Nervous Breakdown on Aisle Three

Like I need any more reasons to avoid eating. For quite I while I have been irritated by my neighborhood grocery store, but only now has the anger subsided enough for me to write about it. At first I was charmed by Sainsbury's (whom I now refer to as Evilburys) clever way of labelling "yogurt" and "healthy yogurt," you know, because there is a difference. But little did I know it was a clever distracting ploy to keep you from noticing there is NO logical organizational system to their store. More often than not, I literally have to walk up and down every single aisle, looking for what I need because it isn't with similar food products. Would sugar be by the "baking products?" Oh no! It would be with the coffee and tea. Chocolate sauce? Perhaps by the ice cream? Nope, that's where the bullion and ketchup is (of course). With the aisle of chocolate bars? Afraid not, that is where you can find granola bars(I kid you not). Oh! There is the chocolate sauce, by the shaving razors and candles! Can someone PLEASE explain this to me? Ask a store employee you say? Well, after you HUNT ONE DOWN (I swear, if they see you walking purposely towards them, they turn and speed walk the other way) they rarely are helpful. I've actually had two different people tell me "I don't know" and walk away. Really? In Safeway you had to put your game face on and develop a method of grabbing things without breaking stride, because the minute you paused, they would swarm you like yellowjackets who smell my fear "Ma'am, can I help you find something?" I have had to develop a system to survive what Bevis referred to as my"supermarket rage." I could either ask for help right away, or I could search the entire store on my own, but I didn't have the patience to do both. On three different occasions, I've searched front to back looking for items (chicken broth, cornbread mix, and cocktail sausages) only to give up and decide to ask next time I was at the store, because at that point if I had to put up with a sullen store employee, I would have bludgeoned them with a "digestive biscuits" roll. Oh, and for the record, liquid chicken broth and cornbread mix do not exist here. And cocktail sausages are in the "party food" aisle, not with the sausages, duh!