There are two things about paying for shopping in some of our bigger retailers that I still find slightly strange. The first is when you have filled up your trolley, and you’ve taken it to the checkout and you can see the total as it rings up on the till. And then, when you get to paying, you can hand over a card, they scan it, and the amount that you pay goes down.
The second thing is that you can often go to a supermarket and then draw money from the cashier. It’s been more than 25 years since I first did this (in a Tesco in London in another, younger, life) and I’m always as amazed now as I was then. There is something just wrong with the universe that you can walk into a place with nothing and walk out with goods and money.
Before online betting, it was the thing I always thought most likely to lead to the end of the world as I knew it. During the holidays, I found myself in a nice bottle store with a reputation for being quite pricey, on the coast somewhere, with my wife. I was just ambling around trying not to break anything and stay out of trouble when I came across a particular bottle of a substance with certain medicinal properties.
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Normally, it’s just too expensive for me to buy on a regular basis; it’s something I hope to get as a gift. And, Dear Reader, there are moments on family holidays when you might find yourself very much in need of something with certain medicinal properties. It turns out that, in fact, this particular substance is in a period of what analysts call “global oversupply”. Which is why, if you’re buying a particularly special bottle for that man in your life, you should do the right thing and buy him two.
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