A bridge too far in store

IT was disappointing to see a sign saying "Weak Bridge" just before crossing the Thames at Hammersmith

IT was disappointing to see a sign saying "Weak Bridge" just before crossing the Thames at Hammersmith. It seemed only too accurate a prediction of what I was going to play when I got to the card party. But in fact it was saying that the edifice wasn't too sound, so only a certain number of vehicles could cross at [one time.

This caused incredible delays and a monstrous display of bad temper as those travelling to the city realised they would be late for the theatre and would miss the first act, while those of us leaving it realised we would be not only be hopeless at playing "three no trumps" but we would be late as well.

It seemed to me that the normally courteous London drivers who used to have a pleasing if unfamiliar habit of staying in their own lane had become unhinged by all this. They were jabbing [the noses of their cars everywhere and making rude finger signs and even winding down their windows and shouting things like "Ger off the road you fumbling old geriatric" to the mild-mannered and fortunately unstressed taxi driver.

He said you got a lot of it nowadays. He worked 13 hours a day to bring his retirement forward to the age of 58. He said he thought about this all the time and smiled to himself, which drove the shouting brigade madder still.

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At the bridge table, mercifully, everyone was so obsessed by the desperate traffic and the downturn in any kind of civilised behaviour on the roads that we didn't have that depressing moment when good players realise that they are playing with poor players. But far worse than road rage, they told me, was a new phenomenon called "store rage" - had I not noticed it? It was people taking each other by the throat and using implements on each other in shops.

I THOUGHT they were joking, but no, it was true. The British Retail Consortium, with its headquarters in Fulham High Street, is now so concerned about the number of incidents in shops where violence is used against members of staff - or, indeed, against fellow shoppers - that it has asked the government to step in and help tackle the situation.

This week training videos and manuals are being shown to staff all over the country trying to tell them how to defuse the situations that will so often arise. People are becoming more and more violent when they are faced with long queues at checkouts.

There have been many reported stories about the Croydon woman who was so annoyed with a man for queue jumping that she broke a bottle of wine over his head, injured him seriously and is in jail for it.

So-called "ordinary robbery" is responsible for only 10 per cent of violence in shops, the consortium says, but about another 15 per cent is put down to "rowdy troublemakers".

Verbal abuse, indecent exposure, spitting drunks and drug addicts make up another large section. But there is a staggering number of store rage incidents caused by ordinary people like yourself and myself who set out to find no aggro, but only want to go into a shop and buy the supper and end up in fisticuffs with someone.

Figures like that, issued by the British Retail Consortium, not known to be alarmists, would sober you somehow and make you watchful. I was getting some vegetables and saw a possible Situation developing. A woman was lovingly rubbing the tomatoes over, testing their firmness, and then apparently rejecting all of them. A man waiting with his basket watched disapprovingly.

"Don't you want to get your nails into a few more before you leave them for the rest of us?" he asked.

I don't know how it ended because to be frank I moved far, far away - stories of how incensed customers had beaten innocent bystanders with baskets fresh in my mind. It's people or lack of people that drive shoppers mad, apparently. It's rarely the quality or the price of the goods. Goods can be exchanged, replaced or refunded, but people are another thing.

And of course it's usually the management's fault: greedy employers who don't put in enough check-out desks, because once they have the customers trapped with full baskets, then they have to wait, don't they? Cautious employers who don't want to employ a proper full-time staff and look after them, but take on part-timers whom they underpay and certainly have no time to train. Employers who are not on the floor when red-faced customers shout that they have been here for 25 minutes and how much more are they expected to wait?

MICHELLE works in a supermarket in West London. She says they were shown one of these videos this week. A lot of it was just common sense, it was about smiling at the customer and being sympathetic, and it tried to explain why so many people who came into the shop were bad tempered. They might have got a parking ticket. Lucky old them to have a car to park, Michelle says good-naturedly.

People have changed in the way they live: fewer now are part of families - they live in what are called individual units; maybe they don't have a background of tolerance, and so they take things out on a shopkeeper. She says sure, could be.

It doesn't matter all that much to Michelle. She's young, she's saving to go to Australia. Mostly people are OK. Some of them are sods and they're probably sods everywhere - at work, on the Underground in the pub. Of course you smile at them, you don't cross those kinds of people anywhere.

Once somebody warns you about something you look out for it. It makes you timid.

"Are you very busy or could I possibly discuss a couple of videos with you?" I asked the man in Video City. He beamed with pleasure at the thought and, after a five-minute analysis of what I had liked in the past, triumphantly produced Bullets Over Broadway.

I thought that it must be nice to work in a leisure activity place like this, where Store Rage never entered into things. Then I heard voices raised at the door - a drunk was annoyed because he wasn't being allowed in.

"Pleash," he said "I just want to hold the video of Singing in the Rain and do a little Dansh."

"Last time you did a little dance you knocked over all the stock," said the girl.

"It's not fair," said the drunk. "It's not much to ask." He looked very angry indeed. I wondered what the training manual on using good body language would have advised.

The man from the video shop must have written his own manual.

"Listen," he said, "why don't we take the video out on the street and both do a little dance there, we'd have more room.

He went outside on the footpath, danced with the drunk for three seconds and then presented him with the cover of the Gene Kelly video, as the drunk swayed happily down the street.