Confessions of a Supermarket Hyena

It's always easy to tell when I have just been paid. The first shopping day after payday I go to the supermarket and buy the luxury catfood rather than the cheap stuff. It costs a whole twenty cents a can more and has words like "infused" on the label rather than "contains". I like to think the cat appreciates the occasional step up into a higher income bracket. In all likelihood what she is actually thinking is what a cheapskate I am three weeks out of the month.

Shopping during the week is annoying, I was in the supermarket at 5.30pm and the whole place looked as though it was about to close. The meat section smelled of chlorine, which didn't stop me buying some chops. If I turn green I know what happened. The vegetables looked very sad and the two carrots I picked up looked thoroughly miserable, although if I was facing the same fate I would look pretty miserable as well.

On the weekend the supermarket is a different place, there are people everywhere and the shelves bulge with goods. Shopping during the week I feel like a hyena that got called late to the kill. Other members of the pack have eaten all the good bits and I and one or two other outcasts of the hyena world are trying to salvage the few remaining edible bits.

Of course I could go shopping on the weekend like a normal person but I much prefer to do it during the week. I do all my housework during the week since I consider those five days as lost time anyway. This enables me to spend the bulk of my weekend in pleasant relaxation. The minor sacrifices I have to make in the way of healthy diet and the like I consider well worth the price.

The one thing I can always guarantee buying is catfood. It doesn't matter if my fellow hyenas are savaging each other to death for the last half dozen cracked, pseudo free range eggs, the cat food aisles are always generously stocked. They are one tiny little patch of plenty amidst the bleak wasteland of empty shelves, derelict cardboard boxes and time expired vegetables. My trolley lurches from one side of the empty aisle to another as I prowl, hopeless but desperate, in search of a skeleton not picked quite clean. From time to time I see another hyena similarly engaged but there is no cameraderie here. We are rivals for the same carcass from which all the marrow has already been sucked. We exchange glares of barely contained hostility and hurry on our way. Each of us knows we are but one trolley accident away from being prey ourselves and that none will mourn our loss.

That's how it goes when you're a hyena; nobody cares about the service we provide, cleaning up the unwanted bits and pieces so the shelves can hold gleaming fresh goods when they come shopping on Saturday. We slink from the empty dairy section to the barren pasta shelves trying to blend in with the tumbleweeds blowing through the store. Each of us is looking out for that one sparkling prize, that diamond among the dross. Something which unaccountably wasn't bought on Saturday or Sunday but is still good on Tuesday evening. It doesn't exist but still we keep looking like the followers of a religion who no longer believe but who dare not abandon their faith. Speaking for myself some of that catfood is starting to look pretty damn good.