food-drink links
Queues, even short ones, are never a welcome sight in a 7/11. Don't know what the continued attraction for me is... perhaps I like salty snacks, twice-melted chocolate bars, bags of Lay's Cheese and Onion flavoured air or just watching the staff for signs of intelligent life.
Anyway, Einsteins special 711 theory of time in convenience stores states "where 2 bodies attempt a counter encounter at the same time, 4 checkouts are not adequate and time slows by 15% for each body regardless of mass (purchase)". So, in Thailand we always have a careful look in and should there be more than one person near a till, we forget the purchase.
It's hard on young Tony and have had to explain to him that this is a constant. EVEN if that all important Chup-a-Chup and chocolate microphone seem easily within reach, they would decompose beyond recognition before they were swiped by the scanner.
Lumpini 7/11 (not narrowed it down a lot I know) today, I was tempted in to pay for my Thai Ticket Major bus ticket. There was one guy at the checkout (one of three checkouts) and one near the drinks. However, my dream of being served before starving to death was dashed by this very well dressed tight arse.
"What is the smallest phone card I can buy" he asked, 50baht was what they could manage. Calls friend over and they debate this for a while before "can we put half on my phone and half on his?" Red rag to a bull and 7/11 staff love fiddling with phones and gadgets so they all tried to assist with this request.
Apparently what you do is put it all on one phone then transfer whatever amount to the other one. This had me out the shop in 30 seconds flat and left them with yet another carton of Vitamilk to return to the shelf. My wife gave me this vital information after I had calmed down and sworn on a copy of Monty Pythons life of Brian never to go in one again.
The 7/11 next to the shop eventually had a vacancy for a customer, so I went in and watched for 25 minutes as they tried to key in a 17 digit code that had been sent to my phone by Thai Ticket major. 17 bloody digits!
That's 14999451010410969 for posterity. So thanks to a slow day in the world of pies I can tell you that with a world population of 7,000,300,000 they must have sold an average of 2,142,686 to each person to have a counter number that high.
But, I'll be back. It's a friends wedding next week just North of Bangkok and that means a 5 day road trip.... which means we live of toasted sarnies and the only source of this delicacy on the motorways is 7/11.
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