These markets far from super
The daily habit of popping down to the supermarket for one or two things is supposed to be a thing of the past, but it hasn’t stopped some. Hello? Haven’t they paid attention to the incessant Covid-19 community messages? There’s a lockdown going on and you should confine your insatiable need to consume, and limit shopping to once a week.
How selfish and stupid can people be? Well, we all know the answer to that as daily reports of ruleflouters make you want to hunt them down and wring their silly necks.
Ah, but we have to be kind to those who abuse the rules. But what about being cruel to be kind? What a pity putting petty crims in public stocks and pelting them with rotten fruit and veg is a thing of the past. I suppose such an old-fashioned punishment might be reinterpreted by the modern miscreant as a kinky opportunity for their 15 minutes of fame.
Who would want to shop at a supermarket more than their fair share when it’s such a grim experience? Welcome to the reinvention of the phrase to find yourself within ‘‘spitting distance’’.
No blame pointed at frontline workers here, but queuing like cows, waiting to be milked by the Australian-owned supermarkets, is not something I want to repeat more than once a week.
When this is over and we prepare for the next pandemic, we need more New Zealand-owned supermarkets to be up and running to prevent billions disappearing across the ditch.
The hunger for profit games never ceases, even in our darkest hour, when such venal gains by our neighbours should be put aside for our greater good.
As for the supermarket employers begrudgingly forced into giving their employees a one-off payment for front-lining the deal, shame on them. R aise their wages and keep them there. Relying on the shortness of people’s memories once the crisis is over won’t work this time. Honour the worker. Nothing’s too good for them. They cannot live on applause alone, and need more than community claps to sustain them.
Remember the good old days when supermarket shopping was fun and involved coded flirtation? That’s when those bold enough grabbed a bunch of bananas and arranged them so they were facing up in the trolley to show that you too, like your fruit of choice, were up for it and available.
How quaint and relatively wholesome that all seems now in the wake of the sordid swipe worlds of Tinder and Grindr.
Speaking of sordid, what a relief that Married at First Sight has sloped off our TV screens. When the chips are down and the populace is confined to barracks, we need life-affirming television for all the generations to enjoy, not the contrived fights of hired muckrakers and button pushers to entertain the masses.
The job of keeping us calm and amused has fallen to Seven Sharp and The Project, both teams having risen to the occasion of cheerleading the nation.
Those everyday heroes, the audience who have stuck to the rules of lockdown and just stayed at home to do what Larry Davis suggested and ‘‘just watch television’’, can tune into the weeknight hilarity as mein hosts invite viewers to mine their own Seinfeld moments to make, create and send in video-ettes.
This is grassroots, home-grown, reactive TV at its best, keeping viewers off the streets, locked down, screen-glued and giggling, something to really look forward to in the still of our incarcerated nights.