We went with Steve to the big new Meijer store near us, because he thought it would be neat and cool and would have a difficult to find product he’d been looking for. I told him I thought it was more of a cross between a really big Target and Sears with a grocery store on one side. And that when I’d been there before, it seemed like a lot of tacky people and their badly behaved kids seemed to congregate there.
Well, for once, I was right. I am so rarely right where Steve is concerned. He called later to admit whole-heartedly I was right.
In Meijer’s, Everybody Can Hear You Shriek
We browsed the aisles looking at all the stuff, and noticed several packs of roving pre-teen boys running around playing with balls and racing along with carts. There was also the full complement of crying kids strapped into shopping carts and slightly older kids running around whapping each other with big, neon colored foam “noodles” from the pool-toy aisle.
And yes, they have one whole aisle just for pool-toys.
We ignored the kids and wandered around in a consumerist daze. Eventually, we wound up on the grocery side, where Steve was originally headed.
A young child just out of view down the aisle started shrieking – high pitched, repeated, endless shrieks that got louder and more drawn out. The racket quickly went far, far beyond the normal sort of “annoying shrieking kid in grocery store” behavior so dear to the heart of childfree bloggers and Netizens.
It was like a firetruck or ambulance siren – insistent, demanding, and forcing an instinctive response from everyone who heard it – they would start to move forward as if to see if there was an emergency, and then the movement would be checked, like “Wait, I can’t just go over there and stop that noise, it’s none of my business and it doesn’t look like the kid is injured, so…”
It went on and on with no end. Suddenly, some sort of limit was reached – every adult in that wide side aisle stopped dead, moved forward a few steps, and stared open-mouthed at the source of the noise. I moved to a better vantage and saw a small, happy looking toddler girl crouched in the front of an otherwise empty shopping cart, being wheeled along by an angry young woman. An older couple had made the mistake, apparently, of actually saying something to her, and instantly she started a tirade, loud enough to be heard by everyone in sight: “you can’t talk to my kid that way, you can’t talk to me that way, you can’t tell me there’s anything wrong with a kid yelling in the grocery store, you mind your own business,” and so on delivered in rapid fire, agressive tones. Everyone (and I mean all of us within sight of the exchange – a couple of dozen people) moved forward for an even better look and to see if the woman would actually attack the older man. He spoke, his wife spoke, the young woman hollered at them, and then as he started to reply she turned away and marched off in full steam, saying loudly “FUCK you.”
The looks on their faces were total shock and bewilderment. The woman moved in our direction, loudly defending her right to shop anywhere she likes with her kid, and nobody could tell her that kid couldn’t yell in the grocery store and more, yadda yadda. As she came closer to us, I started to freak out and pretended to look at some frozen bagles or something so she wouldn’t catch me staring at her and start screaming at me. Steve thought this approach was less than courageous, but I thought she was wiggin’ and ready to get violent in a second if anyone else so much as looked cross-eyed at her.
We walked up the aisle with our purchases, and I saw the older couple – the woman was talking to someone on the cell phone and describing the incident. The man was standing there shaking his head in disbelief. I said “Excuse me – was she yelling at you? ” and got the story.
Apparently when the child’s shrieks were loudest and most urgent, the woman had said something along the lines of “Can’t you get your child to quiet down?” when she got hit with a barrage of verbal abuse. I couldn’t believe it – she was actually asked that old BNP (breeder not parent) bromide “Do you have kids? Grandkids? Well, you can’t tell me how to raise my kid.” As it turned out, the older lady was a grandmother and had started to reply that she’d raised her kids to be well behaved in public, but she was cut off. Her husband spoke to defend her and to criticise the bad behavior, but of course the young woman responded as if to a personal attack on her (grimy, underdressed) little sprog (progeny). And so it went from there as I had seen from farther away.
So I thanked the older couple for at least saying something, because the mom obviously thought it was okay to let her kid disturb other people. We discussed children behaving badly – I can always discuss this stuff with parents of my sisters’ and my mothers’ generations, but not with anyone younger than about 35. Older parents are so on the same page about what’s acceptable behavior and what’s NOT acceptable that unfortunately has become commonplace. I could tell they were PNBs (parents, not breeders).
The three of us (Steve, David and I) headed for checkout. There was the young woman again, still rat-a-tatting away to anyone in earshot about people who wouldn’t mind their own business. I freaked again when I thought Steve was deliberately following her to see what would happen next. He got irked at me. We were almost in line behind her at the checkout – more freakout on my part – and finally we got through in another lane. Steve got hung up for a bit, and the kid started shrieking again – all the people that had missed the earlier show in Meat and Dairy got to catch the reprise in Self Checkout. More staring, more interesting body language, more loud commentary from the young woman. A store employee strolled by, and the lone checker in the “self checkout” lane she was in helped her get her purchases scanned correctly – she was, of course, having trouble and holding up the line. As soon as the one guy walked by, the woman’s tirade stopped. I don’t know if she was in danger of being asked to leave the store, but it sure looked like it at that moment.
Many loud excuses about what it was like to be a young mother of a young kid and nobody understood how haaaaaaaard it was, delivered for the benefit of all and sundry.
We walked out. She walked out, not far behind us. We said goodbye to Steve, who pointed out that he wasn’t following the woman, he was just trying to get to the checkout line ahead of her. Meanwhile, she was still in full cry, quite far behind us then but still perfectly audible – not sure who her audience was then.
So David and I head for home – I was still decompressing and David was laughing and saying “So, you’re blogging this, right?” Oh, yeah. Oh, HELL yeah.
David’s cell phone rang. It was Steve, calling to tell me I was right. About what? Not the yelling woman, it turns out. There was so much more.
Meijer’s attracts a large number of really tacky, low-life people in addition to the normal people who shop there (and by low-life, I mean the sort of person of any income level that makes a spectacle of themselves in some way). Steve now knows this for fact. He’d poo-pooed it before because he thought all Meijer’s were large repositories of consumer goodness.
As soon as Steve had reached his car, he had been approached by a guy in the adjacent space whose 80’s heavy metal beater car was out of gas. Steve agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to give the guy a push to the Meijer gas station at the bottom of the lot. After inflicting some damage on his own license plate frame, Steve figured out how to push the guy gently down the slope and drove up behind to make sure he made it to the pumps.
As they were chatting, he recognized the guy. Steve was badly injured by a lucky punch once years ago – he was at a bowling alley and he said something harmless that was taken amiss by a developmentally disabled bowler in the next lane, and the guy took a wild swing at him and connected, because Steve was completely unprepared and unaware of the guy’s tendency to lash out unexpectedly. He’s never fully recovered from some of the nerve damage. So anyway, he recognized the driver of the beater car as a friend of the disabled guy, and what’s more, the driver recognized him and seemed very glad to see him again. He mentioned that he was no longer friendly with the disabled haymaker-throwing helmet-wearing bowler, and started to ask questions like where Steve was living now, and what his situation was.
It turns out the guy had just become homeless, and could he and his passenger (some random guy) and his dog come and stay with Steve for a while until he got things figured out? He’d already given away his other dog to some other guy in the parking lot, so it was just the one.
Steve declined gracefully, drove away with all deliberate speed, and called to tell me that I was right – Meijer’s is a nice enough store with lots of selection, but the people who shop there are scary.