Today at our local Meijer’s Market I witnessed something that set my teeth on edge and nearly had me speaking out. We were going down the cookie and cracker aisle and I witnessed a mother of two little girls pull up in a cart to where the wafer cookies were, the mother grabbed a cellophane-wrapped Meijer-brand version of the cookies, tore the wrapper off and handed the cookies to her puling children.
This isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed such behavior in Michigan. I’ve never in my life witnessed it in New York and I don’t know if it did happen there and I was just not cognizant enough to notice or if this is indeed a Michigan quirk. People have absolutely no qualms about grabbing a product off the shelf at the supermarket, opening it, and before they have checked out and paid for it, they begin to consume the product! I find this a very rude behavior and it drives me to distraction. You didn’t pay for it, at least not yet, so what gives you the right to just chaw into something? Can’t you wait until you leave the market before you feel the urge to shovel matter into your gaping maw? It doesn’t help that some of these people make that disgusting crunch-munch-gasp-goopy wet sound that comes with people who masticate in public. That alone drives me crazy! Please, for the love of god, either learn how to eat with decorum or eat somewhere else! Anyways, I witnessed this and I instantly thought that that mother was perpetuating two very bad things. First, that you can open a container in a supermarket and just go to town on it without paying for it and second, that her children will grow up spoiled rotten on instant gratification. They put their little prissy hands on their hips and screech and carry on and someone hands them a pack of wafer cookies to shut them up. It ruins the children and sets a bad precedent for normal behavior at the supermarket.
I don’t know if anyone else has witnessed this atrocious behavior where they are. I find it abhorrent and repellent. I can’t stand loud masticators and I really can’t stand such rudeness. Perhaps it has more to do with the idea that I don’t prefer to think of my fellow man as a rude lout with absolutely no manners at all – despite the notion that not everyone can have the same sense of decorum that I was raised with. I think what bothers me is that my sense of decorum shouldn’t be remarkably strict, it should be common!
I didn’t approach the mother and chide her for her bad parenting. I can attribute that to MY sense of decorum. At least one of us has it. Filthy rude loutish proles. Gah!
It's a no-win situation sometimes. If your kid throws a big fat temper tantrum in the grocery store (and from age 2 to 4 it WILL happen at least once) then as a parent you feel the stares of the other shoppers and feel their disapproval at your parenting skills. So I can understand the temptation of opening something to keep your child quiet.
Typically I will tell the kids they have to wait until we get to the car. Usually that works fine, but not always. 😉
Funny, I'm not from MI, I'm not even American. I don't find that rude at all. If she opened it and then put it back on the shelf, that would be theft. I do not even think it is necessarily spoiling a child with instant gratification. Not knowing the full story, or the people involved it is hard to say. Young children need food often. If you have a day where you are running a lot of errands, such a shopping, then you may find yourself in a position where your children are genuinely hungry, and you have a lack of snacks. Now I would not have fed my children cookies out of a box at that age if they were hungry, but I have opened granola bars, or crackers or something while shopping. My kids were hungry, I paid for them when I checked out. It was win-win-win, for my hungry children, my sanity and the store, as I likely would not have bought the packaged snacks otherwise.
It was poor planning on my part, my choice was to leave the store without groceries that I likely very much needed, or feed my hungry child or have a crying child who was normally mild mannered, simply because of low blood sugar. It was certainly not my child's fault that they were hungry, and I was found snackless. I'm sure the store would rather I stay and buy groceries from their store. I'm sure the store would rather my child not cry in the store because they are hungry. Even if you carry snacks with you, unless they are something clearly not sold in the store, opening snacks that you have brought with you can be problematic as then I worried about being accused of stealing the snacks when I left, as someone saw my child eating them.
Rudeness is also matter of community norms. What you find rude in NY, might not be rude in MI. There are examples from all around the world of things that are rude in one place, not being rude in another community. Talking while your mouth is full is an example. My parents would have found that highly rude, and we were not allowed to talk with our mouths full of food. There are communities however where this is not considered rude at all, and where everyone does it.