When I was a kid, I sometimes went with my Aunt Dot when she did her marketing. This pretty much consisted of pushing the cart and playing the following game, which I could never win. Every time she noted a price increase on something, even if it was only up a penny, I'd have to guess how much the product cost back when she was my age. One time, I think I asked her, "Gee, did they even have money then?"
We'd go to a Safeway about three blocks from her home…and the first thing she'd do was to select something to eat while shopping — a bag of cookies or chips or dried fruit or something. She'd tear the bag open, stuff it in the "baby" seat of the shopping cart, then nibble as she shopped, offering snacks also to me and even to other shoppers she happened to talk with.
That always made me uncomfortable. I had the idea that you're supposed to pay for the food at the market before you open it and eat it. When I mentioned this to my Aunt Dot — a very sweet, nice lady, by the way — she'd dismiss my concerns. Everyone does it, she said, even though I never saw anyone else do it. And she was going to pay for the item along with all her other purchases, as of course she did.
I assumed at first that since she was a grown-up, she must know what she was talking about…always a very bad assumption on my part. I think I was around ten when I began to realize that wasn't always the case; that older didn't mean smarter and neither did being my aunt. One day in the Safeway, a young lady who worked there approached Aunt Dot and asked her very politely to not begin gorging herself on the Triscuits until after they'd been purchased at the check-out counter. With a touch of startled indignance, Aunt Dot replied that she was going to pay for it.
The clerk had a gracious undertone of "Please don't make trouble for me, lady" as she said, "I'm sure you are…but some people don't. Every day, we find opened, half-consumed packages around the store and the boss gets upset with us. You put us in an awkward position because we can't tell who's going to pay and who isn't. If the boss sees you, you're not going to get yelled at. I am."
It was as much how she said it as what she said. Aunt Dot, like I said, was a terribly nice lady and she hadn't realized she'd been making possible trouble for someone. She never did it again and I've never done it. Even if I'm famished, I wait 'til I've paid for an item to dive into it.
I'm telling this story because lately, I've started seeing this a lot in markets…people opening packages, munching on chips or swigging beverages for which they've yet to pay. Is this now becoming customary? Do stores now expect it or tolerate it? This may be a mental block I can/should get over.