Let’s Dance With Our Shopping Carts
In 1936, a shopping magnate named Sylvan Goldman was thinking about how only so many goods could be piled into one basket. “If there were some way we could give that customer two baskets to shop with and still have one hand free to shop,” Goldman said later, “we could do considerably more business.”
One night, Goldman had an idea. Working late in his office, his attention was drawn to two ordinary folding chairs. He wondered what if one chair was placed on top of another? What if a basket was placed on top of each seat? What if it had wheels? The modern shopping cart was born. They are so iconic and familiar that we don’t usually think “Oh, they had to have been invented,” but everything has a history.
I have spent my last twenty three working years, and thus my Thanksgivings and the days leading up to them, in the grocery industry at store level. Those shopping carts are full right now, making Goldman’s point. Aisles are jammed and shelves and coolers need constant love and attention. Food, abundance and celebration are in everyone’s face.
This is also a place that affords the close observer ample opportunity to watch people and, in some cases, get to know them well and even develop friendships. That’s a benefit of the job, right up there with health insurance, a discount on food and short-term disability.
There’s a little-known tendency of a shopper pushing a cart or carrying a basket in front of you (as a worker in the store) to turn in whatever direction you want to turn, every time, as if telepathically tied to you and your thoughts. You’re trying to get by on the left, the customer goes left. You then aim right, the shopper veers that way. My term for that is “customer drift” and I am experiencing it daily as we approach the single busiest period in any grocer’s calendar.
There’s still time to talk a little bit as we work together, however. Three of us were in the soup aisle the other day, straightening shelves, and I asked one young co-worker if the date November 22 meant anything to him. He looked puzzled and I said “It’s not a test. I’m just wondering.” He said no and asked why. I replied it was the date in 1963 when President Kennedy was shot and killed. The other guy, my coeval, said oh, yeah, that’s right. It’s one of those dates that shows up unforgettably like Christmas or some relative’s birthday. Yet, to a large percentage of Americans, born long enough after the event, it’s like ancient history.
Here is Thanksgiving and here is the JFK assassination. Day of celebration, day of mourning. Full shopping carts, a gigantic tear in the nation’s psyche. How like our lives? How to reconcile?” Stephen King, master of the macabre, actually had this to say about it. “We did not ask for this room or this music; we were invited in. Therefore, because the dark surrounds us, let us turn our faces toward the light. Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty…We did not ask for this room or this music. But because we are here, let us dance.”
