Suppose If You're Going to Shit in a Supermarket, Here's How You Do It

Listen here is the way you shit in a supermarket: you drop trou and you shit on the tiles. The trousers need to drop to about the three-quarter-the-length-of-your-thigh area, not all the way. If you're dropping your trousers all the way to your ankles to shit in a supermarket then you are doing it wrong. It is like an unwritten rule of shitting in a supermarket. How do I know so much about how to shit in supermarkets? Because people shit in supermarkets all the time, dumb-dumb, and CCTV exists, and the videos always see them dropping trou and shitting on the tiles. Skirts complicate the issue and that is a separate article. But for now, for a base waterline of how to shit in supermarkets, take this: drop trou, shit on the tiling. That is the accepted way of doing it.

However:

And so we have a maverick. Consider this man, shitting in a supermarket in Russia the other week, a moment captured and made crystalline forever by CCTV – yes we all think CCTV on the whole is bad, listen we've all read Nineteen Eighty-Four, yes yes, but sometimes, like moments like this, when a man shits down the sides of his shorts on the floor of a supermarket in Russia, sometimes it justifies itself – and know that you are looking at an artist. This dude sees your norms, your laws, your accepted ways of shitting on the floor of a supermarket, and he laughs at them. He flips them all up on their head.

This dude just shat down the side of his shorts and plopped those little things out onto the floor of the supermarket like they were warm unwanted pears.

Suppose shitting in a supermarket can roughly be split into three distinct acts – sort of like a play! – all of which are demonstrated near-perfectly above video. Let's start with the opening act:

First you have to actually have to do the shit. We have discussed this. You have to open the shitting in a supermarket process by doing the shit. The motives differ but the result is always the same: shit, on the floor, at a supermarket.

The thing about shitting in a supermarket is society still, for all its progress, frowns upon it, so you have to find a place in secret to do it. This is possible in many large supermarkets – of his time before Seinfeld got big, Larry David once said, "When I was living in New York and didn't have a penny to my name, I would walk around the streets and occasionally I would see an alcove or something. And I'd think, 'that'll be good, that'll be a good spot for me when I'm homeless'," and I feel much the same about shitting in supermarkets: I don't want to do it, but should I have to, I am prepared, especially in the Sainsbury's in Forest Hill – and you can see our Russian hero doing much the same. He is crouched in position of dropping his turds, in case someone peeks over the bread aisle and sees him do it; he is alone in a low foot-traffic aisle (the squash aisle, for example, would be a great place to shit in a supermarket, right by a pallet of Capri-Suns); at one point he kicks a turd under some skirting, which you would definitely do if you just shat in a supermarket. Nothing more embarrassing than being marched out of an ASDA by a disinterested security guard for shitting. Hide the evidence.

Hey: you got to wipe your butt when you shit! And what better way to do it than by stealing tissues and liquid soap from the very supermarket you just shat in. In many ways, this is rubbing salt in the wound – you just shat in a supermarket, and now you are thieving from it, a perfect double whammy – but also I think it displays a lot of what the overwhelming groupthink towards supermarkets is: that they are faceless, that stealing from them is a victimless crime, that they are large networks of tendrils and veins of a bigger megacorporation, the oppressor, and they need to be shat in to be taught a small lesson. Listen, we all think supermarkets are bad, but also we need somewhere to buy a Meal Deal every lunchtime, so we still shop in them. But maybe – just maybe – if once in a while we can drop a discreet turd in them, we can still stick it to The Man while still having a place we can buy laundry capsules on offer for £5 down from £5.99.

Suppose we'll never know the true motive for the anonymous Russian supermarket shitter – a lactose thing, a car boot sale burger, three cups of coffee followed by two bananas, that weird thing that happens sometimes where you really need to shit after you run – but we do know that… err… hmm. No there's… there's not really anything to learn from this one. No moral. The End.

@joelgolby

More stuff from VICE about exactly this thing:

Exploring The Philosophy Behind Women Shitting In Supermarkets

Exploring The Philosophy Behind Women Shitting In Supermarkets

Exploring The Philosophy Behind Women Shitting In Supermarkets