A Toronto Karen Hit Me In Loblaws Last Friday: The Canadian White Woman’s 2 Minute Meltdown
- S
- Apr 1
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 2
It was just last week, I was minding my business with my partner as I was getting ready to pay for my groceries. I go and sift through my tiny wallet because I just got a new set of cards after my previous two never showed up in the mail, merci aux the Canada Post strike from last fall.
A woman of little class and large stature (about a foot taller than me), perhaps late twenties, early thirties, began to grow in aggregation quickly within the seconds I noticed the tap option on my very old debit card, for which I do not recall the PIN number for to save my life (evidently holding true with what I would experience shortly).
Let The Story-Time Begin!
It had only been twice that the machine for whatever reason was not reading m card after I just transferred a small sum into it — because who keeps bundles of their income in the care they bring everywhere? I sure don’t! I’ve witnessed more phone and wallet snatching on the subway lately than ever, I won’t be the next one to lose out on a thousand dollars because some thief got lucky.
I digress. She begins to demand of the cashier to open a new line for “real paying customers”, in a loud and obnoxious voice, one I’ve heard nearly exactly before, twenty, thirty times. It’s the voice of a woman free to what she falsely believes she is entitled to in every aspect of her delusion of a life experience, cushioned by the actual work of her ancestors, she has nothing better to do with that lack of integrity and identity that bring others low as she, to a point of bitter déclassé 2000s non-sensical reality TV hysteria.
I’d expressed in return that this wasn’t necessary, that I was just facing an error, and that it ought to have been resolved shortly, in just a moment. She replied in saying that she’d already waited a moment, to which I questioned why someone of such “importance” would be in a rush across moments, instants of time, when it was just after 3 PM on a Friday… notably, she was wearing athleisure.
I’m not inclined to believe she’d had somewhere of rush to be, not so much so that it would be necessary to cause a scene, shouting about my not being a real paying customer, not having any money, and how real paying customers (turning to a white man behind her who wanted anything but to be involved in this lunacy) .
I turned to her and expressed that this was really beyond the necessary way to talk to the staff let alone about me who was just trying to get past an error, that was to be resolved in less that a minute, hence why the escalation surprised all of us.
As I turned back to pay with a different card, the Karen took her shopping cart and rammed it into me, hitting my knee, bag/stomach and lower leg. This did not cause me to move however, to which she proceeded to state that she was getting me out of the way because she was a “real paying customer”.
This of course was just the moment when my card went through. The insane woman, the obnoxious oversized child, swiftly turned her head away from me.
Perhaps it was due to a realization, one can only hope, that she’d come to where the self awareness of being an incredibly indecent person in a public, family friendly space, to someone who in fact had the money and in fact was facing an error, and in fact, only took perhaps 30 second longer than the average checkout line operates by, and in exchange, fell briefly into the shame that such a public tantrum, assault and objective fault her actions arrived to in the end.
A Breakdown of the Breakdown
No such thing resulted in an apology, why would it? The reality of the situation is that I was not dealing with someone who was reasonable, intelligent, nor with decorum. I was dealing with a racist!
You see, it hadn’t registered in the moment, but everyone else around were deeply uncomfortable not simply for her behavior as plainly her lack of sanity, but the deeper implications which ran constant through her willingness of proceed in the manners which she did:
Speaking outwardly quite loudly about my supposed financial situation, in a supermarket during what many are calling pre-recession times, where many families are unable to sufficiently feed themselves was the initial demonstration of lack of empathy, social awareness, emotional and literacy based intelligence.
Ordering the South Asian staff member to open an entire new line when the amount of staff available are lower than normal due to it not being peak season, was not something I believe she thought could be done — for if she believed it were possible, would she have hit me with her shopping cart in public? Does a person who finds operations by humans beneath her expect to receive new services after assaulting another customer?
Her belief suddenly that I had no money and was not a paying customer, in that positions of labels in her language, came with the intention then to operate the situation as she saw fit; that I was then an obstacle, not a customer, and in this particular circumstance as lesser than there was no respect owed to the being occupying low-life flesh before her, where she ought to in turn be treated with the utmost authority to eliminate non-customers by pushing them out of the way for being a nuisance, a barrier between the entitlement of ordering staff to do something not possible (which any reasonable person could see, her being the only teller), and the actualization of what she is entitled to —
In my acknowledgment her lack of decency, lack of reasonable request, and general lunacy (in words far more respectful than she deserved), the illusions that support her overall lived entitlement were made to crack ever so subtly
It was with the aforementioned that we must understand, individuals who behave in this manner initially operate through covert methods of expressing their ideologies, which usually satisfy the need.
It is subsequently easily understood that a lively reasoning for her comfortability with assaulting me was the fact of my race and her revocation of the only variable which made us equal in that system, being of customer status, that justified her actions in the twists and turns or her mind.
Thus, while she violated me being committing a public physical assault, I violated her notion of self — and that for white woman in crocs on a Friday at 3 pm buying nothing but cheap palm sized circle cheeses and a few assorted staples, is enough to explode.
So what did I do after?
With all honesty, I did use some choice words end. It’s as deserved, as much as it was unnecessary.
I feel I stepped out of my character to let one or two curse words in a calm tone of voice slip directly into her one ear, facing stiffly away from me after coming up to reality for a moment.
Once I got home, I called the location I was at, and told them in detail of the experience I just had. Management apologized to me on behalf of the store and staff, to which I immediately clarified that frankly, everyone who saw it from other customers to their own staff were startled and at a loss for words.
Thankfully, it’s not every day nutcases release themselves… or at least, never mind that, nutcases do that all of the time — this was just the first time someone with racial and superficial intent had so confidently attacked my in public since I was a child, facing the ignorance of younger people eager to grow into someone like herself.
What I should have done was ask for a manager just after I paid. It would have been nice to see her spoken to, made to apologize, or perhaps even escorted out, banned, for her actions were fundamentally inappropriate to a legal extent.
People like this count on the fact that throughout their entire life, they’ve been able to get away with acting this way, because most people are scared of them or so taken aback back, getting away from her is the sole priority.
It would have been nice to Karen the Karen, but I didn’t have that in me, not when all I wanted was my partner to make me chicken Alfredo.
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