This column is a day late due to Good Friday being a public holiday. Every year in Auckland Cameron Brewer, president of the Newmarket Business Association takes time from his busy schedule of attending the opening of envelopes to complain that retail businesses should be allowed to trade on Easter Weekend. I was planning to write a sympathetic piece about how shop girls have to work just about every day of the year anyway and I think we can all go one day without buying Italian wool sweaters.

Screw that. It is Easter Saturday and I just came back from the supermarket. I think I would have had a better and more fruitful shopping experience at the frequently bombed Baghdad Central Markets. There was nothing on the shelves. People were filling their trolleys with whatever they could find. I somehow came out with thirty six bread rolls –for a two person lunch. Some part of me suspects that supermarket chains use the ‘one day on, one day off’ Easter Weekend for pandemic training. The staff clearly need to know how to manage deranged, post-35 year old heterosexual men (who cannot operate a trolley at the best of times) shopping for five weeks worth of toilet paper and white flour. Pumpkin –which has to be among the cheapest and most common vegetables in New Zealand- was entirely absent from the fresh fruit section. Wine bottles rolled around the floor on the liquor aisle. Unattended, half-naked children roamed in sticky, shrieking packs.

I usually enjoy my early Saturday grocery shopping. I can read labels at my leisure, pick things up in each hand and weigh them. I can compose menus for the entire week in my head whilst standing in front of the chilled section. I consider my Saturday morning grocery shop as good training for becoming a really annoying retiree –as these are usually the only people in the supermarket with me at the time, apart from a few shy migrant families.

But today I returned home with nothing I wanted. My dinner tonight is some form of vac-packed, pre-cooked chicken sausages in two day old bread rolls. Lunch is probably going to be microwave popcorn. As for the brand of beer I like –there was one torn six pack left on the shelves that I suspect has been dropped. (I’ll find out the hard way soon enough.)

So screw the shopgirls! I was one for nine years and I know how hard it is… But it appears the entire Western World goes completely insane if its access to goods is restricted by even a day. One strange man was buying dozens of Saturday papers. Dozens. Now unless he is planning on fashioning some hobo version of the AIDS Quilt he is going to get home and feel really stupid.

And yes, yes… I know that comparing a less than fruitful trip to the supermarket with shopping in Baghdad is a little hyperbolic, I know that the vast majority of the world’s population has only limited access to food and water and mummy used to tell me that somewhere there are bow-legged, pot-bellied black children that would be grateful to have my vac-packed chicken sausages (“be my guest”)… but dammit. I am siding with that Cameron Brewer guy. Let the over-consuming wheels of capitalism continue to turn. Now if you will excuse me I am going to make my lunch of three dozen bread rolls and shaken beer.

Gordon White works for the New Zealand Herald. He can be contacted at gordon.white@nzherald.co.nz