Shopping Carts = Doom!!

by Tom Shafer

January 31, 2018

So, I’ve decided that the human race is doomed.  I know some of you are thinking, ‘Well, yeah, Rocket Man and The Donald are mismonitoring (yes, I made up a word) the helms of two regimes (and idiocies) poking fun at one another, each waiting for the other to blink.’  Or, maybe you’re thinking that without our global influence (after abandoning the Paris Climate Accord), our planet will continue to warm until every human must declare (for healthcare purposes) whether he or she prefers to be cooked medium, medium well, well, or ‘oh my Lord!’  Okay, so I can’t deny that those would be logical assumptions for a good dooming, but those aren’t the basis for MY prediction.  No, for me it comes down to shopping carts.

Yep, shopping carts.  Those of us (fourteen total that I know of) who are still driving to box stores to purchase stuff, thus wasting valuable media viewing energy, must use these “carts” to contain our stuff before stopping at a cash register.  Okay, so some of you phonials – er, millennials – are wondering what a cash register is.  It probably sounds silly to you, so twenty-first century.  Anyway, here in the rust belt, we put our groceries into these carts, take them to our vehicles, unload our items, and in a perfect world, return the carts to little corral areas designated for them.

Okay, so perhaps a history lesson is needed here.  In the heyday of the grocery industry (the 1950s to 1970s), customers would secure their purchases, then a young teenage boy (typically) would bag the items, walk them to their customers’ automobiles, and unload them into the trunks of their cars.  I was one of those young teenage boys (fourteen when I started), working at Lofino’s (our hometown grocer) for a low base wage that was supplemented with tips from thankful patrons.  Then, large, corporate-owned companies (in our world, Kroger) entered the market, and everything changed.  To keep the cost of groceries down, these companies initiated modifications to what they thought was an outdated business model.  They purchased goods in bulk for mass distribution to their stores, introduced scanners to speed up the check-out process, and streamlined personnel duties – including doing away with underage employees rendering delivery amenities.  Some companies even eliminated bagging services altogether (think Cub Foods).

Of course, all of these changes were made to create a new bottom line.  Kroger (and others) provided inexpensive groceries in exchange for scaled-down customer service.  And, we accepted this arrangement.  We decided that we would purchase our Pringles and malted milk balls, place them in a corporate-provided cart, bag them with recently created polyethylene packaging (much cheaper than their paper counterparts), load them into our own vehicles, then return the cart to its little area.  Outside of the small issue dealing with absolute annihilation of the hometown grocer, this arrangement worked out well for both consumer and corporation.

Until now.  I don’t think it started with a protest against “the man” – in this case, these new mega corporations.  Perhaps it was weather related – nasty thunderstorms or frigid blizzards.  I suppose it doesn’t matter how it started.  But, at some point when no one was watching (except the poor employees who had to retrieve them), carts were being found outside their designated cart corrals.  At the beginning, they were few in number, some even easily explained: octogenarians who simply didn’t have the poop to return them or big winds pushing them all over the lot.   Then, busy people (“time is money”) started leaving them, and moms with broods of children (“Timmy, if you hit your sister one more time . . .”).  Then anarchists and rebels joined the fray, railing against the corporate covenant “thou shalt return shopping carts to their designated areas.”

If it had ended there, I wouldn’t be sounding the doomsday alarm (though I have lobbied the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the Doomsday Clock from two minutes to midnight to one and a half minutes to midnight).  But it didn’t end there.  Now, normal (and abnormal) people are leaving carts next to their cars or pushing them onto random sidewalks.  You now see lonely carts everywhere, abandoned at bus stops and swimming (poorly) in ditches.  At one time, most box stores maintained just a couple of cart corrals, but now, these corrals are taking up one of every five spaces (an approximation based on alternative facts).  And yet, fewer and fewer carts are being corralled.

• 

I submit to you that this is the first crack in the fabric of civil humanity – or human civility (purposeful mixed metaphor – which was the name of my junior high punk-philharmonic band).  Many call it sloth (except sloths), some call it indolence, others call it laziness.  Still others give up because it’s all so tiring – that and that Game of Thrones show is coming on.  But if we are too lazy to make the minimal effort of escorting a cart twenty feet to a designated corral, then what’s next.  Self-driving cars so we can play video games or check Facebook pages while we travel to work?  Robots serving us breakfast in the morning or doing our laundry?  A computer assistant that can turn on our lights or play our “mix” music?  I mean, why think for myself when Alexa can do it for me – and better?

Yep, the human race is doomed.  And what does a good dooming look like?  If you’ve already given up your brain – well, and the rest of your body – to technological advancements, then just troll your iPhones or ask Alexa for apocalyptic glimpses in these fine futumentaries: The Terminator, The Matrix, and WALL-E.  These futuristic studies should serve as a siren call to the indolent, the lethargic, and the slothful.  We should not submit to these technologies that claim to make our lives easier.  Our time has not run out.  We can turn this around!  We can drive our own cars, do our own laundry, think our own thoughts, even return our shopping carts . . . ah, who am I kidding.  Enjoy your dooming!!

•