neighbourhood: going shopping

When I was little my gee-gee, in order to make sure we held onto the hand-rails, told us the story of a little boy who got his tennis shoe caught in the grid at the bottom of the escalator and was sucked under and ground up. For years my parents had to walk miles in malls and airports to find elevators because I would become hysterical near escalators..

When I was little I used to see the commercials for furniture where it said so much to pay a month to pay a piece of furniture off over a few months instead of one large lump sum... I thought you had to pay your whole life as long as you owned the piece of furniture, every month.

I used to think that manniquins were real people posing.

I used to believe…

you know those shops that say 'open 7 days', well, when i was 3, i used to think that because 3 was such a BIGGG number, then 7 must be even bigger. i thought that all those shops were telling us how many more days they would be open 4, and were having closeing down sales. i got pretty worried because i thought Sydney was gonna become a ghost town because business was leaving it.

When I was about seven years old I remember seeing the "adult store" sign while riding in the car and thinking that I can't wait until I am big enough to start wearing adult sized clothing instead of little kid sizes. My Mom had to gingerly explain that it was not that kind of store.

When I was a kid I thought the huge signs that hung up in stores like John Lewis said "Please play here", as opposed to "Please pay here". As a result I was always askinh my mum to let me go to the play area, and she'd ask where, and I'd point out the sign, and she'd laugh at me and tell me it didn't say that. Sometimes I'd believe her, then we'd walk to a different part of the shop, I'd see another sign, and I'd say "Can I go and play over then there please?"

Even now when I see the signs it makes me laugh.

When I was a kid I thought all newsagents/sweet shops in the UK were called "Benson & Hedges", because they were such a popular advertiser above such places. I used to ask my mum if we could go to Benson & Hedges to get sweets and she couldn't understand what I was talking about!

I used to believe that all those discounts for seniors were for high school and college seniors. I always wondered what they needed that they got so many discounts for. It took me a while to figure out they meant old people.

i used to believe that lowe's home improvement warehouse was a mayonaise factory

I used to believe that people give you money when they're actually giving you change. So once my mom said she was low on money while shopping, I asked her y dont you just ask the cashier guy over there?

For most of my childhood life (from birth to age 11) I lived in the area. My family always went to the same grocery store(a Kroger), so until I was about 6, I thought that everyone in my city went to Kroger for grocery shopping, so I was shocked when I went to kindergarden and found kids who went other places for groceries!

Up until I was about ten, I used to think that supermarkets could choose whatever name they wanted, like pubs. So, where a pub could be 'The Crown', 'The Anchor', 'The Queen's Head' or whatever, supermarkets could open and pretty much choose what they wanted, like 'Waitrose', 'Sainsbury's', 'Tesco's'. I couldn't work out why they only chose the same three or four names...

When my younger sister was just beginning to read, she would try to read all the signs she came across. In one of our favorite stores were dressing rooms bearing the sign "no more than 2 garments in dressing room at one time". She thought it read "no more than 2 grandmas in dressing room at one time" and was very concerned about what would happen to the 3rd grandma.

When I was younger I used to beleive the word 'pharmacy' was pronounced 'pyrima-cy'.

When i was 7 my Mum would stop the car to go into the Royal Bank of Scotland. Even though I knew I was in Bolton, England I thought that the branch must be in Scotland. I never resolved that problem until I realised the truth.

I used to always wonder why my clothes gets shorter within an year of buying it.Finally I came to a conclusion that if you remove the price tag from the dress,it would start diminishing in size every day.I did't realize it was I who was growing and the size of my dress remained constant.