Supermarket Detective

You need to be sharp and alert in Supermarkets.  Rows upon rows of wrapped up convenience, all battling for our attention and all the while, us ailing shoppers are faced with the ultimately banal (yet fiendishly complex) riddle of whether it's more cost effective to buy a 2 litre carton of Tropicana or two one litre ones from an other brand. 

 Sometimes, you will find evidence of a previous customer finding a more cost effective deal for a similar item, say, for instance, in the manner of a discarded 8 pack of Tesco Everyday Value sausage rolls, flung next to an 8 pack of Tesco Finest Lincolnshire Sausage Rolls which happen to be on offer.  In these instances I take on a Jonathon Creek persona and in my head I begin to create a physical and mental profile of the sort of pasty faced twat that would consider Every Day Value sausage rolls in the first place.

 But sometimes the discarded items can really throw you, and you have to use your best detective skills in order to understand the circumstances in which the evidence came about. It can force you to make some informed guesses as to why a Fleetwood Mac - Hits Album can be found with the Unsmoked Gammon Steaks at Lidl in Braintree, Essex.

Meatwood Mac

As you can see in the above photograph, the offender has placed a compact disc containing 'The Hits' of Fleetwood Mac in an area ear-marked solely for pork-based items.  One is left to imagine what sort of tyrant would behave in this manner, but through informed guesses it is possible to come to some conclusions...

Let's firstly imagine the demographic shopping at Lidls, and furthermore the sub-demographic that would also consider buying a Fleetwood Mac album.

• General demographic of Lidl: Frugal, low earning, Eastern European.

• General demographic of Fleetwood Mac CD buyer: Ageing, out of touch, wears Sketchers.

After combining these two demographics i decided the likely offender was the late Pope John Paul II.

Having conclusively worked out that the perpetrator was in fact the recent Bishop of Rome and the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church, the next step was working out WHY he had resurrected and had placed the Fleetwood Mac album upon a box of gammon.

I have come to two possible conclusions:

1. It is a divine gesture - symbolically representative of how western christianity must improve relations with Islam and the east. The pork is an obvious symbol of the conflict, i.e. Islam's forbidden consumption of pork compared to western ideologies that pork is well good.  The Fleetwood Mac album, however, is a symbol of peace, harmony and freedom - note the bird adorning the cover of the album, soaring freely - and symbolizes what can be achieved between the two if they learn to co-operate.
2. He couldn't be fucked to put the album back in the proper place because he had a revelation that Fleetwood Mac are a bit wank and he prefers Razorlight anyway.

Take a look at another piece of evidence i documented on a visit to Waitrose in Brighton, East Sussex.

Crazy in the Coconut

This time the offender has not only discarded a solitary coconut, but also the carrying basket!

I will let you detectives decide the culprit for yourself and the reasons behind this deplorable behaviour! *


*CCTV footage later proved the culprit to be Calvin Harris, who swiftly dropped his entire weekly shop due to his irrational fear of Quavers.