I'll have to give up Waitrose. It's too exciting for me now

Waitrose in Towcester has closed down for a week to make what it describes as ‘a final few touches’ to an ‘exciting’ refurbishment. We will see just how exciting this is when the store reopens this weekend with its ‘improved customer toilets’, ‘improved café’, and so on. But forgive me for being a little sceptical, for normally the main effect of a supermarket ‘refurbishment’ is to disorient shoppers. Managements wait until customers such as myself have finally mastered the layout of the store and know where to find everything they need (something that can take a long time to achieve) and then suddenly they move everything around again.

It is difficult to understand why they should wish to test their customers’ patience in this way, but perhaps it’s because work in a supermarket would be unbearably boring without such periodic upheavals. I can’t imagine it’s much fun stacking products on the same shelves day after day, year after year; and the staff of Waitrose in Towcester (or ‘partners’, as they are called) seemed unusually lively and stimulated during the weeks of growing disruption prior to the closure.