Granny Knows Best – Online Shopping

In the time I’ve lived on this earth it seems to me that shopping has come full circle. 

When I was a girl my sainted mother (a woman of humour, kindness and a very hard hand when applied to the back of the leg) ordered her groceries and had them delivered – by a man who wrote next week’s order (with a stub of pencil and painful slowness) in a dog-eared book.

These days, of course, the man who scarfed ginger snaps like there was no tomorrow has been replaced by a robotic female but the principle is the same.

Almost.

The difference?

The grocer with his brilliantined hair and nicotine stained fingers generally brought precisely what Mum ordered. And if there was a slight deviation the replacement item was very close to the original that had been ordered and was usually reduced in price by a penny or two in compensation.

So what happened in the intervening fifty years?

We all got conditioned to the hell of the supermarket and the joys of the trolley whose only mission in life was to career sideways across the car park like a drunken juggernaut. Thus it was that we mostly looked with some relief towards online orders.

And how we were disappointed. How we tried to order our modest needs – only to be thwarted by sudden death of websites, ridiculous delivery slots, and the replacement for goods that had become unavailable between the order and the fulfilment of same with random crap from the returns cupboard.

We are sorry we have run out of Cornish butter, we have replaced your order of that product with a jar of nappy rash cream. Or. We are sorry we have run out of bananas, we have replaced your order of that product with a pair of flip flops (size 3). Or…

I could go on…

So we drifted back to the weekly trolley dash and the amusement of choosing our own bruised apples.

But then.

Horror of horrors. The supermarket was declared a place of lurking plague, and we deserted in our thousands once again. 

Online we went. Whether through the offices of a creepy talking box or the efforts of our fingers. Only to find. No delivery slots available until 2023. Limits on what we could buy. 

The screams could be heard as far as the empty beer garden outside the Dog and Scrotum where the landlord sat alone drinking Old Stumpblaster and wishing he had sold up last summer.

But I digress.

Shopping online? I don’t fu**ing think so.

Me and Gyp fire up the Micra and make our stately way to the emporium. 

Gyp minds the car.

I shop.

Bottoms up!

You can now have a collection of Granny’s inimitable insights of your very own in Granny Knows Best.