The Most Annoying Thing You Can Do at the Grocery Store

I get it: Sometimes when you go grocery shopping, you’re in a rush or maybe you’re just really hungry, and some of the cultural etiquette everybody has picked up over the years goes straight out of the window. You see a cluster of grapes and you just want a quick sample before committing to the whole bag. You think you want that bunch of carrots but while browsing the other aisles you decide you want the cookies instead and the carrots get left behind. We all do it, even though we know it’s wrong.

And if you think that everyone is judging this naughty behavior, you’re right: A recent survey asked shoppers to reveal the most inappropriate grocery-store behaviors and the participants did not hold back.

Treadmill Reviews (a site that, um, usually reviews treadmills) found that the “Most Inappropriate Shopping Behavior at the Supermarket” is — drum roll, please — leaving a perishable item that you’ve decided you don’t want to buy after all in a place where it doesn’t belong. Makes sense, because when you do that it just leaves more work for the people tasked with cleaning up after us sometimes-inconsiderate shoppers.

Shoppers also called out eating something you plan on buying before actually paying for it, and trying out produce before paying. As The Takeout points out, this makes sense for grapes but hopefully no one is doing this with lettuce leaves and carrot sticks? That would just be unsanitary. People who leave the line to grab a forgotten item were also labeled an annoyance, and yeah that is not exactly polite, but also it’s so embarrassing when it happens to you, so let’s all try to be nice to each other, okay?

Turns out that the grocery store is actually a hotbed of aggression. The Treadmill Reviews survey found that shoppers are prone to publicly lashing out at people who cut in line (genuinely bad behavior, to be fair), and getting annoyed when there aren’t enough available cash registers or personal space in line. Now that I think about it, the grocery can be pretty chaotic. Be careful out there folks. Just remember to be on your best behavior.