Just a quick moan. Just got in after attempting to do some grocery shopping. I say attempt because most food shops close on a Thursday afternoon so it's near impossible. I do know this, so you could say I shouldn't have even tried, but I was hoping I'd be lucky.

Why do they have to close on Thursday afternoon? Are they so over worked that they need to do that? Just the food shops close though, the other shops close on Monday morning until it gets hot then they close on a Saturday afternoon (because everyone goes to the beach) and open on a Monday morning. Are you following all of this? There'll be questions later.

Shopping. Warning: This post is ranty

There was an ad on TV for 10% off at Careffour (=big supermarket) this week. Hmmm. The last time I went there we did all our shopping, having followed my carefully prepared shopping list, selected the best vegetables (without plastic gloves on), chose the longest sell by dates and best offers etc etc. Good to go. However, when we got to the checkout, we saw that the queues were *enormous*. After waiting 10 minutes in the queue without moving even *an inch* forward we decided “enough!”. We left the trolley there, muttered a few angry words and went home, foodless. Teach them! - Hard as it was on our empty stomachs.

The business sense there leaves so much to be desired. They never seem to open more than 30% of their tills. Plus the workers at the tills are either on a cannot-be-fired-for-any-reason contract or are the daughter of the owner and so will never be fired either. This means they move at snail pace and just don't care. I’ve worked on a few checkouts in my time and when I did I would get the queue down as fast as possible because I didn’t want the people waiting to start complaining, plus I liked it when my checkout was free. I could show them how it's done :)

DIY checkouts could sort the situation a bit. I'm not sure how they'd go down here though...

You’re heavily conditioned as to when and where you can do you’re shopping here. Saturday morning is to be avoided completely. I look at the deli counter queue and think there’s no way I can join that. Walking back home from work the other day I wanted to buy bagno schiumma at the detersivi shop. A simple task you may think, but again it was so busy and the man is sooo slow in there, so I have to wait until I catch the shop empty. Some of the shops I go in, like the detersivi shop are so small too, packed with boxes, you can barely fit in there. If another customer turns up whilst you’re in there, that’s it, you’re blocked in with no escape.