Absurd Intellectual

If you’ve ever worked in a retail environment, you’ll know that a big part of the job is cleaning up the mess left by lazy customers. People will pick something up, look at it, put it in their cart, walk around the store for a bit, and then decide they don’t want to buy it, so they’ll drop it off — on a completely different shelf in a separate section of the store.

As a shopper, I don’t mind the little moments of serendipity that come from finding one thing burrowed among very different other things — it’s a reminder that human beings still exist, despite the global procurement chains of big-box megacorporations.

But now there’s a single-serving blog about the phenomenon. Spot a misplaced item on the shelves? Snap a picture and send it to Someone Else Will Put It Back (submit via email to [email protected]) and they’ll try to come up with an explanation of the thought process that was behind the juxtaposition.

Here are two of my favourites:

A carton of eggs on the Life-brand cereal shelf?

Eggs – Easter – the Easter bunny – rabbits – Welsh rarebit – Irvine Welsh – Trainspotting … so obviously they’ve led this shopper to choose Life.

Condoms and Malibu rum on the knife shelf?

This may pinpoint the precise second that someone gave up on the idea of a nice night in with a young lady and some booze, and decided to become a full-on sex-assaulter.

Touché.