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Today I went downtown, I need bread and fruit and a few other things that I can get in Yan’an. It was cold out but again on real surprise there, the wind was the worst part, it is that biting wind. Anyway enough about the weather, I was not planning on writing a blog about that! I was at my final port of call, one of the few supermarkets in town, I went there last, only because it has become a habit to go there last! I dropped off my bags off shopping from my previous two stops at the front of the shop. A lot if not most supermarkets and stores where goods are easily accessible make you drop bags off at the front of the store. This includes shopping from other places and handbags if they think that they are two large! It is an attempt to stop shoplifting, not really sure if it works, though they still have one more security check when you check out and have to have a security officer stamp or mark your ticket in some way. No idea why they do that, I just know that in some place with an itemized list they often take a glance at what I have brought. I don’t see how it really stops shoplifting, but it does provide work, and make shopping a little bit of a pain at times!
Anyway my shopping was done and all I had to do was collect my bags and head out. When I got to the counter there was a quite an event with one annoyed woman shouting at the top of her voice and one irate security guard shouting back at her. As well as four now sullen and annoyed workers behind the counter while she shouted at the top of her voice that something worth a fair bit of money had been stolen from her bag. You see you hand your bag over they put it in an available slot and give you a tag; however the slot is just an open box, everyone can see it and in theory anyone of the staff behind the counter could steal something. In this case every time I hand something other, knowing that I am not trusted to steal, I have to trust that the staff taking my bag can be trusted! I have never had a problem, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. How the whole thing turned out I don’t know, I didn’t stay around once I had got my stuff. I knew that probably things would get more heated and the crowd would get larger as folks tried to stop and listen. Who knows maybe even join in the fight if they felt they had a point to make, safer for me to get away from there!
Still shopping at times is not much fun out here, most places have so many staff that they follow you around the store watching your every move. It can be very suffocating and unnerving to be followed around like that. Still at least they do it everyone, someone today was backing up while watching a customer, trouble was she was not paying attention to what was behind her and ended up backing straight into me.

Ah well that is just the way life is sometimes!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 12:56 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.