The Other J. P.

Today's title is an inside joke, or maybe even more if (as I suspect) he doesn't read this stuff. 

Anyway. Attempting to explain it to you would take up far more time than it's worth so just accept it as the imponderable and probably inconsequential that it is and continue to walk this way, please. (Hands inside the ride.)

Our local supermarket, feeling the competitive pressure no doubt of an Arkansas retail chain in a business where profit margins often disappear, has gone to a form of Robo-shopping I find fascinating. You have it too, I bet; we take a bar-coded rewards card and sweep it across a reader/scanner that releases for our use a handheld device that's tied to our card. I feel like a walkon in Brave New World.

You wander the aisles, grabbing stuff you want, scanning it, and putting it in shopping bags. When you're done shopping, you head to a checkout register and scan one final bar code that tells your handheld sidekick you're past tense, and it transfers your order to the register with the total amount in the display. You pay for your order and out the door you go.

I feel so twenty-first century every time I do it, and I confess I do it every time I shop there. I'll concede the whole process is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint his fence for him. The groceries don't cost less because we do all the heavy lifting. The 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 such as transmissions 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 and then back to your abode where the unloading and putting away were your job.

We've still got cashiers, baggers, courtesy desk employees, the whole kit, and caboodle, who watch us as we wander the store with what look 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 soon, are announcements over the store PA system 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. I checked.).

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 peep 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? Hell is, indeed, other people, JP. 

-bill kenny