neighbourhood: going shopping

When i was about 5 yrs old me and my mother went shopping to Marks and Spencer and i was crying and screaming ( as we did when we shopping with our mothers )because i couldnt get my own way, then my mother turned around and told me that there was this child man hiding in this door in the corner of the shop and if he saw a child screaming he would come out and take me away and lock me up in this room until it was time to go home, i never cried shopping with my mother ever again.

When I got my feet measured by the electronic machine, I thought that the machine will squash my feet!

There is a department store in Edinburgh built on a hill with exits at the front and back, and you had to go up stairs to reach the back exit. However, they were labelled the "Princes Street level" and "Rose Street level" exits, and I used to look up or down whenever we left the store and wonder where the other level was, because I could never see it...

Ya know how kids just love to stand up in the shopping cart and the mom always tells the to sit down? Well after my mom telling me that if I didn't sit down, the cops would come to get me, and not 2 seconds later, I heard a siren...I didn't move an inch

I used to belive that when shops closed at the end of the day, the shopkeeper took all the things off the shelves and took them home... only to bring them back the next morning and put them back again.

When I was about 5, my mom and I would go to the mall. We loved to have our pictures taken at the little booths. I asked my mom how we were able to get pictues from the booth. Her reply was..There is a little man inside who paints your picture, then sends it out through the slot. I would bang on the booth and yell at the little man to hurry up with our pictures. My mom would crack up laughing and paaer bys would have very strange looks on their faces. I believed this until I was about 9. Thanks Mom. *grin*

when I was a child I couldn't figure out for the life of me why in the world anyone would go to a flea market.Why would you want to buy fleas?Unless of course they were talented as those who worked in flea circuses!I believed this until the age of 12!!

When I lived in Texas as a small child, there was a grocery store called Gerland's. Whenever my dad went to "Girl Lands" I thought that was where he went to pick up girls!

I believed when I was a child that a man lived in the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket (on top of the sign) and he was always chasing his furniture while it kept turning.

My mother would put quaters into the shopping carts at Superstore. For a period of a couple of years, the Canadian Mint put out a new batch of coins each month with a special design on them. You were supposed to collect them and my mom did. She never let me put any of the coins with special designs into the shopping cart slots because she belived that you didn't get the same quater back. I once spent an afternoon convincing her that the quater you put in was the quater you got back. She still doesn't belive me.

I used to think that people who worked in supermarkets lived upstairs from the shop. I thought that they were really lucky because if they ever forgot to buy something, like a tin of beans, they could just pop downstairs and get it.

My Mother used to play games (more for her benefit) with me when I was young. She used to tell me that store mannequins were actually real, live people who were paid to stand still all day and model clothing. She used to tell me to go and talk to them while she shopped because they get lonely. So, here I was, 3 or 4 years old, talking to mannequins all the time. When I asked her why they never talked back, she simply replied, "Well, they will get fired, they're not allowed to." Love ya' Mom!

When i was 5 or 6 or something I was convinced that if you did not have enough money for something that the shop keeper would not only give you the item but would also hand over the money your were short of. It wasn't until the nice lady in the sweet shop explained it to me that that wasn't what getting change was about. And that had to happen in the first time i went out with just my younger brother and myself. Embarrassing or what! ... Hmm, that may explain my aversion to capitalism in later life.

The supermarket my mother frequented placed the Wise potato chips on the bottom shelf.
As a preschooler I used to run down the chip aisle in fear because I believed that the eye on every single bag of Wise potato chips was staring at me.
I believed that they wanted to "get me."

My sister would always bring a lunch size bag of potato chips whenever we went to a department store. She didn't eat them herself, she would feed them to the mannequins. She believed that they came to life after the store was closed and they were relying on children to leave some food behind because adults did not know they were alive.

In the parking lot of the shopping mall once, my mother and I were talking and my younger sisters (aged 2 and 3 at the time) were in the backseat complaining loudly that they wanted to leave. So my mother told them that if they didn't behave those people coming out of the mall, the *mall people* were going to come and take them away.

It became very easy from that point on to discipline my little sisses. We would just tell them, "Don't make me call the mall people!" This did, however, cause them to be afraid of shopping malls for many years.