Man-Rule: Don't Play Games at the Supermarket

I don't know how things work at your house, but in ours we have to visit the supermarket  (or grocery store, or corner market, or whatever you want to call it) about once every three hours. In our household, we have a 17-year-old, a 12-year-old, and a six-year-old, all of whom can Hoover their way through $100 worth of groceries without breaking a sweat. Add on to that a 48-year-old (me) who has the magical ability to make pints of ice cream disappear, and it means that we've single-handedly funded the building of at least three new Publix stores.

As a caring and sensitive husband who has very specific ice-cream tastes ("You got BLUE BUNNY? WHY?"), I frequently make these pilgrimages to the store myself. And because I'm a soft touch when it comes to letting the boys get a free cookie from the bakery ("Dad, can we get a cookie?" "Did you eat your supper?" "Well, I looked at it a long time." "Okay, but just one."), the two youngest often go with me.

It's not easy to keep two boys entertained when you're grocery shopping. They keep wanting to push the grocery cart into the shelves (not on purpose), or "read" the shopping list ("It says we need Oreos and Soft Batch cookies"), or ask questions that can't be answered ("Doesn't that fat guy know that buying all those chips is bad for him?"). I must admit, at times I have been tempted to distract the boys by playing games in the store. As a Man, you must resist this temptation, because from what I understand (and this is NOT based on personal experience), store personnel can get quite antsy about it.

Let me give you some examples of games you should NOT play in a grocery store:

Jenga

You probably remember this game from your childhood, when your parents bought it in a vain attempt to pry you away from video games. In Jenga, you spend roughly 37 hours stacking little blocks of wood into a tower, and then two minutes pulling out some of the blocks until the tower falls down. Fun city!

There are a number of Jenga-like constructs all over a grocery store. Sometimes you'll see stacks of Nilla Wafer boxes, or Cheez-It crackers, or canned goods, or cereals, or ... if you're lucky ... creative displays of 

soft-drink containers:

It is very, VERY tempting to tell the boys "Go see how many of those boxes you can pull out before the display comes crashing down", but you shouldn't do that. Not even when they're arguing over who got the bigger free cookie.

Bowling

The way our Publix is laid out, the last aisle we go down in our shopping trips is the soft-drink aisle. This usually means we've been in the store about 30 minutes, and the boys have long since lost any interest in grocery shopping and are on the verge of climbing the shelves and leaping, ape-like, from aisle-top to aisle-top. When we hit the soft-drink aisle, I've often considered quickly emptying several two-liter drinks, setting them up in a triangle, and giving the boys a cantaloupe or a head of lettuce to see how many pins they can knock down. So far I've resisted this impulse. And believe me, if I can resist it, you can too.

Baseball

Remember when Garrett Morris played retired Dominican baseball player Chico Escuela on Saturday Night Live? Of course you don't, because you're only 25 years old and you have the attention span of a fruit fly. Anyway, Chico's catch phrase, spoken in a heavy Hispanic accent, was "Besbol been bery, bery good to me."

If you're a Man trying to entertain your children in the supermarket, besbol will not be bery bery good to you. Let us say, completely hypothetically, that you're in the process of buying some apples (or plums, or Vidalia onions, or mangoes, or anything semi-round in shape). And let us also say, again completely hypothetically, that you decide to pretend to throw the coconut or kiwi fruit or whatever like a baseball pitcher, complete with wind-up and a glance at first to hold the runner, to your 12-year-old.

If you were to do this, your 12-year-old AND your six-year old could decide that if DAD can do this, THEY certainly can as well. Hypothetically. And whereas you, as a former Little League pitcher, might still have outstanding control over your hypothetical mango fastball, the boys might not possess this same level of skill, and you might wind up apologizing to the produce manager and assorted Publix patrons for the pelting they received from your miniature Nuke Lalooshes.

So there you go ... three games you shouldn't play at the supermarket if you want to be a Man. I'm sure there are many other examples of games you shouldn't play at the supermarket -- two that spring to mind immediately are darts and field hockey -- but I don't have time to write about them now.

We're out of ice cream, and I have to go to the store.

(c) 2014 John Puckett 

The Man Rules: Not available in any supermarket!

That's right: As hard as it is to believe, the only book in existence that outlines the top 50 Rules guys must follow to become Men is NOT available at your local supermarket! When our crack marketing team contacted the owners of the top 84 supermarket chains in the U.S., not only did they refuse to carry the book, but 73 of them threatened legal action against us if we ever called them again. So the only way you, an aspiring Man, can own this book is by clicking the cover image below. Click today, and buy the book! We only need to sell another 999,989 to reach our goal of one million copies sold!