The woman who is the only character in this commercial is standing in the medicine aisle, filling her basket with one box after another of Tylenol. I think she ends up with about eight boxes of the stuff in there, before the disembodied voice so popular in ads like this intones "you can get the same relief from one Advil (All Day Long, All Day Strong) as with EIGHT Tylenol...."
She then proceeds to do something that would probably not set me off if I had not spent four years working at a Wegman's Grocery Store: she puts her basket, still filled with boxes of Tylenol, right down on the floor, and walks away, carrying her one bottle of Advil.
I know people like this woman, and worse. I worked in the Dairy Department at a Wegman's in Cheektowaga, New York back in the early-90s. I saw seniors open 1-lb boxes of butter so they could remove one quarter- even if there were already boxes open from the last band of marauding "I buy butter one stick at a time" old farts to pass by. I saw people open cartons of eggs, find one broken one among the dozen, and then carefully close the cartons and put them back right where they found them- so the next customer could find the broken eggs, I guess. I saw drooling hick morons take gallons of milk off the shelf, decide they didn't want them, and leave them on the floor to spoil (or WORSE- attempt to put them back on another shelf, causing a gallon already sitting there to fall backwards into the refrigerated stocking area, creating a huge puddle for John in Dairy to clean up.) I saw worthless Please Die In a Horrible Accident on the Way Back to the Trailer Park bottom-feeders prove utterly incapable of taking a container of yogurt off the shelf without spilling two onto the cooling grate at their feet.
And I saw many, many, MANY clueless, indecisive, ADD-addled morons move through the store, picking items off of one shelf and dropping them on a random shelf with each mood swing.
Look, I get that stores these days are big, scary, complicated things. I understand that the choices offered are enormous and bewildering, especially for people with IQs roughly equalling that of brain-damaged lemmings. Sometimes, people think they want to buy something, change their minds, and just don't have the time or energy to go ALL THE WAY back to the correct aisle to return it. But GOD DAMN IT, this woman is STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO THE SHELF. Is it really too much to ask that she PUT THE MEDICINE BACK and RETURN HER BASKET TO THE FRONT OF THE STORE??
Ok-- I'm calmed down now. I'll just leave you with three additional thoughts which ran through my head while suffering Wegman's flashbacks:
1. Is the woman in this commercial stocking medicine for a bomb shelter? Before she realized that 1 Advil = 8 Tylenol, was she really planning to buy what looks to be two decades' worth of pain medication?
2. If this woman really needs to take this much medication, shouldn't she, maybe, check with her doctor?
3. If I was the cashier at a grocery store and this woman plopped down eight boxes of Tylenol, I'd call a manager. I don't know what powerful hallucinogens can be extracted from large amounts of Tylenol, but I'd be convinced she had some form of meth lab off the basement rec room. Or in the bomb shelter.
The seniors bought butter one stick at a time because they grew up in the age of the icebox, when dairy was bought in small batches every morning from the milkman. They probably lived alone, and thought it would be really weird to buy a lot of butter at once like that. It would be like you or me buying bread eight loaves at a time. (Although, they still shoudn't have opened a new box if there was already one open.)
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