You’ve heard of road rage, airline rage, postal worker rage, and tormented teenage nerd rage. Now get ready for the newest item in the expanding catalog of social irritability indicators: SUPERMARKET rage. It was bound to happen sooner or later. In Lowell, Massachusetts this past week, a 38-year-old woman apparently attacked a 51-year-old woman who tried to sneak 13 grocery items through a 12-item express lane. The fracas began with an exchange of colorful words at the checkout counter, then escalated into something more physical outside the store.

I wasn’t there to gawk at the fisticuffs in person; I had to settle for a relatively bland online news account of the incident. (That’s how I collect most of my information about the outside world these days, for better or worse.) Anyway, it appears that the two women engaged in a fairly fiery public brawl -- at least by traditional supermarket brawling standards. There was considerable kicking, screaming and hair-pulling. After eluding the authorities for a time, the woman who took umbrage at the 13-item shopper finally turned herself in. Today she stands accused of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon: her foot (with shoe attached). If convicted, she could face up to ten years in a place with no express lanes at all.

Do I sound as if I’m making light of the Lowell, Massachusetts, express lane incident? If so, shame on me. I should probably restrain my more flippant propensities when I cover a story of such obvious gravity. After all, nobody should have to get kicked about the head, even with BARE feet, for slipping an extra Snickers bar onto the conveyor belt.

Those express lane item limits are merely guidelines, not holy writ. We all know how infernally long it takes to pass through a standard checkout lane behind three or four shopping carts filled above the brim with Pampers and six-packs of V-8 Vegetable Juice. It’s even more maddening when you see the person ahead of you retrieve a two-inch stack of coupons from a pocket or handbag, then slowly dole them out to the cashier. You can hardly blame a shopper with 13 items for wanting to skip the interminable wait and sneak through the express lane, can you? So what if the stated limit is 12? Supermarket item counts are open to interpretation, like Bible verses or Florida ballots. If you’ve placed three identical cans of Bumble Bee Chunk Light Tuna in a neat stack, couldn’t that stack conceivably count as one item? You don’t count a bunch of bananas as five or six separate items, do you?

How many of us actually enumerate the contents of our shopping carts, anyway? If my haul looks appropriately skimpy, I do a quick estimate, head for the express lane and hope for the best. I find it hard to believe that any right-minded citizen would force a fellow-shopper to endure the living limbo of the Pampers lanes, let alone kick her about the head, because her cart holds 13 items instead of the officially sanctioned 12. I could see losing it over 18 or 20 items, or even 16, but surely our common humanity obliges us to forgive a surplus of one.

We tend to approach an express lane with unrealistic expectations. It promises us a smooth and expeditious checkout, but, like so many other of life’s promises, it generally reveals itself to be a sorry illusion, a cheat, a seductive come-on without a blissful consummation. How often do we find ourselves standing there motionless, as glumly and passively as sheared sheep, while some sluggard ahead of us writes a personal check for $13.89 in an excruciatingly slow scrawl. (Remember to dot all those I's, friend.) Meanwhile, we watch a shopper in one of the Pampers lanes -- a shopper who got on line precisely when we did -- pass through the checkout, pay the cashier, and break away to freedom. It happens often enough to make me ponder the existence of a nose-tweaking deity. And naturally, if you or I had chosen the other lane, we would have been stranded THERE while eight or ten shoppers passed through the express lane. (All this is in accordance with Bayan’s Law of Supermarket Checkouts: whichever line you choose automatically becomes the slowest. It’s something a veteran cynic learns to live with.)

We can’t stand to watch others pass us by, especially when we’re playing by the rules. It takes discipline and character to abide by rules, yet the world seems to tolerate rule-breakers. Not only tolerate them, but EMBRACE them, as if the rest of us are clueless chumps (which we probably are). Such inequities are bound to stimulate rage in the very marrow of our downtrodden, law-abiding bones, and for this reason alone I can begin to understand why the 38-year-old woman in Lowell, Massachusetts, allegedly attacked the 51-year-old woman who carried an extra item to the express lane. No doubt the irate shopper had meticulously counted the groceries in her own cart; she might even have sacrificed a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos to make the cut. How she would have loved to carry that bag of Doritos home with her and enjoy it in front of the TV on a chilly evening, but she was a vehemently virtuous citizen: 12 items and no more. How, then, could she abide the brazen temerity of the middle-aged woman in front of her? Thirteen items in her cart, and the cashier was letting her GET AWAY WITH IT. Just like that. No reprimand, no request to relinquish that extra Snickers bar. What’s our civilization coming to when the authorities let a shopper make a mockery of the rules? 

They’re making a mockery of ME, she thought. I could have kept that bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos in my cart, but I put it back on the shelf. Why do I do it? Why take the trouble to bend myself to the rules when everyone else breaks them? Of course, if I ever broke them -- if I carried 13 items to the 12-item express lane -- God help me, you KNOW the cashier would stop me. I never get away with anything -- never have, never will. But look at that woman with the 13 items -- who does she think she is, Nicole Kidman? I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! Oh God, I hate my life!

The law-abiding shopper was burning inside, silently but lethally. You know the feeling. Finally she could take it no more, and she blurted out the fateful insult that led to the greater scuffle outside.

The supreme irony, of course, is that the woman who stood up for the rules will be facing a possible prison sentence of up to ten years. That’s how it goes: chronic outlaws tend to get away with their misdeeds, but the dutiful, put-upon folks who finally snap -- they’re the ones who pay dearly. If the irate Lowell woman loses her case, she’ll be a convict, looking out at the world from behind bars, watching all those free lawbreakers make merry. As for the woman who got kicked about the head -- the next time she contemplates getting into the express lane, you can bet she’ll count her groceries.

Those of you who thought cremation was the way to go are probably thinking twice now, aren’t you? The Georgia crematory operators who stashed hundreds of decomposing bodies around the grounds blamed the ghastly spectacle on a broken incinerator (which nobody bothered to fix for the past 15 years, of course). If they really wanted to dispose of those bodies, you'd think they could have built a bonfire now and then. Somebody should force them to watch 'Night of the Living Dead' before they go to prison. Too bad real corpses can't walk.