Meet the shopping spoilers who are bound to ruin your day at the supermarket

Buying groceries is painful enough at the best of times, but there’s no bigger deterrent than the obnoxious aisle clogger and desperate milk diver. Here are the nine not so ‘super’ supermarkets types you need to spot a mile away and, most importantly, avoid becoming.

Here are the nine not so ‘super’ supermarkets that make you pull your hair out.

Supermarkets are hives of contradiction.

Just as the Mexican food is kept in the Asian food section, so can a five-minute trip become an hour-long ordeal in an emporium seemingly beyond time and human reason.

Here are nine fellow aisle dwellers you might come across in the supermarket.

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GRAPE BANDIT

Imagine if every shopper ate two grapes every time they went to the supermarket.

Imagine 500 people did it at each supermarket every day.

That’s 7000 grapes a week per store — millions of grapes and countless riches lost every year.

This culinary kleptomaniac, the bane of every supermarket manager, is a blight on the economy.

Whenever the grape bandit is spotted, they should be met with a glare akin to God’s final judgment.

Diving into the back of the milk fridge are as savvy as those who dig for change in the couch.

MILK DIVER

Reaching so far into the milk fridge that you’d expect them to fall into Narnia, the milk diver is on an Arthurian quest to find the best use-by date.

Never mind those suckers who get stuck with the milk at the front that won’t last as long.

Once the milk with the best longevity is plucked from the coldest corner, the milk diver holds it aloft and proceeds to fruit and veg, where apples at the bottom of the pile are also thought to have inflated merit.

AISLE CLOGGER

Like blood through arteries, the free movement of people through supermarket aisles is vital to the system.

Disregarding that principle, and civility, is the aisle clogger.

Somehow managing to get a trolley sideways across a passageway already made narrow by a pillar or service cart, the clogger, usually of considerable girth themselves, is deaf to the calls of fellow shoppers to get out of the way.

Not until the right tinned fish for their many cats has been selected will the clogger even think about recognising the inconvenience caused to others.

They are also the most likely to push in at the deli.

Beware the grape bandit!

ONION MASTERMIND

If you run fruit and veg through as brown onions you’ll save money by effectively stealing.

But that’s just the start.

How about taking two items of equal weight and scanning the cheapest one twice so the scales can’t tell the difference?

How about cutting out a barcode from a cheap item at home, keeping it in the palm of your hand and pretending to scan expensive stuff while the machine makes a bloop noise and the staff don’t notice?

The price war is not enough.

The onion mastermind must get cheap groceries even damn cheaper and they’re not afraid to break the law to do it.

TROLLEY GHOST

It’s tough being a supermarket shopper.

Not only does it demand the physical exertion needed to push the trolley around the store, but when you’re finished, you have to take it a whole 15m back to the trolley return bay.

Fifteen metres!

For the trolley ghost, that’s an unrealistic expectation. They’ve simply had enough. No more. Where the trolley sits in the car park, so it will rest.

Along nature strips they stand and on the bottom of river beds they lie: monuments to human laziness.

Beware the avocado squeezer — who can’t resist touch-testing every avo in sight.

WANDERER

Seen at one time walking with purpose without a trolley or basket, intending for this to be a short shop while parked in a 15-minute zone, this shopper can be spotted 20 minutes later is a daze.

Overwhelmed by an abundance and affordability of food, and a string of dinner ideas that chase each other’s tails, the wanderer is condemned to stalk the shelves waiting for a silver bullet meal idea that might never arrive.

A parking ticket awaits outside.

AVOCADO SQUEEZER

If those avocados weren’t mushy before this iron-fingered shopper started their workout, they certainly will be afterwards.

Known to loiter until every piece of fruit has been handled, the avocado squeezer is, in their own mind, a mix of scientist and artist.

How firm is too firm? How soft is too soft? Is the avocado going to sit in the fruit bowl for a couple of days, or is it for this afternoon?

The squeezer can often be mistaken for their many impersonators who, while choosing an avocado, give a half-hearted poke to a few of them to look like they know what they’re doing.

Taking the trolley 15m back to the trolley return bay is just to hard for some.

SELF CHECKOUT DUNCE

Having abandoned technological development some time around Windows 93, this shopper, often of retirement age, is ill equipped for the automated world.

Missing barcodes, putting items in the wrong place, mucking up with the touchscreen.

For the number of times the green light goes on and the teenage assistant has to go and pull him out of a hole, he might as well have gone to the staffed checkout.

But no.

The self checkout dunce would never forego an opportunity to get aggro and complain about how there’s no proper service these days.

Just wait until he finds out he has to pay for the bag.

BANDWAGON OF SCREAMS

Heaped with Coco Pops, Le Snak and toilet paper, and pushed by a mother at the very edge of human endurance, this trolley is loaded with three children screaming with the power of eight.

Chucking stuff out, pulling stuff in, opening packets, dribbling on fruit.

This mobile cacophony, like a tornado, carves mayhem in its line of travel.

It continues through the checkout and to the car park where the SES needs to be called just to get them in the car.

@MitchellToy