Strays

One of the occasionally amusing things about working in a grocery store is finding stray items. Ice cream left melting on a table, a piece of fruit carried from one end of the store to the other before being abandoned. Things that people changed their mind about buying and couldn't be bothered to put them back where they belong.

I work in the bakery department, so it's particularly interesting to find non-food items, like an umbrella or a magazine, next to the muffins and danish. Sometimes I decide to return items, so the other day I went to put a Teen Bop magazine back. It had Taylor Lautner and Justin Beiber on the cover so I was looking for one that matched. After realizing there were at least eight different teen mags with pictures of those two, I narrowed my search to include covers that also featured Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez. The search was not narrowed. Apparently all magazines for teens use the same collage formula. But I digress.

The most surprising strays I've found were two pregnancy tests, of different brands. Imagine, someone goes to the store thinking they're pregnant, picks out two different tests to be sure, and then abandons them in the bakery department, presumably to drown their troubles in chocolate cake! So I opened up my cake decoration book to the "Welcome Baby" section and slid it over right next to the pregnancy tests sitting on my counter. ;)