The Mega Balagan

The Mega Balagan (mess):  or the joys of grocery shopping!

“Mega in the City” is a grocery store located about half a block from our building, so we naturally do  much of our shopping there. Despite its name, there is nothing “mega” about it, space being at a premium in this town.  It is staffed largely with relatively recent Russian arrivals who seem to have imported the Soviet work ethic: “You pretend to pay us, and we’ll pretend to work”.

The other day Mike went down to pick up a few things, and since he planned to buy some heavy items, he went to one of the sets of shopping carts which are kept locked up outside the store, and put in a 5 shekel coin into a cart to release the lock.  As can happen anywhere, it jammed.  He couldn’t get the coin out, and he couldn’t detach the cart. So he thought, well it’s just  5 shekels, and he might  as well save himself the aggravation of trying to get any help, and he went to try the other set of carts.

At that very moment, a young guy came along, clipped his dog’s leash, with dog attached, on to exactly the cart that Mike was heading for, and sauntered into the store. Hmmm…now what?  One cart jammed, the other “dogged”. Just as Mike decided that he would indeed go in to get help to deal with this situation, along came a woman, popped her coin into the cart the young man had left behind, and as she turned to take it into the store, she belatedly realized that there was a  dog that came with it.  WTF!  Being of sterner stuff than Mike, (i.e. she was Israeli),  she stuck her head into the store and yelled, “WHOSE DOG IS THIS?”   And a few other choice comments.

Meanwhile the employee  who came out to deal with the jammed coin, looked first at Mike’s cart…and nodded his head…yes, he agreed,  it was indeed jammed…puzzlement spreading over his face.  It seemed he had never seen such a thing before. He was baffled.

Then he turned his attention to the dog attached to the lady’s cart.  Now this was truly confounding. What to do? How to unclip the leash? (Should he unclip the leash?)  After a few futile efforts on his part, Mike intervened, looked at the leash snap, pressed a little lever and… Bob’s your uncle!…off it came. The lady went into the store with her liberated cart,  and the dog’s owner finally came out,  mid-shopping, grabbed the leash, and hooked his dog right back on to the next one.  Now we were back to square one: one cart jammed , the other attached to a dog.  Okay, at this point everyone was mad at this guy, but without a backwards glance, he turned and went back into the store.  Mike, by now a leash expert, unclipped it, attached the dog to the next cart in line, sacrificed another 5 shekels and went in to do his shopping. The employee remained outside, apparently struck dumb by this whole episode.

As Mike passed the checkout counters on his way in, he noticed that a little drama was unfolding with one of the few non-Russian clerks, a new-hire.  It caught his eye since only last week, mid-checkout, she had asked him to reach over and self-scan his six-pack of beer, apparently for religious reasons. Yes, he was allowed to buy it, but she could not touch it.  By coincidence, Mike is in the midst of studying this very phenomenon in a course, Islam and the West, that he affectionately calls “fatwa of the week”. We in the West only hear about extreme fatwas, but in reality they are mainly rulings that translate Qu’uranic precepts into practical strategies for daily life.  Mike’s course is examining, in particular,  the rulings that apply to situations that arise in the West such as, in this case, the legal sale of alcohol, and the need to be in a  workplace with unrelated men, both of which would normally not be permitted.  Here, she is clearly following a ruling that recognizes her need  to work and make a living, (even in a 100% kosher store), as long as she refrains from handling alcohol. It was Mike’s first one-on-one encounter with this kind of accommodation, and it took him a few minutes after his initial puzzlement at her request to figure out what was happening.  But I digress.

On this day, the same new check-out clerk, a Filipina customer, and the Russian manageress were having their own problems.  It appeared that the Filipina, who was picking up the usual groceries for her elderly charge, was having trouble with the credit card she had been given.  The clerk was looking in puzzlement at the card, the Filipina was on a cell phone trying to explain the situation to her employer in  broken English, while pleading in broken Hebrew with the clerk and the manager to let her take the groceries home anyway. The manager seemed nonplussed by the whole situation. The growing line-up grew ever more restless. (Happily, it included the obnoxious dog owner.)  Mike took one look and decided to take an unusually leisurely approach to his shopping; clearly this was not going to get sorted out any time soon.

Interestingly, one of the consistent exceptions to the rule that Israelis generally speak English, is found in grocery stores. This is because these stores are largely staffed by immigrants, many from Russia, who have barely learned Hebrew. (Don’t get me wrong, that in itself is a feat for which I have considerable admiration. So I appreciate that for them, English on top of Hebrew, would be a lot to ask…and it gives me a chance to practice.)

After making his rounds, and finding the usual 30% of our list out of stock, Mike went to check out. Sure enough, the big sale item of the day, the four-pack of water, would not scan. Despite several tries, including inputting the bar code number by hand, it just would not work.  So the problem was resolved in the usual fashion in Israeli grocery stores…he just had to go home without it. If it doesn’t scan, you can’t have it.  In this country, the consumer comes last.

On the other hand, there are a few services at Mega that you don’t get at home (or at other Tel Aviv grocery stores for that matter).  For example, you are allowed to take the cart home with your groceries, as long as you bring it back. And everyone does.  And if you have empty wine bottles (who us?) you can put them in an empty cart left at the store’s door specifically for that purpose. From there, the local homeless person can take the cart, once it is full, to wherever it is that you get the  bottle refund that most people cannot be bothered to hunt down. There is service; just not from the people who work there.

But Mike never did get his 5 shekels back.