Hi all!

So the other day I was in Wal-Mart (a fact I’m not proud of. I usually champion the little guy but I currently have no money) and I was witness to a scene that I found quite amusing. In fact, it made me laugh out loud in the faces of the people involved.

You know how all stores have central aisles and branching off from those at ninety degree angles are secondary aisles? And you know how at the end of the secondary aisles they’ll have special products or displays set up in the central aisles designed to catch the eye of unwitting shoppers? Well, my story takes place around one of those displays. When I worked for Blockbuster Video they were called ‘end caps’. If you ever have or currently are working retail then you know what I’m talking about.

Let me set the scene. I had a selection of inexpensive “mom and pop store destroying” items in my hands and was walking towards the one thru fifteen item checkouts. While walking down one of the central aisles there was a woman a few paces in front of me pushing a shopping cart. In front of her standing in the central aisle was another lady looking at an ‘end cap’ display of items from the pharmacy department. I believe it was a selection of pain killers such as Tylenol and Aspirin.

Well, as the woman with the shopping cart approached the lady who was looking at the analgesics the lady who was contemplating killing her pain stepped two paces back, away from the display to allow the woman with the shopping cart to pass. I thought in my head, ”How kind for her to do that.” Well…

Instead of the woman with the shopping cart passing in front of the lady looking at that tantalizing display of pills she stopped and parked her shopping cart right in front of that pharmaceutical ’end cap’ in the space where the lady had previously stood. Then she abandoned her cart and descended down one of those secondary aisles that I mentioned earlier.

I know what you’re thinking,”How rude!”. That’s what I would have said. I would have loudly called “Bullshit!” on the woman with the shopping cart.

Tell that to the lady who had stepped out of the way to accomodate said woman with the shopping cart. I’ll be damned if she didn’t try to read the pill packages through the grating of the woman’s shopping cart! She must have had x-ray vision.

I found it outrageous that she would allow her courtesy to be treated with such disrespect. Did she say, “Hey! What’choo doin’? Biatch!” Nope. She stood there and tried to continue her shopping through the now inconvenient bars of a shopping cart. I burst into laughter at the ridiculousness of the situation. More for how it was allowed to continue rather than at its coalescence.

What the hell is wrong with people? Has it become too costly to be courteous? Has it become too dangerous to defend yourself? Had I been that lady who graciously made room for the woman with shopping cart I would have taken that now parked cart and run it to one of the far corners of the store. That woman’s rudeness warranted some kind of action but none came. As it stands, that lady thought the rudeness and the inconvenience of a visual distraction were acceptable so she carried on like nothing had happened ignoring the shopping cart like it was invisible.

At the time I thought “I should say something”. I wanted to get in the face of the woman with the shopping cart and ask just exactly what she thought she was doing creating this kind of discord with another human being and had she “any inkling of what she’d done by leaving her cart where she’d left it”? Did she realize just how rude she was being?

As it turns out I was too busy laughing my ass off about the whole thing to bother.

Cath and I have made a sort of unofficial pact of non-involvement.  We see people treating each other like dirt on a daily basis and frankly we’re fed up with seeing it. That being said we’re also not their keepers nor should we expect to be or be expected to be by others. When the difficulty is directed at us, we’ll deal with it. When two or more people external to ourselves are having difficulties then it’s up to them to resolve it. We’re adhering to the Mahatma Ghandi ideal of ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’. We’ll lead by example but we won’t be referees.

Rudeness is definately on the rise in our society. I don’t know if we’ve just grown too large and have too many people to care about each other anymore. Maybe people are just jerks and now that people have a bit of anonymity due to our size as a society they’re emboldened about expressing their true natures with little or no fear of repercussions. I don’t know.

Well, I’ve said my piece. I don’t want to harp on about rudeness anymore. I could go on forever. I’ll leave you with this one last thought, don’t be someone’s doormat. If rudeness should come knocking at your door make sure you choose to defend yourself against it. No one else will do it for you.

For now, that is all. Goodnight.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Articles, Rants, on LIFE . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.