The weekly supermarket food shop is a necessity in any urban environment - we all do it. Some, like myself, try to avoid it as often as we’re allowed to by our ‘other half’. Typically, mine prefers to shop at her own pace, checking labels on items which are new to her without feeling under any obligation to speed on and possibly miss something. While I on the other hand, will happily go food shopping – but at my pace – provided there’s a shopping list! In my defence, I would add that on more occasions than I care to remember, my ‘impulse’ food purchase has resulted in multiple stock items in the cupboard on my return!
Our local supermarket is located 10 miles away and the weekly food shop can typically take around 2½ hours in total on a Saturday before lunch, and I reckon our example is fairly typical across the UK and Europe.
But even our worst supermarket nightmare pales to nothing when compared to the late night food shopping experience of Kostya and Irenie in Moscow.
The couple live in what’s known as the North East District of the city with their two boys, some 30 kms from the centre and about 9kms from the Moscow orbital ring road or MKAD which they must cross to reach the biggest and most popular supermarket offering everything under one roof at the best prices.
The MKAD has got to be seen and experienced. It’s vast! Even with a diameter of 102 kilometres it’s not even on the perimeter of the city like London’s M25. The MKAD was built with 6 traffic lanes in each direction and was originally considered to be more than enough for the city’s needs. But that was before the authorities discovered the city gains half a million additional vehicles each and every year. The extra vehicles have to go somewhere. And when you see 8 lanes of traffic squeezed in to those six lanes you know the answer. Inevitably clashes are a foregone conclusion, one that’s exacerbated by the Russian requirement that all drivers and their vehicles involved in an accident must remain in position until a police officer ‘writes up’ the accident. Quite how a police vehicle reaches any accident scene through 8 lanes of congested traffic on a six-lane highway remains a mystery……
Anyway, Kostya and Irenie’s local supermarket is called the ‘Metro’. It’s just 15kms from their apartment which makes it about 30 minutes journey time when the traffic flow is much lighter – normally after 11pm. After commuting home they find it’s much easier and quicker to delay going shopping until after 11pm to avoid the horrendous MKAD congestion. Last December (the 28th to be exact) with the New Year festivities approaching, they once again delayed their shopping trip until after 11pm to save time, and after spending an hour of shopping arrived with their loaded trolley at one of the 45 cash tills at half-past midnight. Everything was going smoothly.
They then waited in line for an hour without reaching their till. There saw no point in switching to a faster line because there wasn’t one, every till had a similar backlog.
At 2am, they had already waited 1½ hours in line, when they received a call from the boys who were now wondering were they had got to. Had they been in accident on the MKAD? “No” – they were in line queueing for the till!
The couple didn’t abandon the trolley and leave everything behind because they felt they had already invested enough time getting there, filling the trolley up and anyway there was no other place quite as big, or as cheap with everything under one roof as the Metro that was still open and within easy reach. They were stuck with their choice.
By 3am, after 2½ hours waiting in line for the till the hungry boys rang once again and this time were told to go to bed! Mum and Dad would return as soon as they could. Meanwhile, all around the couple shoppers were sprawled across their own trolleys in a vain attempt to snatch some sleep as best they could. Some people even began celebrating the forthcoming holidays with festivities of their own by drinking and sharing their shopping with others around them and simply arriving at the tills with empty half-empty bottles and empty boxes of chocolates.
At just after 4.00 am Kostya and Irenie arrived at their till and by 5.00 am they were back home putting the key in the door. Irenie went straight to bed after unpacking the shopping. Kostya didn’t bother, he had to be up for the 6.30 am commuter train back to the city to go to work! They haven’t returned to the Metro since.
