It was just before closing time. Three or four customers who wanted to run their errands quickly after a long day at work were standing in front of the cash register in the small Edeka on Säbener Straße when a younger woman joined the group of late shoppers. She immediately caught the eye because, unlike everyone else, she didn’t look drawn and tired at all, but looked very refreshed and smiled. She didn’t have a hastily assembled emergency supply for the evening in her shopping trolley, just a product from the fruit department: bananas for an extended family of forty. The customer had apparently cleared the entire display of the supermarket. We would have liked to have learned more from her about the reason for her purchase, but then the banana woman disappeared that night in Harlaching.
Waiting in the queue at the supermarket has one major advantage: you can study the customers as well as the goods they have selected, and you can at least get an idea of how they live and what they want from life. Whether you are more of the dark type, the Augustiner Hallodri, the chickpea aunt, the cinnamon bun or the thoroughbred vegan. A jolly old lady used to come into the shop and pick up her Piccolo and a box of Marlboro Light every day. But that’s in the past, the Piccolo generation has apparently abdicated, at least in this part of Munich.
The banana woman remains a mystery, she has never appeared in the supermarket since. And so one can only speculate what the reason for her tropical fruit offensive was: does she belong to the growing number of ambitious café owners who have dedicated themselves to ever more sophisticated fruit creations? Banana bread, for example, which is often served with an oat milk cappuccino, has long been the main source of food in some Munich districts, which is supplemented at best by beetroot carpaccio and avocado-spelled mousse. Or is the banana woman perhaps the fruit representative of a dedicated day care center that has recognized how important the potassium balance is for the little ones? Does she mix yellow vitamin bombs in the feel-good lounge of a large Munich law firm or Asian cocktails on the celebration banana between Sendlinger Tor and Maximiliansplatz?
You will probably never know, but one thing is for sure: the banana woman was obviously in a good mood. Must be the object of your purchase.