Right, quick for a quick blogstyle rant of "10 Things that are wrong with my local supermarket". Feel free to skip this one.

1. People standing outside asking me to donate money to causes that I think should actively be stopped.

2. Shrink wrapped fruit and veg in quantities greater than I want to use. And apples so shiny they must have been polished.

3. Never seeming to have the size and type of milk that I want, thus forcing me either to compromise or go to another shop on the way home.

4. Not selling any alcohol, thus enforcing a trip to the drug store that does sell alcohol. This is also related to the fact that my credit card sent me an annual statement with all the different purchases carefully separated out into different headings. Because I buy booze and food from different shops, this allows me to work out quite how much I spent on getting drunk over the last year, and it's a lot.

5. Putting special "half price offers" on things that I want to buy. This is because they completely sell out of the thing that I was prepared to pay full price for, and so I can't buy them at all.

6. Not selling the range of instant meals available in Britain for 99p or 5 for 4 quid. Instead I have to pay $4 for crappy instant lasagne. They have no instant curries! And the crisps are rubbish (but improving).

7. Having a policy of trying to get 20 items per minute swiped at the checkout. Thus, they end up throwing my food down the conveyor as fast as possible, and it doesn't get done any quicker because you need an extra five minutes at the end to sort out the mess that they've made.

8. Employing some idiot to stand at the end of the checkout and shovel my stuff into plastic bags without asking me. This is bad because : I brought my own bag that is better to carry and less wasteful. I don't want you to put my shopping into thirteen bags when I can fit it easily into one rucksack. When you pack my shopping, you seem to delight in putting the softest stuff at the bottom. I feel really awkward when someone else packs up my shopping, but now you make me feel even more awkward when I have to ask someone *not* to pack up my shopping.

9. The crappy electronic payment system. I *know* how to use it, you don't have to tell me to press enter or worse still, lean over and press enter for me. It's just that I like to know how much money is being deducted from my account before I agree to the transaction. On several occasions I have been overcharged because something got swiped twice when you were in such a rush to get all my shopping done at 20 items per minute.

10. People standing asking me for money on the way out as well.