BERELDANGE — A local grandmother has confirmed that she’s going to Cactus this weekend, ideally late Saturday afternoon when the supermarket is at its fullest.
Josette Urbany, 86, admits that although she could schedule her excursion for a quiet weekday morning when vastly fewer people go shopping, she enjoys using her slow movements and limited spacial awareness to infuriate a maximum number of younger, impatient shoppers.
“You’ve never had fun until you’ve parked a shopping cart sideways in the cheese aisle and created a backup that stretches all the way to the vegetable section,” she said. “And no matter how pissed off people get, nobody will ever say anything because they’re afraid of giving you a heart attack.”
Urbany says that she’s going to arrive around 3:30 p.m., just as the supermarket begins to fill to maximum capacity. She plans on staying for several hours, or at least until all of the stragglers and procrastinators have arrived.
“Those are the ones who hate shopping so much that they put it off till the end of the day,” she said. “Those are the ones who go from annoyed to psycho in about two seconds after they get stuck behind me when I stop to read all of the ingredients on a jar of pasta sauce.”
While Urbany usually enjoys Saturday shopping alone, this weekend she’ll be joined by two fellow grandmothers. Together, they hope to create a shopping cart traffic jam so large that if there were no ceiling, it would be visible from space.
“On my left, I’ll be flanked by Micheline [Hoffman], who suffers from severe osteoarthritis and poor eyesight, and consequently moves at about a quarter of a kilometer per hour,” Urbany said. “On my right, I’ll have Alice [Scholl], who uses a large motorized scooter that is rigged so it can’t go faster than a crawl.”
“It’s going to be beautiful,” she added.
