Status: 15.10.2023, 21:19 PM
By: Anna Laura Müller
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After all, they do exist: the person from the arithmetic problem who buys huge quantities. A supermarket customer discovered it. And she's not the only one.
Munich – There are quite a few curious snapshots of everyday observations while shopping on the Internet. A recording takes users on the Internet directly back to childhood. Because a supermarket customer discovered the "woman from the math book" on the queue at the checkout and without further ado posted a photo of it on the Internet.
"Mrs. Meyer buys 30 kilos of strawberries, 15 litres of milk and 22 kilos of bananas in the supermarket. How heavy will their shopping bags be on the way home?" Such or similar arithmetic exercises still evoke memories of their school days for many adults today. After all, who doesn't remember the absurd word problems in the math book, in which the protagonists buy masses of food and in which everyone present wondered with reference to reality who should ever consume these quantities.
Customer discovers woman from the math book at the supermarket checkout
But a user on platform X (formerly Twitter) has now probably found exactly this one person and recorded his encounter in a post. There is a picture of a woman in front of him in line. Her whole shopping cart is full of broccoli and there are already countless heads of lettuce on the checkout belt next to her; probably also their yield. He writes: "I met the woman from the math book in the supermarket". And the user also has a guess as to what the customer wants to do with the huge amount of vegetables. "Delicious broccoli casserole," he commented under his own post.
Pictures like these always cause amusement on the net, so there are countless posts with photos of observations like this one: a car loaded to the ceiling with watermelons, a shopping cart filled only with bananas or overflowing baskets full of fruit. All of them captioned with captions such as "Math books are written about such people" or "I found the guy who was in our elementary school math book."
Sold only in normal household quantities
In real life, however, the "customers from the math book" could well fail at the checkout. This is because supermarkets have the right to sell their goods only in so-called normal household quantities. What many may have remembered as upper limits for hoarding purchases during the Corona pandemic has long been in the form of small print in the brochures of many markets. But supply bottlenecks also repeatedly lead to rationing of products, such as sunflower oil.
In principle, however, according to the consumer advice centre, there is no clear definition behind the reference to the sale of normal household quantities. It always depends on the individual case. Whether the customer's huge pile of broccoli from the net find is considered customary for the checkout staff is therefore a matter of discretion. And for how many people you could cook casserole from it is then a calculation problem for the slightly higher classes. (alm
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