5711/18731
Make America Russia again! All of it. Not just Alaska.
I did our supermarket shop at Tescos in Stevenage. It was the first time in a while that I’d needed a pound for the trolley. I think the people of Hitchin are more trustworthy when it comes to returning shopping carts, but the Mad Max inhabitants of Stevenage will take them and use them to carry their own things around, unless they know they are going to have to pay a pound for the privilege. If nothing else though it does mean that people always return their shopping trolley to the correct place. In Hitchin Waitrose where trolley bays are few and far between, people will often just abandon them behind a parked car. In a way, aren’t those people more evil than the ones who steal them?
Anyway the whole Tesco experience in Stevenage is a complex system of weird rules and regulations. You can park for three hours, providing that you spend at least £5 in store. When you do you are given a voucher and then have to go to a machine and enter your registration number and scan the voucher. It seems a fair deal of palaver to stop people illegally parking in the store car park, especially as it’s more or less in the middle of nowhere (like all of Stevenage), but I suspect that it is near enough to the train station that people would park there all day if they could get away with it.
Still it meant knowing my own registration number, which I still don’t (even though I have had this car for over a year now) and added an extra layer of annoyance to my trip.
I already felt like I was in a very shit Crystal Maze, but the real challenge was to come. I unloaded my shopping into the car (but only after having had to edge the car forward as the car behind was parked too close for me to open the boot) and then tried to return my shopping cart and get my pound back. There were two small strings of lose trolleys in the entrance to the tiny trolley shelter (a bus is never coming for you guys, it’s a trick) and the back one in each case had been spun round 180 degrees and there was no way I could get my little trolley lock into the right space. So I had to then try and move one string of trolleys so I could get to the ones inside the shelter. But the trolleys I moved started rolling away and I had to then rescue them so they didn’t run over a child or old lady and then wedge them into the side of the shelter so they couldn’t carry on with their escape. This left me limited room to manoeuvre my own trolley to the place where the other correctly positioned trolleys were waiting. It was a tricky squeeze and there wasn’t really room for both me and my trolley. I was already wondering if this operation was worth the pound that I was going to be paid for completing it. Surely there comes a point where the time wasted on something like this is worth more than a pound to you. But Ian Tesco knows human psychology. If I was in Hitchin I would have dumped that sucker wherever I could see a trolley shaped space, but I wanted my pound back and I was going to fight for it.
Having finally got myself near to the trolley caterpillar where the final trolley didn’t have it’s arse in the arse of the penultimate one, I tried to pull the chain with the seat belt attachment thing and release my money. But it didn’t stretch far enough. I was still a bit trapped by the loose trolleys that had partially returned to the wild and I couldn’t move my trolley into quite the right position. I pushed and pulled at trolleys and chains and managed to get the postman close to the letterbox, but it was coming up agonisingly short.
Another shopper had now arrived and noted how Herculean a task I had set myself. She waited and watched for a minute or so, before realising that I was basically in a trolley prison and might not be able to get out and she certainly wasn’t coming in, so she decided to head to the next trolley shelter along.
I got the tip in and the magic secret pound drawer opened a smidgen, giving me a tantalising glimpse of the gold I sought. But the mechanism couldn’t be pulled from there. You needed to lock it properly. It seemed impossible, but with a final burst of Hulk like strength I pulled the coupling together and my pound emerged. It had only taken five minutes, giving me a reasonable hourly wage of £12. It was worth it.
I then had to find my way through a wall of trolleys and get back to my car. I got buffeted and lost a bit of skin. But I had triumphed.
