Many decades ago, humans developed a process by which they could go into a store, pick an item off the shelf, and pay for it at the checkout counter. A few years ago, we lost it. Now you ring a buzzer, wait for an overworked employee to unlock an item that costs $5.99, and navigate the emotional complications of feeling like both a suspected criminal and an entitled ass.

The late Soviet Union was damned by the iconic image of people waiting in endless lines for scarce consumer goods. When we look back at the dying days of America, perhaps we’ll think of waiting in dots, surrounded by plentiful products locked away because our bosses fear and loathe us so much they have forgotten how selling things works.

Why has our society gone backward in this small but really annoying way? Surely there must have been an epidemic of shoplifting? No, there really wasn’t. Instead, the great lotion lockup was a corporate moral panic, which has been a disaster for their profits and for the rest of us a degrading enshittification of running basic errands.

It’s far from the most important way our lives have gotten worse, but it might be the most pointless – which makes it useful for understanding so much else about a moment in history defined by breathtaking self-sabotage.

What’s happened to going to the Walgreens or Target is a store-sized version of what’s happened to living in America. It’s the experience of being subject to the decisions of a ruling class that responds to every challenge with authoritarianism, greed, and the same levels of poise and wisdom as an inbred Pomeranian.

Equally ominous is a new system being developed by CVS, in which customers with the company app can unlock shelves from their phones. If this plan spreads throughout the industry (and of course it will), picking up a product with your own hands will become a privilege you can only have in exchange for giving more personal information to the company.

Will this be the final, camel-back-breaking, indignity? How far will we let these stores degrade us before we rise up to free the shampoo? I don’t have the answers, but I have to think that the arc of history bends back towards being able to touch a stick of deodorant.