Big supermarkets — millions of $ spent on marketing, and then no registers open!

Warning — first world problem rant.

There are a few large, national chain supermarkets near me. Which one I go to depends on whichever one I am driving by when I have to face the fact that I desperately need to buy groceries.

Otherwise, I avoid big supermarkets like the plague. I have always hated them with a passion: the noise, the people, kids having tantrums, the harsh lighting, the jangling muzak and loudspeaker spruiking of specials. Ugh. Plus the sheer mundanity of it all.

Most of the time I try to go to small, independent shops, figuring the hit to my bank balance is a tiny price to pay for fewer people, easier parking and smiling service. I also altruistically figure that if we all don’t support small businesses, they will simply go out of business and then the hypocritical lamenting the rise of the multinationals will begin. That the manager of one of my local small stores always carries my groceries to my car and flirts with me might also have something to do with it.

My loathing of supermarkets got worse a few years ago after I had an anxiety attack in the middle of a very large store, so bad that I couldn’t actually move and had to call my husband who was also there to come and get me out of there (thank God for mobile phones). The store is in a beach-y, holiday town a few hours south of where we live, but it is one of those places that has been killed by its own popularity with the major shopping area as crowded on a Saturday morning as…