The mostly entertaining Defective Yeti has an entertaining post up, musing upon embarrassing purchases, malicious price checks by Walgreen’s cashiers and the nature of vacuums in check-out lines:

A man walks up to a cashier. He wants to purchase something embarrassing: porn, say, or hemorrhoid medication. He has a few other items, too, but it’s unclear as to whether he really wants to buy them or if they are just a beard for the shameful merchandise. He has a plan: when the cashier picks up the copy of “Car & Driver” to reveal the three-pack of “mango flavored” condoms, he will feign surprise and say “whoa, how did those get there? Well, I don’t feel like returning them, so go ahead and charge me — I guess I’ll buy them …” But then, as the teller rings up the items, disaster strikes. For some reason the bar code on the product fails to scan correctly. The teller gets on the intercom system and says, “I’m going to need a price check for the jumbo pack of Tink’L Trapp’R brand adult undergarments …”

I used to buy gay porn magazines for the slightly-closeted homosexual a cubicle over from me at work. He was a nice guy, but — as a homosexual — felt a lot more self-conscious in exposing himself as one than I, happily hetero, did. It wasn’t particularly embarassing and I even became known at the newstand as one of the seedy, stained-trenchcoat-wearing regulars, up until the point where the guy working at the newstand started asking me where I lived and what I liked doing for fun, at which point I told my colleague it might behoove him to start buying the magazines himself. This gay colleague, by the way, also had a great anecdote about a one-on-one encounter with a John Holmes type, whom he turned down with the quip “What am I supposed to do with that? Pet it?”

Which is all ancillary to the tangential question we’re attaching to this post. What’s the most embarrassing shopping experience you’ve ever had? Let us know in the comments section.

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