Welcome to Sweden, Take a Number

The Swedes are a refreshingly honest bunch, who tend to efficiently state what they mean with their words. Take even the Swedish beer brand “STARKÖL”. Literally translated it means simply “STRONG BEER”.   

No messing about there. 

Most of the time this works well, though if they wish to imply something, they will often either ask you a question that illustrates the stupidity behind your lack of comprehension, or alternately, they may scrunch it up into a ball of anxious frustration inside themselves which will many years later turn into a cancerous tumour. This tends to happen a lot when people push-in while waiting in queues – you will hear no objections from the ever-patient Swedes, just a silent tirade of disapproval.  

Queues here are ubiquitous. You want to collect your mail? Take a number. You want to speak to a customer service associate at a store? Take a number. You want to talk to a blonde at a bar? Take a number.  

But seriously, queuing is a very Swedish thing, with most supermarkets having just one “checkout chick” working the register.  This obviously leads to long lines during peak periods, so when the rare sight of a second checkout worker appears, there is a mad scramble to make it to the new register.  I recall one time in a supermarket having waited around 5 minutes in line already, in that time making my way from about 13^th in the queue to 7^th in the queue.  With little to do while waiting, I’d observed that there seemed to be quite a few other shoppers not in the queue, but milling around reading the magazines and newspapers positioned near the registers. 

As the Hemköp employee approached the register, you could feel the Matrix-style slow motion kick in as the employee uttered the words “Kassan är oppet, nästa tack” (“The register is open, next please”). Magazines and pretenses were dropped by the non-queuing shoppers as their chameleon-like disguises fell to reveal their true identities as line-pusher-innerers.

Muwaahahaha!  We fooled you, you social-etiquette compliers!

But still remaining around seventh in line, the new checkout’s allure proved strong despite my aversion to lining up behind such supermarket customer equivalents to Olympic drug cheats. So with time still moving according to Matrix-temporal-retardation physics, I made my decision and began a quantum shift to the alternate cash register.

Despite my immediate reaction and swift execution, I was no match for SupermarketSwede, the Ben Johnson of Olympic Supermarket Cheats who happily overtook me at the halfway point to the new register queue. Yes, SupermarketSwede, who had been eighth in line and behind me in the queue, had broken into a sprint to ensure he placed himself directly in front of me in the new queue.

Outplayed at a game whose rules I clearly did not fully comprehend.

It was that day I learnt silent Swedish indignation. I can feel the tumour growing already.

Every man has his breaking point however, and recently came a time when my Australian willingness-to-object could take it no more. Recently, while patiently waiting in a Stockholm supermarket queue, an older man decided to simply bypass the queue in which I was the next in line to use the self-scanning register.

 “Excuse me! I was next.” I told him in Swedish.

“But I don’t know how it works” replied the Swede in his native tongue.

“There’s a queue and you have to wait” I told him while signalling with my thumb that he should bugger off to whence he came.

Seeing that I was in no mood for his rubbish, the man complied, albeit with a stupid look on his face.

I proceeded to scan my bottle of mineral water and was reaching into my wallet to take my cash out to pay for my purchase when the same SuperBenJohnsonSwede decided that it would be nicer if I paid for his frozen dinner as he promptly tried to scan his purchase prior to my payment.

“NEJ!!!!” I scolded him.

“But I don’t know how it works!” he tried again.

“You wait til I am finished and you pay for your own buddy!”

Then again, maybe it was just Swedish innovation once more – no, we’re not making you pay taxes anymore, that’s outdated. Now we have incompetents follow you around the supermarket and you have to buy their food for them instead.

Saves on bureaucracy.

Hmmm…on second thought, the idea of Swedes eliminating bureaucracy seems pretty unlikely.

I need a STARKÖL...

...better take a number.