By Justin Lee

SHELL AND COLD Storage have recently held their first jointly organised supermarket night race to launch an 11 week promotion to give shoppers free fuel.

Customers who spend $30 at Cold Storage between 15 August and 31 October will receive a free $2 Shell fuel voucher.

The supermarket night race was held at Cold Storage Centrepoint and a total of nine teams of two made up of members of the public, the media and senior executives from Shell battled it out to collect $289 (symbolic of the F1 Singtel Singapore Grand Prix race date) worth of items.

A husband and wife team comprising of Kenneth Lee and Tan Lek Wan emerged champions walking away with a total of $1,000 worth of Shell and Cold Storage vouchers.

All the other participating teams in the supermarket night race each took home a consolation prize of $200 worth of Shell and Cold Storage vouchers.

Items collected by all nine teams during the race worth a total of $2,890 were donated to Care Community Services Society.

Trolley Folly – How glory slipped through our grubby fingers

By Leow Ju-Len

ONCE WE LEARNT that Shell’s supermarket night race would include a media challenge, our very own Justin Lee promptly threw his name into the hat, loudly proclaiming that as a ’shopping auntie’ he was bound to wipe the floor with the rest of them.

Come race night, Justin teamed up with a like-minded shopping queen from a golf magazine and proceeded to cover himself and CarBuyer with glory by hitting the magic $289 figure in a lightning 20 seconds or so.

Cannily, all it took was a DVD player ($279) and two boxes of biscuits ($5 each), leaving our man plenty of time to bemusedly observe his rivals scramble desperately from aisle to aisle.

Sadly, the other teams each managed to find $289 worth of goodies as well, and with an inexplicably low weightage given to speed (none) in something calling itself a ‘race’, the event was declared a tie.

This was then settled by a race proper, with the first team to gather a list of five specific items declared the winner.

Doubtless with the theme song to Chariots Of Fire at full blast in his head, Justin went great guns and disappeared into the bowels of Cold Storage… and failed to re-emerged until some blokes from Channel NewsAsia and a little-known publishing firm had scooped the honours.

A deflated Justin blamed unfamiliarity with the high number of no-frills ‘First Choice’ brand items on the list, revealing himself to be something of a high class shopping auntie. Never mind, lad. The Olympics’ll include shopping someday, and you’re a shoo-in for Gold.