Adventures in Retail

Politically, I lean toward the libertarian and the conservative, in the belief that it's better to let people figure out things on their own than impose some sort of top-down Soviet-style rule commanded by "experts." I also generally hold to the hope that people will act like adults if you treat them like adults.

Working at a large retail store is utterly destroying that belief. Because people are pigs.

Virtually all I do, all day long, is pick up after them. I remember in one Diner podcast about New Year's Resolutions (either this year or last), Lileks mentioned that one resolution was to put stuff back on the proper shelf in Target rather than just dropping it at random anywhere in the store. He meant it as a joke, but I actually started to get mad.

Because that's all I do. I find frozen food that someone didn't want hidden among the bottles on the shampoo shelf, now warm and ruined. I find full carts of stuff picked up at random by teenagers with nothing better to do, abandoned in the corner of the store, and now I've got to put all that stuff back. At the end of the day, you cannot walk through the shoe aisles, because the floor is so littered with shoes. One shopper yesterday set up shop in the patio furniture section, setting up chairs for himself and someone else, plus an end table, and then proceeded to tear open a box containing a wire mesh firepit and partially assemble it on the floor of the store. I found the half-assembled firepit, surrounded by cardboard and plastic strewn heedlessly about, abandoned without a word.

People are pigs.

But it is fun to laugh at them sometimes. A dude in the store yesterday was looking at a grabber, one of those aluminum things to extend your reach (not this one, but similar). And his kid, maybe three or four, is sitting in the shopping cart, and Dad is grabbing his arm with the thing, and the kid's going, "Do it again. Do it again."

And then, in that loud shouting voice that kids use as a default because they think it's the only way they can get attention (and it may be true), the kid yells, "Dad, grab my pee-pee with it. Dad, grab my pee-pee!"