Adult temper tantrums

[mace17]

What is the best way to deal with temper tantrums by your adult pwBPD in public? I know how to handle kids having temper tantrums in stores but I guess I'm not so good at dealing with adults.

Went grocery shopping with uBPDh and s8 today. Just a little backstory, I basically forced my H to buy groceries because he doesn't want to contribute to the family expenses much so I finally said if you want to eat you'll have to buy the groceries. This has been working for about a year now. So he always complains about the store we shop at, usually about how many checkouts are open, and I usually try to soothe him or just ignore it. Today it started almost as soon as we walked in the store, they were out of something he wanted and he started complaining loudly in front of some stockers that they never have anything he wants and they must be doing this on purpose. I finally had enough, I told him let's go shop at a different store then. He said no, this one is cheaper. So I said fine, if you want to shop at this one then I don't want to hear you complain about it. We went back and forth a few rounds and finally I grabbed the cart and went to get at least the essentials. He caught up and complained that I was walking too fast, so I said if you don't like it, get your own cart.

I finished getting the basics, and by then both H and S has disappeared. I finished shopping, put the groceries in the car, and went back to look for them. No luck. I tried calling H's cell and it went right to voicemail. Finally I went back to the car, figured I'd sit there for a few minutes and if they didn't show up I would try to have them paged. They finally showed up, S8 announced that dad heard his phone ring and deliberately ignored it. I felt bad that S8 had to get in the middle of all that, but they had both disappeared so I didn't know where they went.

In the future, should I decide I care enough to try to bring him down from a public temper tantrum, how should I go about it? Any suggestions?

[mace17]

Thinking about it, I guess I should have validated his frustration that the store was out of an item he wanted rather than just setting boundaries right away.  I just get so frustrated by this behavior in stores and restaurants, and had enough and said so, said I wouldn't tolerate this anymore and I was leaving if it didn't stop. I guess next time I should try validating first to see if that helps, at least I've set a boundary so he knows I won't tolerate this behavior anymore.