Tikkabik

So was at Stop & Shop last night, unloading my cart with some dinner supplies and other stuff. I'd just about gotten the cart unloaded when this well-dressed, well-fed man wheeled up behind me and started unloading his cart.

I could tell he was in a hurry from the start. He started putting his groceries on the belt before I'd even finished unloading my stuff. Ordinarily I'd let stuff like that pass, but what this guy did next pushed my buttons -- and for reasons I won't get into here, I'm not in a button-pushing mood this week.

I'm waiting for the cashier to finish scanning my order, standing in front of the card reader most of us use to pay for our groceries these days.

This guy sidles up beside me, only about a hand's breadth away. He's jockeyed in front of his cart and is now definitely inside my personal space zone, as if we were crammed together on a packed subway train at rush hour.

Only this isn't a subway train, and this sure as hell ain't rush hour. Anymore.

"Back off," I said.

He didn't realize I was talking to him, I think. He was so in his own world, I don't think he acknowledged that anyone was speaking. He was just staring off into space.

"Back the fuck off," I repeated. "At least an arm's length away, if you don't mind."

The guy huffed a little as if to protest, but eventually did what he was told. I leisurely completed my order -- actually, that's an understatement: I took as much time as I could to complete my order -- and left.

He resumed his rushing and huffing and puffing the second I strolled my cart out of there, shooting me a dirty look as I walked off.

Weird thing is, this is the second or third time this has happened to me at this particular store. Now, I do a large amount of my grocery shopping there, so perhaps it's just an exposure thing. But I've also been at this store in the middle of the night when people have excoriated the one cashier on duty for not keeping a self-service line open and made other really self-absorbed complaints, so I really think that it's specific to this store, or at least their customer base.

About the only thing I can think of is that the store is located in Cotuit, Mass., a village of Barnstable not too far away from Osterville. There's a large concentration of wealth there, and at any given time there's a high concentration of Land Rovers, Mercedes and Lexuses in the parking lot. So not superrich folks, but people who undoubtedly are far more important than the rest of us.

Interestingly, I've also noticed this behavior in the self-service lines, where you scan your own groceries and pay for them using an automated machine. It's not quite as bad, but I can't actually count the number of times I've used those and still been loading my groceries into bags at the end where someone just absently walks up to terminal, scans their card and starts sending groceries down the conveyor belt.

I think that's the result of three phenomena: One, the novelty of the self-service lines hasn't allowed the etiquette of regular grocery lines to carry over. Two, people see the terminal absent of a customer, and immediately want to fill that space, without bother to check further down to see if the previous customer is actually done. And three, the absence of a belt to unload your groceries on first before they're scanned has messed up the traffic flow in such a way that people just don't think about giving the person ahead of them time to finish.

Maybe I should just start bringing a cattle prod with me.