Shopping in the fast lane
BUG GUTS & BEAUTY
June is now here. The grass is doing its happy dance as the month begins with rain. Weed whackers and lawn mowers are crying at the sudden splurge of green. And mosquitos, blackflies, midges, and all sorts of other blood-imbibing creatures are enjoying a smorgasbord of new skin. Hello summertime!
Why is it that stores from Wally World to the Truck for the Buck stores sets their shelves on a 90-degree mark, perpendicular to the main wall of the store? Aisle after aisle the stores look the same. Yet the customers in all their glory are not squares. How about some variety?
All of us visit the various stores during the year. It’s often the one place that old friendships and new babies collide. And therein lies one of the minor if infuriating problems of shopping for two rolls of tape: Some clown decides to tell his life story to his friend at the peril of free flowing traffic everywhere else.
Wally World is humungous. Ranks of motorized scooters are mute testimony to just how large the store is. Yet, for all of its emphasis on building a community the very layout of the store impedes community development. Rank by rank bland colorless aisles are arranged in straight lines. Easy for the loss prevention officers to locate malfeasance in the motor oil or managers to harangue staff about orderly displays. Then the public comes in. All that mechanical conformity is anathema to people. Have you ever tried to catch up with an old neighbor not seen in 20 years? It takes time to go through all the cousins, uncles, babies, grandbabies, great-grandbabies, cousins, spouses, ex-spouses, and mother-in-laws, with their aches, pains, conniptions, and constipation problems. This alone is worth 20 minutes. Thirty minutes if the hearing aids are not turned on or put on. Meanwhile the poor customer who only wants a bar of soap is stuck waiting for the aisle to clear. And more often than not, what is needed is located at the opposite side of the store with no clear map of where or why to act as a guide.
There are no rest areas in Wally World. There are no rest areas in Marden’s or Kmart. There is no place to just sit down and think for a moment.
Why can’t stores put in rest stops. Places where a person can sit for a moment to figure out if the left-handed back scratchers are a better buy than the right-handed back scratchers. No place to pull over for a chat session with neighbors about dogs and fish. In the place of rest areas are massive walls of slow moving fleshy things: customers. It is enough to make a space alien whimper. Whether from desire to munch on meat or panic from the overwhelming blandness of the offerings.
Any competent fisherman can tell you that islands and oxbows are terrific for encouraging fish to grow. Some fish love to dawdle in the shade of a tree on the inner curve of an oxbow where the water is slow. Other fish love the speed of the flume as it rushes around an island. If this works in nature why is it that so many stores still rely on an artificial constructions that impede commerce?
It would be nice to have conversation spots scattered throughout the store. Places where one could sit a spell and contemplate. Certainly it would make the ordeal of shopping a bit more bearable. As the highway department can attest, rest areas help to speed traffic along. Mull on that while waiting for the two old geezers ahead of you to finish yacking about the government conspiracies and halitosis from hell. Hello summer!
Orpheus Allison is a photojournalist living in The County who graduated from UMPI and earned a master of liberal arts degree from the University of North Carolina. He began his journalism career at WAGM television later working in many different areas of the US. After 20 years of television he changed careers and taught in China and Korea.
