Store Wars: A New Hopelessness

The grocery store is an already crowded and panic-stricken atmosphere filled with wild-eyed shoppers with no grocery lists who are not allowed to return home without something for dinner. The easiest thing, I’ve discovered, is spaghetti. It’s real simple to make, but you shouldn’t have more than twice a week unless you want to look like big-fat Marlon Brando right before he departed the earth. Too many carbs.

One of the most frustrating things for me in the grocery store is trying to find the Q-tips. Am I insane or do they always seem to change locations every time I look for them? Sometimes they’re next to the baby food, sometimes they’re next to the soap and razors. One time I found them in the beverage aisle squeezed in between the A&W Root Beer and a six-pack of Tab. Sometimes they don’t seem to be in the store at all and I ‘m forced to use toilet paper wrapped around my pinkie finger until the next shipment of Q-tips magically reappear.

There is a nuisance, however, that has suddenly appeared in grocery stores that makes shopping even more difficult and irritating than I ever imagined. One day I was in the toiletries aisle, which was fast becoming clogged with people who had no idea what kind of toothpaste to buy or shampoo to change to because their hair was feeling a little limp lately and people were beginning to notice. My anxiety was building as it usually did in the narrow, cramped store aisle. I asked myself, “Will I ever make it out of here? If I die here will the morticians ever be able to get the panicked, bug-eyed look off my face so that I may have a proper open casket funeral without everyone thinking about how goofy I looked when I kicked the bucket. Why is dental floss so friggin’ expensive?!!! It’s FLOSS!!!”

Anyway, the toiletries aisle was now beginning to resemble a stopped up sewer pipe that was quickly filling up with poop, toilet paper and stuff you shouldn’t flush down the toilet but people do anyway, like children’s toys or empty cans of Chef Boyardee's Ravioli. One end was completely jammed by two elderly women whose carts are parked side by side while they reminisced about World War I or when they had an affair with Ben Franklin or some goddamned thing. My anxiety was quickly turning to utter panic when I noticed that several carts were part slalom style down the length of the aisle and open just enough for me to squeak by without hitting them. There was a small burst of light towards the other end so I began to race for freedom, and that’s when I saw it.

It casually, menacingly turned the corner, almost in slow motion, and effectively blocked any more light from entering the toiletries aisle. It was a behemoth, a Corellian Star Destroyer piled high with soda bottles, boxes of cookies and sugar based cereal, and some Weight Watchers Brownies because mom deserves to be decadent every once in a while without putting on the pounds. The entire cart was already on the brink of spilling out and crushing to absolute death anyone standing next to it, and yet, attached to the front of this already overloaded junk food buggy was an extended kiddie-cart that resembled a car, a Yugo I think. Or maybe it was a Honda? Two tiny, deranged looking children were in the front fighting over the steering wheel while two more kids were running around the top like a couple of squirrel monkeys in an open-air Indian food market. It looked like a cross between scenes from the Road Warrior and Deathwish. I began to panic. What did they want? Did they want fuel? Did they want my soul? Should I abandon my cart and bolt the hell out of there, never to return? The mother of these insane toddlers didn’t seem to notice that not only was she taking up more square footage than the Space Shuttle but that her lunatic offspring were causing a calamity that, in my opinion, could only be suppressed by a highly trained squadron of riot police, or perhaps Delta Force.

Is this what they called ‘shell shock’? Had these children/beasts mangled this woman’s ability to recognize when other humans are suffering as a result of the anarchistic behavior of her hell spawn? Mother Hubbard didn’t seem to give two squats or even notice that her children had almost completely taken over the toiletries aisle and were now holding three couples hostage, or that her aircraft carrier sized shopping cart was literally preventing evolution from occurring. We were all now overcome by this family of oblivious freakazoids and there was no SWAT team prepared to make entry and TAZE this family into submission, something somebody should have done long ago.

So, what do we do in this situation? STOP going to the store for fear of running into one of these roving kiddie-Death Stars? Do we really need the kiddie-cart attached to an already oversized cart in an already undersized store? If we are going to expand the size of the shopping carts why not correlate that by expanding the size of the store? Why are we using 2011 carts in 1942 shopping aisles? People were smaller a hundred years ago. Let’s try and keep up with the ever-changing human bulkiness and try and design our buildings, our restaurants booths and our airplane seats accordingly.

Grocery stores need to curtail the kiddie-cart attachment at once! This rolling menace serves no purpose either for the parent or the customer. It is a giant waste of plastic that parents stuff their disorderly, uncontrollable children so they may purchase unhealthy food that will almost surely contribute to their highly unlikable whippersnapper’s eventual imprisonment. Shopping for food doesn’t have to be a life or death experience. Shopping for food should not make a person contemplate suicide. Going to the grocery store should not be the equivalent to a death match in the octagon.

We need to solve this problem immediately so that we can move on to the problem of people who still write checks, use way too many coupons and cannot understand that 15 items or less does not mean ‘as many items as you want’.