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Horror stories of customers with no manners from Berkeley's best market
Click to read the whole story, I'm just excerpting the examples of behavior that I consider outrageous, but that Berkeley residents consider as normal.
As most veteran customers know, it takes a pretty thick skin to successfully navigate the Berkeley Bowl, this strident city's most popular grocery store.

Outside, petitioners seeking signatures for ballot measures have come to blows with opinionated residents. In the tiny parking lot, nicknamed the Berkeley Brawl, frustrated motorists have been known to ram one another's cars. At the checkout, people have thrown punches and unripened avocados at suspected line-cutters.

When one shopper was told she couldn't return a bag of granola, she showily dumped its contents on the floor. Culyon Garrison, who works at the customer-service desk, recently had a loaf of bread thrown at him.

The produce emporium -- one of the nation's most renowned retailers of exotic fruits and vegetables -- creates its own bad behavior. Kamikaze shoppers crash down crowded aisles without eye contact or apology for fender-benders. So many customers weren't waiting to pay before digging in that management imposed the ultimate deterrent: Those caught sampling without buying will be banned for life -- no reprieves, no excuses. (Not even "I forgot to take my medication.")

Store manager Larry Evans says the policy is a fair response to doctors, lawyers and college professors who help themselves to bags of cookies, nuts and vitamins, stick their fingers in pies and guzzle from bottles of sake, assuming the rules don't apply to them.

"There's a sense of entitlement to this town," Evans said. "People think, 'If I want to do it, I'll do it, just try and stop me.' "
You mean that The Rules apply to everyone but ME, and I'M a beautiful, precious, unique snowflake?
Seven years on the job, he said, has given him insight into the city's sometimes sharp social elbows. "Berkeley residents are angry -- they're mad at the president, the economy, all kinds of stuff. And this is the place where it seems to get released, the local supermarket."
What a bunch of jerks.
Each morning, the early birds wait in line for the Berkeley Bowl to open. Then the rush is on -- the elbowing and scrambling to reach the shelves of reduced-price produce that can be bought in bulk. The scene is so madcap, the store used to play the "Call to the Post" theme used in horse racing. Now management enforces a no-running policy -- because when Berkeley switches into hunter-gatherer mode, things can quickly get out of hand.
What the hell is this, pizza day at an elementary school? It is barbarous behavior.
The Internet site Yelp, where customers review restaurants and other stores, has hundreds of entries about the Bowl. One writer said weekends were the craziest, when "you don't wander through the aisles as much as hack through the underbrush of nose rings and cloth shopping bags with a machete, only to count the minutes you creep closer to death at the checkout line."
This is just like shopping in a Chinese store, except less civilized. Elbowing people out of the way is NOT the way that normal people behave, it's behavior of savages.
But other things get pointed out too. Your cart is at the wrong angle. You didn't replace that apple where you found it. Tell your child to stop playing with that plastic bag -- it's a choking hazard. One customer said he thinks he's come up with the perfect city bumper sticker: "Welcome to Berkeley: Now please stop doing that!"
Surprise, surprise - liberals like to mind other people's business.
Once, caterer Francisco Machado was at the checkout, talking on his cellphone, when he got a shoulder tap. "I made a remark to a friend, 'Dude, this place is a meat market!' And the guy behind me took offense. He started shouting that what I said was really sexist," Machado recalled. "He wouldn't let it go. I finally had to turn around and say, 'Mind your own business.' "
Thought police.
On a recent day, shopper Jean Sirius, a local editor, was standing in the produce section explaining the store culture. "There is a goddess Oblivion, and she has many devotees who shop here," she said. But before she could say more, a male shopper in a sweat suit removed his iPod earphones and barked: "Hey, you've been taking up space there for too long! Why don't you move aside so the rest of us can do some shopping?"

Michael Pollan, author of the best-selling book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," is a Bowl regular who calls the store one of his top three places to buy food in the world. Still, he knows there's easier shopping.

One time, Pollan was picking out a box of cereal for his daughter when a fellow shopper interrupted him. "He said, 'I'm watching Michael Pollan shop for groceries,' " Pollan recalled. "There was this note of disappointment that I was buying Fruity Pebbles. Berkeley is full of hall monitors. It's a small town, and people are looking into each other's baskets."
This is EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS TO ME IN CHINA. People peer curiously into my basket, to see what the foreigner is buying. These days, it is much less common, and the only people who peer into my basket are HICKS FROM THE COUNTRYSIDE. The ordinary city people couldn't care less - and the Berkeleyites are upholding the same standard of behavior as Chinese people with no manners.
Posted by: gromky 2008-09-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=250785