I am not April fooling today, though I could. Just walking through a store today was enough to convince me that we conduct ourselves like April fools 364 days a year, so this should instead be our day off.
I think I know what is happening to shopping in live stores: we can’t stand each other anymore. Now that any type of manners or decorum, or just plain common sense, has gone out the window, public shopping has become a parade of the absurd. The upper class don’t want to be talked up to, the middle class are trying to hold together what prevents them from sliding down into poverty and avoid talking altogether, and the lower class doesn’t want to be talked down to. This is why we bury our noses in our phones to avoid contact of any kind that might break the bubble of tenuous self-secure righteous pseudo-normalcy.
People shop wearing pajama bottoms, begging the question of whether they have underwear on. People shop wearing no undergarments at all, and it is obvious. People shop looking like they just came from a week at a survival camp. The children are smelly, sullen and indifferent. The senior citizens are ignored as if they are the wretched scum of the earth. Those in the middle–the 20- and 30-somethings–cling to shopping carts as if they are the only means to stay upright, the men looking like they’re on a death march and the women like prisoners in a work detail.
And yes, everybody still hates waiting in checkout lines. Instead of clerks in cattle chutes, maybe we should have checkout in each department, at a self-serve kiosk overseen by a human intervention assistant should things go wrong. Scan your item, pay for it, bag it (and have some way to seal it against padding the purchase later), and you’re on your way. The only time one would have to see an employee is to complain, which is usually what is done anyway.
Probably none of the people I saw shopping today even looked up more than a second when they voted last November, either. But that’s a subject I’m not going into today. That would be foolish.
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