Doomed Supermarket Display/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A precarious stack of wares in a shop is guaranteed to collapse by the end of the scene.

  • Straight: Alice the shelf-stacking wage slave finally puts the last can of beans on the top of the pyramid. Then out of nowhere, Bob appears on a runaway trolley... Offscreen Crash. Cue ambulance.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Shop-o-Mart is having a sale on Priceless Ming Vases!
    • An aerial view of the supermarket shows multiple stacks of goods all over the shop, arranged in such a way as to set up a huge domino effect.
  • Justified: It's a gameshow, and Bob wins the value of whatever he can knock into his trolley.
  • Inverted:
    • Bob careers into an ordinary shelf, and when the dust clears, he's knocked the goods into a perfect pyramid.
    • A human pyramid rides down the aisle.
  • Subverted: The trolley comes to a stop inches from the stack. Alice wipes her brow in relief.
  • Double Subverted: ...Bob says "Ooh, beans!" and takes a can from the bottom row.
  • Parodied: It's a hardware store. The swaying, ceiling-high stack consists of scythes, shears, chainsaws, sledgehammers...
  • Deconstructed: A new workplace health and safety officer is horrified at the potential for injury and stock damage.
  • Reconstructed: The supermarket continues to stack goods this way, but with a framework underneath to stop it all collapsing.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Enforced: The cans are pieces in a grocery-themed puzzle stacking game.
  • Lampshaded: "Next thing ya know, it's just gonna go...boom."
  • Invoked: The manager has a strict "You break it, you bought it" policy, so makes the trolleys extra-fast and sets out the products as precariously as possible.
  • Defied: "You are NOT riding the trolley down the aisle, you'll go straight into a stack of jars and I'll have to pay for all of them."
  • Discussed: "Oh god, they have one of those stack displays. £50 says it's fallen over by the time we leave the shop"
  • Conversed: "Why do cartoon supermarkets always set out their stuff like that?"
  • Played For Laughs: We hear an Offscreen Crash, and Bob emerges with Circling Birdies.
  • Played For Drama: Bob trips and falls into a tall stack of canned goods. They collapse on top of him and give him a serious concussion and a few broken bones, putting him in hospital. He tries to sue the hospital to pay for his bills.

You want Doomed Supermarket Display? It's in Aisle 3. WAITWATCHOUTFORTHOSE- BANG, CRASH, WALLOP MREEEOW! - Never mind...

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