I was sure it was going to come to blows. The young guy and the old guy, circling each other in the grocery store parking lot, performing that age-old dance of threatened predators; two wolves, sizing each other up, ready to go for the throat at the first sign of weakness.
The fight wasn’t over a woman, or money, or even politics and religion. The fight was over a shopping cart.
A few minutes earlier, the young guy had rolled his cart to his pickup truck, loaded in a couple bags, and then hopped in the truck and started it up.
“Hey,” shouted the old guy, who was parked two cars down the aisle. “You going to just leave that cart there?” He glanced pointedly at the “cart corral” less than 20 feet away.
The young guy in the truck, heavily tattooed and muscled, appeared neither intimidated nor shamed.
“No,” he said simply. “I ain’t. So what?”
The old guy, skinny as a rail, but with that hard-pan look of a veteran scrapper who’s seen more than his share of conflict and backed away from none of it, shook his head.
“So, your cart might hit someone’s car,” he said, adding an epithet unsuitable for print in a family newspaper. “That’s what.”
The young guy, clearly unhappy at being referred to by that particular word, stepped out of his truck and asked the old guy if he had a problem. He then added several unprintable words of his own to the conversation.
And the two began circling, fists clenched, eyes squinted in fairly passable Clint Eastwood impersonations, just daring each other to be the first to take a swing. The conversation quickly devolved into a series of unprintable nouns, interspersed with an occasional verb that served only to make the nouns even more unprintable.
Eventually, the young guy decided the old guy wasn’t worth violating his parole over; he climbed back in his truck and roared away in a black cloud of diesel smoke. The old guy called after him (though not too loudly) that yeah, he’d better run. Then he pushed the offending cart the 20 feet to the corral, got in his own car, and drove off, presumably to administer parking lot justice elsewhere.
I thought about the two of them all the way home, not sure which, if either, I should have been rooting for.
The old guy was right; the abandoned cart could well have scratched someone’s car. But, I reasoned, when did proper cart care become the purview of the customer? Long before they started making us scan and bag our own groceries, fore sure, but not THAT long ago.
At one time, stores hired human beings to do things like handle bottle returns, ring up groceries, bag groceries and — yes, kiddies, it’s true! — push the cartload of groceries to your car for you, load them in, and then push the empty cart back to the store. In exchange for these wondrous amenities, customers gave the store their business.
This not only made for happier customers and a more pleasant shopping experience, it created jobs for lots and lots of people, who in turn could then afford to shop at the stores that provided the nice services. It was a wonderful system that has been all but eradicated by greedy corporate types best described by some of the unprintable nouns uttered previously by the old guy and the young guy.
It’s against the law to advocate the violent overthrow of the government. But advocating the overthrow of a huge, impersonal grocery store chain remains — for the time-being, at least — legal. It is perfectly legal to leave your cart in the middle of the lot, where a job will be created by the guy who has to gather it back into the store.
It’s perfectly legal to leave your empty bags and cartons lying on the floor of the automated bottle-return room. The store will be forced to hire someone to clean it up, thus creating another job!
It’s altogether legal to line up 30 carts deep at the few checkout lanes still manned by human cashiers. It’s annoying and inconvenient to wait, sure, but it will send a clear message to the store’s nefarious owners: hire more humans!
If nothing else, this sort of concerted protest could help eliminate future parking lot brawls between old guys and young guys.
Vive le révolution!
Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com or visit Reality Check’s online home at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.
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