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.
Not justifying it, but your experience sounds like the experience of a “bad neighborhood” not a nationwide phenomenon.
It’s a shame you’re missing the bigger picture of the free fall in public trust… And the social contract is burning and I think your shopping experience might be the least impacted.
Ultimately stores can go back to the general store or (bullet proof glass) method where the clerk gets all your stuff for you. There’s also pick and and delivery options.
Making a more perfect union… That’s the hard part.
It’s not like that in most of the United States. You are cherry picking and attempting to claim the entire country is like it. It’s not.
The late Soviet Union was damned by the iconic image of people waiting in endless lines for scarce consumer goods
Even when attacking the Right, left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that “when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts.” While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism “both of the Right and Left,” individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.
M. Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds
