Doomed Supermarket Display/Playing With

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    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...

    This article is issued from All The Tropes. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.