AIBU to expect the shop to close ?

No, I don't think you were wrong to feel upset, I do think the staff should have cleared the store for an hour or so out of respect, they would have done it quickly enough for a bomb scare.

If that was my father that had died, I would be outraged that he was left lying on the floor, in the midst of shoppers ignoring him and picking up their baked beans, until the funeral director appointed by the coroner could get there. If it was your child or grandchild, how would you have felt?

Having been a police officer for many years I can tell you that a paramedic can pronounce life extinct. It saves a lot of time not having to get a doctor.
Ambulances will not normally take a body away as it ties up the crew from saving lives. The police, who will have attended as this is a 'sudden death', will have called the 'first on the list' undertaker to deal with the deceased's body.
I don't think closing a supermarket is really practical. Where do all the customers go and for how long? However, I think the staff could either have moved the body, after police attendance, to a private area like the staff room, or close off that entire aisle to shoppers with staff getting any goods that the customers required from it.
I am sure the man's body would have been covered with a blanket as well as there being a screen.
I can understand some people being upset (I have a friend who loathes seeing hearses pass) but I can also understand the store's practical approach. Sorry to sound callous, but if you felt upset, why did you not leave your coffee and depart the store?

I know how you feel-although this is a bit different. Some years ago I was coming out of a large open air car park in our town & a man collapsed in front of me clutching his chest. I was the office first aider & had done my St John's training so I got him into recovery position by which time a small crowd had gathered.
This was before everyone had a mobile so I ran to nearest shop (I was the only one there able to run TBH) I was just about to dash in & get them to ring an ambulance when something stopped me & I decided to go to the shop next door. I have no idea why & even as I did it I felt it was odd.
Then I went back to make sure he was still in right position & wait for ambulance.
Unfortunately the poor man died there on the pavement although the ambulance men were there quickly & did their best. He was on his way to meet his wife at Waitrose across the road.
I found out later that his daughter worked in the shop I nearly went into. I have no idea why I didn't go into the first & nearest shop.
I used to think about it every time I used that car park & was very glad when they built a shopping mall on the site as I'm sure his family felt the same way. You just do not expect to see death at such close quarters in an every day situation & it really does shake you up. I sympathise.

Having read some other posts - yes, the undertakers will take the body to the hospital mortuary in a case a PM is required, but the man's own GP might be able to issue a certificate if the man had a potentially fatal condition (heart disease or emphysema for example), had seen him within the past 2 weeks and the circumstance of death are consistent with the condition.
An hour for the undertakers is not unusual; I have waited far longer than that on duty, and when my mother died at home a couple of months ago it was nearly 3 hours, Depends on how bury they are.

Freudian slip - *how BUSY they are

I was once at a bingo hall when a woman collapsed. The paramedics arrived and used a defibrillator. The bingo games continued with people saying 'shhhh' when the defibrillator gave the command 'stand away'. It was ridiculous. The poor woman died there and they just carried on playing bingo. I couldn't believe it. Surely they should have cleared the hall out of respect. I daresay it was nice that she died doing something she enjoyed but her family would be appalled to learn the circumstances I am sure.

When I worked in A+E ( long time ago I admit ) we often had ambulances arrive with people who had died - very strange ...

The funeral directors work on behalf of the coroner to move a person from the place of death to a hospital for post mortem. Some areas this is on a rota system and calls will be made to FDs to find one who is available. Some areas this is on a contract with one FD. They can be covering a huge area. It may be that the funeral directors were already out and dealing with another death, on a funeral or quite some distance away. XX

I stand corrected ?!

on a cruise i left the ship to walk around the dock area and saw a small crowd of people had gathered round someone on the ground. there was a paramedic present attempting to ressusitate the person, it was very distressing and distasteful that people were standing too close, watching. I moved on quickly but was upset so returned to the ship by another path, only to be stopped and shouted at by half a dozen security people as i walked past a large shiny yacht.(later learned Bill Gates owned it). I explained what had happened, but they sent me back the way i had come, past the poor tourist who was still on the ground. i have thought about the this person and the family often since.

Obviously, despite the low barrier, you didn't see the body because you had to ask why the atmosphere was so unusual so whilst it might have upset your sensibilities, I don't think the barriers were a particular problem. The staff might have felt uncomfortable (or perhaps didn't realise they could) moving the body. Life is for the living so I don't see who it would serve by evacuating the shop. Lots of the people shopping might have been compromised by the shop closing. It isn't ideal for there to be a dead body to circumnavigate but as long as he wasn't in full view, I don't think there was a lack of dignity.
My OH once had to give CPR to a gentleman whose wife had not been at all bothered when he disappeared to the toilet not to return for an hour. In the end the landlady called my OH to help because she knew he was a firefighter. The man had been dead for a while but my OH did all he could and made sure nobody entered the cubicle, not least because he needed room to work. The ambulance crew arrived and arranged for the body to be moved. At the time, the wife thanked my husband profusely. A few weeks later, he was called into see his boss. The wife was considering suing because my OH had ensured she couldn't be with her husband as he died! My OH was gobsmacked and wondered if he would bother if there was a next time.

Someone else is not responsible for my feeling upset about being in the same building as a dead person should I be affected in the way the OP describes. The OP mightn't even have known about the body if she hadn't asked. I suspect that most people in the shop didn't know.

Then there is this: why feel upset about someone you don't know? People die. All living things die. Feel upset when your own nearest and dearest, friends and relations die. Feel some sympathy for the dead person's relatives but a dead body in a supermarket is not essentially different from, say, someone being taken ill on a train journey and the train being delayed while their needs were met; an inconvenience to other people on the train but not something to get upset about unless you are going to be late for something important, but then you'd be upset about your own troubles.

It's not like the upset a train driver would feel after someone flung themselves in front of the train and it wasn't possible to stop in time. That I can understand.

I think telling the store manager that one was upset would be rather infantile. It is not the store manager's job to take care of upsets that are nothing to do with the shop other than pure chance. I think we should deal with our own feelings in circumstances like those described and not seek to lay blame on someone else.

MinniesMum
Out of interest what do 'old ladies' shoes look like.?

I was in a similar situation, on the Central Line platform on the London Underground. A man was lying on the opposite platform, perfectly straight with his briefcase beside him. He had obviously been on his way to work and presumably just collapsed. He was being ignored, not covered or shielded in any way and people walking round him and, even worse, stepping over him.
I still think about it now many years later and wonder where our humanity has gone.

Should have shut the shop, that's disgraceful. Poor man give him some dignity having died in a shop was bad enough.
They shut Tesco yesterday because a fire alarm went off. Yes I know it's a different situation.

with a death such as this the police have to be called and the para medics - you may not move the body, the police have to see it first. All very unfortunate and sad. I suppose it is down to the store managers discretion as to wether or not to shut the shop.

Would have cost the shop a lot in lost profits plus a great inconvience to many shoppers if the shop had closed. A higher screen was needed.

Amazing how people react to things. I remember a friend arrived for lunch upset as she had been playing tennis and her partner dropped dead on the court. She wasn't so much upset because he had died as he was elderly but it was more how could he do that in her presence as it wasn't nice for her and an inconvience.

Sarahannwhitney.
This was some years ago and older women in those days all wore "sensible" shoes some laceups, some with a bar. I think Truform still do them. Nowadays we all wear the same styles more or less although I do draw the line at 4" heels!

"It wasn't nice for her" says it perfectly, ajanela. The OP is about izzywizzy, not about the dead man, who would not have been feeling ill-treated or undignified at all. A screen was put around him and, as someone has said, he was probably covered too. What's undignified about that?

His death was not a result of violence, nobody else was in danger. Why do we feel the need to be protected from such a natural part of life?

It has occurred to me that I've never seen a dead human body. Once when I was working on my allotment a shocked yell of "Oh my god!" came from the canal. Some people in a narrowboat were passing and had spotted a body in the water. I went to the edge of the canal but the body was hidden by overhanging bushes. As the people in the narrowboat seemed shocked (as you would be), I dialled 999 and explained what had happened. The boat people moored their boat. I went up to the road to await the police. I was affected in the sense of feeling sorry for the boaters as they were probably on holiday. As my mum said when I spoke to her about it: "They won't forget that holiday." I was also affected because the police wanted me to hang about as a witness. We had had an Australian visitor for a week and he was due to leave later that morning so DH put him on the line to say goodbye.

It turned out that the dead man had been at the fiftieth birthday party of my allotment neighbour at a pub a little up the canal. It seems he had fallen in because of intoxication and drowned. An unnecessary accident. I was not upset by it, though my allotment neighbour was, unsurprisingly as she knew the man. I was simply a little inconvenienced. Shrug.

It sounds as if the shoppers in the OP story were not even inconvenienced. Why should they be? The unfortunate man's death had nothing to do with them.

If one thinks supermarkets are disgustingly money-grubbing, one shouldn't go in them. Put your money where your mouth is as the saying goes.

Izzywizzy, your post made me think about my brother in law who died at the gym the week before Easter. He lived in Canada and we had a visit to inform us that he had died of a heart attack. I did not even think about the gym members or how they must have felt. My thoughts were with my sister in law and the rest of his family.

The supermarket death aside, I don't think I could be so completely detached and unaffected by the presence of a body in surprising circumstances.

I'm reminded of the case in Italy a few years back where the bodies of drowned Roma children were covered with towels and left for an hour to await collection. People just carried on pick-nicking and sunbathing.

As a nurse I've seen and attended to dead bodies, including children, but know that I just wouldn't sit on that beach and carry on as normal.

A man was stabbed in a central London Tesco a few days ago. He lay by the customers services desk in what was clearly a critical condition. Despite this, the presence of emergency services, with the area ringed by police cars, many customers ignored several tannoy announcements asking them to leave the story immediately. Some customers who had witnessed the event were sobbing and in shock. But,as the man lay there in a lake of his own blood, and with police anxious to close the store which was now a crime scene, many customers were more concerned about finishing their shopping. 'I've got nothing in the fridge,' declared one. in the chaos, there were some who helped themselves or even pushed trolleys full of unpaid-for shopping out to their cars. I think this says a lot about our society.

What @mtheresap999 criticises 'our society' for would have been seen as laudable British 'just carrying on' in the Blitz. Though looters would of course have been shot. Or at least punished.

I don't think you can blame the staff or the store manager for the shop staying open, Head Office would have to contacted in this case, I doubt that they would sanction the store closing.

I can understand you being upset, but if you hadn't asked you would have done your shopping in blissful ignorance. Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh. I can just imagine the amount of people who would complain about having to rush their shopping or not being able to get into the store to shop.

We all react differently, sorry you felt upset

I remember some years ago a neighbour's daughter had her new father in law drop dead at her wedding reception. The young couple had just left the hall under an arch of arms when he walked across the floor and collapsed. An ambulance and paramedics were called but by the length of the time it took to take him away I think most of us realised he was past help.