Following our previous culinary incident in which I was made to feel guilty for a cock-up in the restaurant kitchen, we thought that we would get our next meal from Livingstone’s Shoprite supermarket. I needed a break from the drunk, near-violent Angolan gemstone-smuggler who caught me off-guard as I was trying to buy underwear in a clothes store. (He was thrown out of the shop by security, promising to wait for me outside, and we were escorted to the supermarket by a fellow clothes-shopper.)

Our perennial favourite travel-cheese, Laughing Cow, was approaching it’s use-by date in-store and so had been discounted.* After all our other items had been beeped through at the checkout, our assistant looked up:

“I’m sorry for you”, she offered.
“Umm. Ok. Thanks. Sorry, why are you sorry?”, I quizzed.
“I’m sorry about the cheese.”
“It’s OK, we know it’s near its use-by date. That’s why it’s discounted.”
“No, I mean I’m sorry, you can’t buy it.”
“Umm. Really? Why not?”, I was confused.
“The manager is on lunch.”
“O…k… but what does [i]that[i] matter?”
“He is on lunch so you can’t buy the cheese.”

It turns out that if a product is discounted, the manager must authorise the discount at the checkout. Presumably to avoid ne’er-do-wells from moving discount stickers to other [non-discounted] foodstuffs. Makes sense. What does not make sense, however, is the fact that there is no deputy manager or anyone else in the building with the ability authorise the sale of the discounted cheese.

Squiffy put the cat amongst the pigeons:

“That’s ok. We’ll just wait here [at the checkout, holding-up the queue] for the manager to finish his lunch.”

We got our cheese and, boy, did it taste of small victory.

* Why is Laughing Cow our favourite travel-cheese? It’s because it doesn’t need to be refrigerated. Spanish supermarkets don’t bother putting it in the fridge. Morocco doesn’t even have fridges, or supermarkets for that matter. Makes you wonder just how much [perishable] cheese is actually inside a Laughing Cow triangle, doesn’t it?