It all started about six months ago.
I was at Waitrose, buying some stuff to bide us over the next day or so and as I always do, used a trolley to put that stuff into. A person - and as you will see in a moment - that person was almost certainly a woman, had left her shopping list in the trolley that I used.
I looked at it and saw that there was a roll of everyday products written on it from potatoes to All Bran but it was the items at the bottom of the list that grabbed my attention. They were “knicker stickers” and “fanny goo”. I am not certain what that is but I have an idea.
Since then, whenever I see a discarded shopping list that has been left in, or is attached to a trolley, I study it in the hope of gaining deeper insight into what sort of life a Waitrose person has.
It would be interesting to compare lists compiled by Waitrose shoppers with those who use Aldi and Lidl. I wonder how many Aldi shoppers have ever put “zhoug” on their shopping list. When I saw it, I had no idea what it is and had to look it up when I got home. I had to do the same for “amchoor” some weeks later.
I expect you already know that amchoor is dried mango powder and zhoug is a hot spicy sauce made from coriander leaves. I had never heard of either until I saw them adorning lists on the bottom of empty Waitrose trolleys. Maybe I’m not really a Waitrose person.
I hope that the person who had written “shower head” on their list had been to a branch of Wickes or a specialist bathroom store before visiting Waitrose because shower heads are not sold at Waitrose.
When I went to Waitrose for the first time after Christmas, I realised that people were already preparing for their New Year celebrations. The trolley I used had a discarded shopping list nestling within its metal grid structure and getting soaked from the constant drizzle. The shopper hadn’t wanted much as the list was just four lines:
red wine
white wine
bubbly wine
paracetamol
Now, that’s a real Waitrose person.
