Sort of Lost in the Supermarket

I'm almost sixty-eight years old (sound like a kid making sure to get 'and a half' in when explaining that they are six 'and a half' years old) with a compromised immune system so I'm paying attention to all the COVID-19 admonitions and advice and doing my level best to follow all the insights even when I don't fully grasp them. I'm not always mindful that it's a Brave New World out here, Winston, even if we're not out in it at the moment the way we used to be.

One of our local supermarkets, feeling the competitive pressure no doubt of an Arkansas retail chain in a business where profit margins often disappear, has a form of robo-shopping I find fascinating though the other supermarkets in town who should be feeling the same pressure have yet to go down that road.

Of course, they all have a bar-coded loyalty rewards card for the checkout and that's what this market uses with a scanner at a sort of hitching post as you enter the store to release a handheld device that's then tied to your card. I think it took me longer to explain than the process actually takes.

I can then wander the aisles, grabbing stuff I want, scanning it and putting it in bags and when I've reached the checkout, I then scan one final bar code that tells my handheld sidekick I'm done, and it transfers my order to the register with the total amount in the display. I pay and go.

This process is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint his fence for him. It's not that the groceries cost less if we do all the heavy lifting, they don't. But this system isn't designed to make our lives easier. Once upon a time in grocery stores of a bygone era, there were actual employees who took the items a colleague was ringing up, placed them in bags (eggs and loaves of bread on the bottom, canned goods, and automotive supplies then dropped on top of them) and placed those bags in your shopping cart and, if asked, would help you get that cart to your mode of transportation.

Here in the now, we've still got cashiers, baggers, courtesy desk employees, the whole kit and caboodle, who stand around as we wander the store with what looks like Star Trek weapons at the ready. All we need are the communicators over our left breast pockets. And pointy ears, I suppose (check aisle four behind the breath fresheners).

The only part we're missing, but it's probably coming, are announcements that the Metamucil truck has arrived at loading dock two and twenty-of-those-of-us-formerly-known-as-customers-but-now-called-morons, are needed to unload it, and to stock the shelves in aisle eleven. Don't laugh-that day is dawning. We'll end up playing rock, paper, scissors to decide who's unloading the home pregnancy tests (they go at the header in aisle twelve beside the KY jelly display).

The other day underscoring the perfect beast isn't quite yet where the Grocer in Charge would like it, I grabbed and scanned (in one motion; I've gotten quite proficient at this) a jar of lightly salted (with sea salt, no less) dry-roasted peanuts but, instead of a little peeps and a small green light, I got an electronic squonk and a near zen message in the device display: "The item you have scanned does not exist within your order." Oh, really? 

Hell is, indeed, other people, Jean-Paul...

-bill kenny