Am back in the UK for my annual summer break. Just back from the supermarket. Stood behind a pretty old (going to guess at least 80yo) woman who was weighing fennel in the veggies aisle, to get a barcoded sticker that she could self-scan. She did one sticker, then a second, then a third. I moved over to the right a step, intending to lean over to offer help (I’m crap with tech, reasonable assumption she might be too). Immediately clocked she was holding the fennel up a bit, ie semi-lifting it off the scales. Then I watched her select “potatoes” on her fourth attempt. Saw her do it again on her fifth attempt - she’d lifted the fennel higher.
Basically, she was deciding what she wanted to pay for the fennel. She left four stickers behind, all decreasing in price, all for potatoes.
I’m normally all for being empathetic towards people on a budget, especially a fixed budget like an pension, and I know about the col crisis. But this was fennel, in Waitrose. She was LOADED with gold jewelry and had a small LV crossbody bag. She can afford 98p (the fifth sticker price) for a bulb of fennel. It made me half want to tell someone on my way out to double check her shopping scan.
No AIBU I suppose. I’m just properly cross. This isn’t the 80s anymore. Things cost more than they used to. Fennel shouldn’t be expensive - but it is. That’s how it is for everyone, and for more essential stuff than bloody vegetables. They don’t steal. She was blatantly stealing, and it was the repeated effort, and the sneakiness and slyness in the way she did it that made me so cross.