One door temporarily closes, another door opens

My supermarket constantly makes me furious – I had to stop shopping there for a few months when they introduced new trolleys that needed a pound coin to unlock them. I felt criminalised, it goes against all the principles of innocent until proven guilty that underpin the fundamentals of our legal system. It shook my relationship with Sainsbury’s – how can they even want me as a customer if they suspect I’m only there to pilfer the wheels? Plus I never have any loose change on me. Mrs Burnett got me a little token to put in the trolleys, but I keep forgetting it.

I spent those few months shopping at another local branch of Sainsbury’s, but it was a different class of customer (far more likely to steal trolleys in that one, and yet they still managed to dish them out for free) and I couldn’t find anything anywhere. To be fair, I can never find anything in my regular supermarket because they keep moving things round. Either they’re massively indecisive or they do it deliberately so you can’t shop too quickly. Either way it’s intensely irritating.

Smash cut to this afternoon, where I park in my usual spot (otherwise I lose the car, I can never remember where I’ve left it) and make my way inside. The door does not open. I spy a sign, which says ‘This door is temporarily closed’. Well of course, it’s a door. All doors are temporarily closed, otherwise they would be walls. Indeed the whole point and essential nature of a door is that it closes temporarily.

What they needed to communicate was that this door would be closed for slightly longer than you might expect, to the extent that it would be more expeditious to use the next door several metres down. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to explain that this door is temporarily not opening. But why even bother with a sign? How long is anyone going to stand in front of an automatic door before giving up? If I didn’t know any better I’d assume it was some sort of retail-based psyop. To what end? To make me furious. A genius move, because I’m still thinking about Sainsbury’s hours later.