BATON ROUGE, LA—Turning his gaze downward just in time to avoid eye contact, shy local man Carl Huskins narrowly avoided a gregarious product representative offering toothpicked morsels of teriyaki chicken at an area Rouses supermarket, sources confirmed Sunday. “Wow, that was close,” the awkward and visibly rattled 41-year-old said following the near-encounter, which reportedly caused him to pivot his shopping cart around abruptly so he could escape down the pet food aisle rather than risk social interaction with a stranger. “Thank God I got out of there. I would have been stuck struggling to make some kind of small talk and racking my brain for a way to end the exchange without sounding like a jerk. Now I just need to play it cool and act like I’m looking for something, even though I don’t actually need anything from this aisle.” According to reports, the sheepish man was later paralyzed with fear upon realizing the store had removed its self-checkout lines and he would be forced to interact with a human cashier.

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