Feeling Super at the Market

With all the sports going on this weekend, I thought it would be timely to write about grocery shopping and grammar.

I was checking-out at my local Supermarket a couple of days ago when the cashier asked if I had a Stop&Shop card.  And for those of you who have retained your masculinity, most supermarkets have membership cards that essentially clip coupons for you.  So now when you are checking out, they swipe your card and you get the savings of any item that might have been on sale that day.  Genius marketing idea when you think about it because after you fill out an application and get your card it pretty much means you’ll go to that store exclusively for all your food-shopping needs, and I think the government secretly tracks your purchases just in case you are warehousing industrial fertilizer and wicks.

And there are, of course, some people who have a savings card in more than one chain of supermarkets.  But almost all of those people also possess a vagina.

Getting back to it, I told this lovely cashier that I did have a card, but I guess I didn’t need to use it since she already swiped her own card for me.  And that’s what some cashiers will do as a courtesy… If you either forgot your card or don’t have one, they will swipe a generic card provided by the store itself, and the savings will still come down to you.

But, like I said, I told the cashier that I didn’t need to give her my Stop&Shop card because I see she already ran through the store’s “courtesy card”, for which I then politely told her, “Thanks very much.”

And here’s where it got interesting.

She told me, “I know I ran mines card for you, but if you want to still give me your card I’ll swipe it so you can get the credit for being a frequent shopper that you wouldn’t get from mines.”

Now I hope this jumped out at you right away- This woman used the term “mines” twice in that last sentence… The first time she used it in place of the word “my”, and the second time she used it in place of what I guess is the singular version of “mines”, which is the word “mine”.

“I know I ran mines card for you, but if you want to still give me your card I’ll swipe it so you can get the credit for being a frequent shopper that you wouldn’t get from mines.”  I just felt like typing that sentence out again in bold print, because it really is absurd to think that a woman is butchering the English language like that even though she was clearly in her late-40’s/early-50’s, and seemingly not off some recent boat from a faraway land.

I write a little bit, and… I, know: i sometimes’ screw up with speeling and punctuation! BUT I am… righting 1,000 wurds, at a clip?

So, I don’t exactly know why I decided to do this… Maybe I was feeling “frisky”… Maybe my courage gets turned up automatically once I enter the climate-controlled atmosphere of a supermarket (the refrigerated dairy section cools my undercarriage)…

Or maybe I was just fucking tired of hearing morons butchering the English language.  Either way, I say to the cashier, “No such word as mines… You mean either my or mine.”

And she says, “What you mean there’s no such thing as ‘mines’?  I use it all the time.”

To which I reply, “I apologize.  There is such a word as ‘mines’, but it is strictly used as the plural of ‘mine’… You know… Like a diamond mine or perhaps a land-mine.  As in, ‘Man!  All these Vietnamese kids are still getting their legs blown off from leftover US Military mines!’ But I assume you weren’t referring to buried explosives when referring to your courtesy card, so then I gotta also assume that you just messed up.  No biggie, sweetheart. Just though it was worth mentioning as a courtesy on my part.”

As I left, I would like to say that I left her dumb-founded, but I think I left her just plain dumb.

Take a reports.

-Large