Doomed Supermarket Display



There are many things you see on TV that are guaranteed not to survive to the end of the scene.

Supermarket displays are one of them. Rather than the shelves that are standard practice in real life, fictional shopkeepers seem to prefer to display their wares in rickety, ceiling-high pyramids stacked in precisely the place a runaway shopping trolley is likely to crash into them.

Their other major vulnerability is to someone (often an oblivious young child) taking an item from the bottom level, thus causing the rest of the pyramid to collapse spectacularly.

Some supermarkets do have displays like this, but generally they consist of non-fragile items and are held up by cardboard support structures.

Compare Ashes to Crashes, Priceless Ming Vase, Exploding Fishtanks, Doomed New Clothes.

Film -- Animated

 * The Spanish feature-length Katy, Kiki y Koko had the same problems with the ants' food hoard.

Live-Action TV

 * One time on The Bob Newhart Show, Bob and Howard went grocery shopping. Howard took something (possibly a jar of pickles) from the bottom of a food pyramid and the stack didn't fall over, flummoxing Bob. Then a few more people did the same thing. Finally Bob took something off the top, which made it fall all apart.
 * A classic animated sketch on Sesame Street has a grocer stacking 12 large cans, presumably filled with tomato juice, but the first customer to pass the display pulls a can from the bottom of the stack. The stack collapses, and the grocer re-stacks the 11 remaining cans, with one extra. The same thing happens with the second customer. Finally, a boy on roller skates provides a Twist Ending.

Magazines

 * The 1955 MAD feature on "Supermarkets" shows a malfunctioning shopping cart crashing into a pyramid of canned soup.

Newspaper Comics

 * Invoked in the title panel of this Garfield strip.

Western Animation

 * A Two Stupid Dogs cartoon spoofing Freaky Friday had one of these. As a Running Gag, it was repeatedly destroyed immediately after supermarket employee Cubbie had just finished fixing it.
 * The Simpsons had a parody of a bulk-buy warehouse that was packed to the rafters with these. A highlight is Barney knocking over a full-size human-shaped maple syrup bottle and thinking he's killed a woman.
 * In another episode, when Lisa attempts to skateboard she ends up bearing down on two stacks of salsa jars - one "mild" and one "hot and spicy". "Please mild please mild please mild..."
 * Happened in the The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh episode "A Pooh-Day Afternoon".

Real Life

 * Best. display. ever.