HAVE you noticed how over the years supermarkets have become larger and larger, selling more products and providing more services, so that now there is almost no connection with the sort of place where you used to go to get fresh food, canned goods and some fruits and vegetables. And with each increase in size, the name has changed, so that it is no longer enough to call the place a supermarket. After all, originally it was just that - a market that was, much more than a market, that was, well, ‘super.' Just like Superman and all the other superheroes. But now in the age of ‘jumbo'-this and ‘mega'-that, ‘super' is not enough, so we have hypermarkets, and I suppose in the future there will be ‘cosmo'- or ‘astro'-markets as well. Whatever you call them, they certainly are large, with sky high ceilings and aisles wide enough to drive a small car through. And of course there is a reason for that. They have increased the size of the shopping carts so much that you now often see an older sister pushing a cart with three or four of her younger siblings in it while her mother has another enormous cart which she is filling with enough food to feed a small army. The shopping carts are not only wider and longer but are growing higher as well, and they will soon have to provide short people with special shoes so that they can reach the top. And, who knows, if necessity is the mother of fashion, this might put platform shoes back on next season's catwalks. At my super (or whatever) market they actually have shopping carts like small autos. Your young ones can pretend they are driving their car while you are piling up the goods in the basket on top. The only problem is that the car, complete with steering wheel and room enough for a medium sized child, takes up a lot of the space which would otherwise be occupied by the basket. In fact, the basket is not nearly large enough for those who have come to shop until they drop, so a mother is often forced to push along the car cart with her child at the bottom with one hand and with the other steer a huge shopping cart. Of course the next logical step is to have real autos, some sort of golf cart type machine, with baskets being pulled behind. But that would require even larger markets with much wider aisles. I wonder how many years we will have to wait before we see that? As it is, the size of the markets can be daunting, and family members can get separated and even lost; but of course, only temporarily, because these days every family member has at least one mobile phone. In the old days, in the marketplace people used to chat with one another. Women would comment on the freshness or lack thereof of the fruits and vegetables, on special offers that they had seen at another shop, or on recipes that they had recently tried. Today there is just as much chatting going on, but most of it is directed into the mobile phone. We have all overheard people (men usually) standing befuddled in front of a shelf and asking someone on the other end of a mobile, “Which one am I supposed to get? Is that the green one?” And speaking of mobile phones, when mangoes where recently in season, I saw a very large man in the supermarket tottering over an enormous display of the luscious fruit. He was using one shoulder to pin a small mobile phone to his ear so that he could talk to someone while he was using both hands to fill a plastic bag full of fat mangoes, all the while reaching over the huge stand of fruit to pluck the most delectable mangoes which were, to his eyes, clearly at the very top. Meanwhile, his conversation was becoming a bit animated, and he was trying to make use of non-verbal gestures, mango in one hand, plastic bag full of mangoes in the other, shoulder pinned to his ear, to demonstrate how incredible he found whatever it was that he was hearing. I had to stop for a minute to see how this balancing act would work out, but he came through it all like a seasoned circus performer, which perhaps he was. Really, You have to laugh. __
