I love game shows, and when I was in university I was so desperate to kill time that I spent a half hour each morning watching Supermarket Sweep, possibly the crappiest game show of all time. Three pairs of contestants answered trivia questions to earn sweep time, and then they got that amount of time at the end of the show to run through a supermarket and grab as much stuff as they could. The team that grabbed the most stuff, in terms of dollar value, won a craptastic prize like two recliners or two Timex watches or, if they were very lucky, a weekend trip to Montreal.

It seems straightforward enough but I never really understood the standard strategy that most teams employed for the final sweep. The team that had earned the most time got to start first, then the next team started, then the third team, so that all teams ended at the same time. The first team always ran straight to the Obus Forme back supports, which were like $60 a pop, but instead of grabbing them all, they’d take maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the available stock, and move on. The next stop for every team was these giant hams, at about $20 each, and again, they’d take maybe 2 or 3 of them, and leave 3 or 4 behind.

Another weird thing the teams did was that there was this special set of three products, and if you got all three of them, you’d get a bonus dollar amount. Each team would invariably run to the right section, like say, the vitamins section, then spend a minute looking carefully at each package until they found the right brand and flavour of vitamins, then pick up one box. I’d be screaming at the TV every time, “Just grab each one! Grab everything! Use your whole arm and sweep the shelf!” But no one ever did.

I used to think that maybe the teams got to keep the stuff they put in their carts, and really, a person only has freezer space for so many giant hams. But once I carefully read the closing small-print and it specifically stated that the contestants didn’t keep the stuff. Then I thought that there was some rule they weren’t telling the audience that they had to limit the number of things they took of each item, but then some freak team would come along and grab a basket of cereal and dump the whole thing in their cart like a sane person would do, throwing that theory out the window.

The only thing I can think of is that since it was a Canadian show, the Canadian contestants were just too polite to grab all the expensive stuff, leaving their competitors to stuck with nothing more pricey than toilet paper and canned peaches. The team that had earned the most time almost always won, so I guess they felt bad about kicking the other teams when they were down by taking all the good stuff.

Yup, university was quite a worthwhile expense.