Money

I was at a supermarket yesterday in a nice leafy Melbourne suburb. I only had one or two things so I cleverly avoided the "12 items or less" line, and not just because it's grammatically suspect. You see, it's not really the scanning that takes time, it's the end transaction. Especially if people use loyalty cards and credit cards. Also, in this particular supermarket there's sometimes 2 cashiers in the fast lane, but invariably as soon as you get on the line one of them goes.

So I got behind a woman who had quite a few things in her trolley. As I'd suspected, they were all scanned quite quickly, so I was quite a ways ahead of where I would have been had I got on the fast lane. But then, of course, it all came unstuck.

The cashier finished scanning, and said to the woman, "sixy-five dollars seventy" (or something like that). The woman looked surprised. She then swung her handbag around in front, rummaged though it incredulously and found a purse. She opened the purse and looked inside. There were notes and coins in there, which seemed to throw her.

I wanted to lean forward and say to her "It's money. It does three things. 1) it's a medium of exchange, 2) it's a a unit of account, and 3) it's a store of value". There's an eipsode of the Simpsons where Homer reminds himself "Money can be exchanged for goods and services". And you have to figure that if Homer can intellectualise that, anyone can.

She didn't look as though she had anything wrong with her, but she was spectacularly unprepared for the business end of the shopping trip, the bit where you hand over money. I've been behind people like her - or, possibly, her - at ATMs too, where having gotten to the front of the line they look helplessly at the machine for a while before remembering they need to get their ATM card out and stick it in the slot (meanwhile, I'm hovering behind, incandescent with rage, flicking my ATM card between my fingers).

I need a massage.