peanuts must be for sale as they had a whole bloody shelf of them, prominently displayed with a clearly marked price. Moreover, the packet was clearly marked ‘Tesco’, so was an own brand product, so how could he claim that it didn’t exist? What was the alternative explanation for their presence? Was someone sneaking into the store with packets of chocolate covered peanuts with fake Tesco packaging concealed about their person and secretly placing them on the shelves? Why would anyone do that?

Of course, it was all to no avail. The peanuts didn’t officially exist. Fearing for my sanity, let alone blood pressure, I paid for my newspaper and left the shop, leaving the supposedly non-existent nuts behind. Perhaps I should simply have replied ‘OK then, if they don’t exist, I’ll just walk out with them – I can’t shoplift something that doesn’t exist’. I have a feeling that had I done so, alarms would have been going off, security guards trying to detain me and the police been called. It was one of those incidents that turn you into a raging Luddite, railing against modern commerce where, if something isn’t registered on a computer system, then it doesn’t exist. Whatever happened to the good old days of mechanical tills where the cashier entered the price manually and those little flags popped up with the total and a bell rang? I was left pondering whether this chocolate covered peanut phenomena was simply a local glitch confined to that particular Tesco Metro or whether it was nationwide. If I had gone to the main Tesco on one of the edge of town retail parks and tried to buy an identical packet of chocolate covered peanuts, would it too have been deemed to be non-existent when i went to the check out? I honestly couldn’t be bothered to find out. Eventually I bought some chocolate covered peanuts elsewhere: I was in one of my local Lidls (we have three) later in the week and they had chocolate covered peanuts for twenty pence less than Tesco’s reduced price. For the same quantity I can’t deny that I experienced some trepidation when they went through the check out, but they went through with my other items without incident. So clearly chocolate covered peanuts do exist in Lidl.

But the mystery didn’t end there – a couple of weeks later I happened to be in my local Tesco Metro buying a newspaper the other day and remembered the peanuts fiasco, so decided to see if they were still on the shelves despite not existing. Anyway, the shop seemed to have gone all in on their contention that the item was non-existent. They had vanished from the shelves completely, their place taken by a second box of packets of chocolate covered raisins. There was no mention of them anywhere. It is as if they were trying to convince shoppers that the chocolate covered peanuts had never existed and anyone who claimed to have bought them in the past was suffering from a delusion. This instant rewriting of history is like something out of Orwell’s ‘1984’. Just what is it that the chocolate covered peanuts done to deserve being written out of Tesco history like this? It makes you wonder just how many other products have suffered a similar fate? Is this why I can’t find anyone else who remembers various now defunct confectionery and snacks of my childhood, like the Tingle Bar or Rancheros? I’m still intrigued by the fact that the non-existent peanuts had an on-shelf price label exclaiming ‘Chocolate Peanuts – New Lower Price’, implying that they must have existed prior to this to have an existing price to be reduced. Maybe it was that reduction that triggered their non-existence? Actually, I did notice that the wine gums are now labelled similarly, maybe if I tried to buy a packet of those, I’d find myself going through the same conversation at the till as to whether or not they exist. Luckily, though, I don’t particularly like wine gums.

In a final development, a third visit to the confectionary shelves of the Tesco Metro a couple of weeks later finally yielded a possible solution to the mystery. The chocolate covered peanuts were back! Same packaging, same reduced price! But a quick examination of a packet revealed that it was now only a 150g pack – a 25% reduction in quantity, but a less than 10% reduction in price. Clearly, on that first visit, the wrong packets had been put out with the new price – they were definitely still the old, bigger, packs, which had obviously been remoevd from the stock list. Hence the confusion at the till. Sadly, this sort of subterfuge is becoming ever more common in UK retail. The fact, however, that I can get these peanuts – in the larger quantity – from Lidl for twenty pence cheaper even than the ‘reduced’ price Tesco were claiming that their chocolate covered peanuts could be bought for,if they existed, means that I’m not actually interested in buying them from Tesco any more. Nonetheless, the whole bizarre episode still fascinates me – I’ve never before had the experience of trying to pay for something and being told that it doesn’t exist.

Doc Sleaze