Assignment or Sneaky?
August 28th, 2005 at 07:53pm
I’ve held this story for a week now because I had far too many other important stories to run, and then forgot to run this one, so here it is.
Last week while I was choosing potatoes in City Supabarn I noticed a pair of people, aged around 13 or 14, taking note of the prices of various produce items and comparing them to prices at other stores around Canberra.
If this was a school assignment then that is fine, but the paperwork they were filling out seemed to be just a bit too professional for a school assignment, apart from which, I can’t imagine why a school assignment would have students comparing prices of onions, bananas, types of meat and other products. Even the most elaborate maths assignment doesn’t require that much leg work. Apart from which, it is hard to imagine a teacher realistically expecting year 7/8 students to go into multiple supermarkets in Canberra (and some of the names I heard were from fairly remote suburbs…relative to Civic) and complete those forms.
I would suggest that it was probably a job that they were being paid to undertake, either by a research company, an industry regulator, or a competing supermarket.
I did try to get a closer look at their forms by inspecting (and choosing) items near them, but I couldn’t get a clear look.
Regardless of what they were doing it for, it certainly breaks the old stereotype of the price checker being the well dressed man in a suit holding a clipboard and squinting at the price tags.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: Bizarreness,Canberra Stories
