Personal Narrative: Breaking A Social Norm

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Pages: 3

For my act of breaking a social norm, I had flown down to Atlanta for the weekend to visit my friend, Rachel Novak, who coincidentally happened to be enrolled in a sociology class and needed to do the same assignment as myself. On Saturday morning, she realized that she didn’t have enough groceries to last the entire week, so while driving to the Walmart in Kennesaw, she came up with a brilliant idea. We were going gather the items that we needed milk, eggs, cheese, juice, etc., but only if they were out of other shopper’s grocery carts or baskets. When arriving at the store, we picked up a basket and headed towards the grocery section; the plan was that we would each take turns picking items while the other could observe the costumer’s reactions. …show more content…
I volunteered to grab the groceries first, but on the inside I was nervous because I hadn’t ever attempted something like this before and it felt wrong to take others’ items even though it wasn’t technically theirs yet. While I was observing, I noticed that the majority of the younger demographic that consisted of around sixteen to middle twenty year olds didn’t seem to care about what we did, in fact, they tend to be amused by our actions. On the other hand, anyone who was older than that weren’t so amused, and gave us awful looks. Those who had younger children with them would tattle on us to their parents, and they either said some hurtful phrases about us, told them to be quiet, or asked to have their items back, which we would if asked. Overall, we were mostly given questioning looks from the customers which translated from ‘why are you doing that, or what the hell is wrong with you?’ That gave the impression that we shouldn’t do this behavior, and it almost worked but eventually I had to look away from their faces so I didn’t feel pressured to conform with the normal