PITTSFORD, N.Y. (WHDH/AP) — A woman shopping for groceries says she was surprised to find a snake on her shopping cart while picking out produce at a New York supermarket.
Laura Walitsky says she was at Wegmans in Pittsford on Monday evening when her daughter spotted the hitchhiking reptile wrapped on the bottom of her cart. She says she then walked the cart outside and had her daughter tell customer service there was a snake on it.
“I just wanted it to stay where it was until I could get it outside. The situation could have gone very different had someone else grabbed that particular cart or if it had climbed off,” Walitsky told 7News.
Walitsky was able to flag down two employees who removed the snake and placed it in a nearby wooded area.
A Wegmans spokesperson said in a statement that “this was an isolated incident.”
Walitsky says she thinks the snake may have been lingering in an outdoor garden area before slithering into the store’s entryway and wrapping itself around the carriage.
Another shopper jokingly asked Walitsky if she thought the snake “was from around here,” according to a Facebook post.
Biology professor Bradley Cosentino identified the pictured snake as a non-venomous milk snake, a common snake species.
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