Which Way To Your Car?

Which way to your Car?

In northern California, we have a chain of grocery stores called Raley’s. It was at a Raley’s that I first noticed a very disturbing trend which I now notice at numerous retailers and locations.

Once you have completed your shopping and you make your way to the register, a nice, typically clean cut teenager eagerly awaits your arrival at the end of the checkout counter like a gerbil waiting for a small treat. Once they bag all your items (in your choice of paper or plastic), they politely take your loaded shopping cart and ask “Which way to your car, sir?”

Which way to your car? The first time I heard this I was a bit taken aback. Why was she asking? Was she planning on coming home with me? Did one of the many coupons I used have a small disclaimer on it: “This coupon gets you $0.02 off detergent and your own angst-ridden teenie bopper!”

Then I realized that what she was actually asking me was if I would like help out to my car with my grocery bags. Suddenly I was thrown into a tizzy of emotions. Was she implying that I appeared too weak to push my own shopping cart? Was this her way of flirting with me? Did she suspect that perhaps I was someone a little “special” and simply needed a little more help? Or, worse yet, being a Muslim male of Middle Eastern descent, perhaps this was a new form of national security! Damn you Patriot Act for keeping dibs on what kind of Ho-Ho’s and tator-tots I buy! Damn you!

In an ever increasingly competitive market place, Raley’s has decided that to justify providing regular groceries at inflated prices, it has to provide something else. Something to make you feel special and to make you feel like someone more important than you actually are. (Let’s face it…if you have the time to sit and read this, you are not that important…sorry.) Who wouldn’t like to have their groceries taken out for them and loaded into their car. Who wouldn’t like to be followed around by a servant-like youth, being paid to be your personal grocery store bell-hop.

And for some people, this service could be a life saver. Quite often I will see a mother wrangling four or five screaming cherubs through a parking lot while at the same time pushing a cart filled to the brim with a weeks worth of diapers and Gerber to the trusty family minivan. For someone like this, having someone to bring her groceries out is a fantastic service. For little Ms. Homemaker, having a young high school football player in a grocers uniform to carry her big heavy bags out to her car safely and securely is brilliant and a godsend.

Sadly, this isn’t what this is being used for. Rather than being implemented for functionality, it is simply another extension of our own narcissistic tendencies and desires. I can’t tell you how many times I have observed a 30 something year old man strutting through the parking lot like the big rooster in the hen house while a sweating, panting 16 year old lass weighing 90 pounds dripping wet pushes his cart filled to the brim with body building protein powders, tofu nuts and the latest edition of Men’s Health magazine.

Sure, he’ll spend countless dollars on fitness plans, gadgets and diet shakes. Sure, he’ll spend more time at the gym in a week than he’ll spend volunteering in his lifetime. Sure, he’ll run 15 miles on his treadmill while watching the latest dribble from the Faux News Network (oops…did I spell that wrong?). And yet, when it is time to push a little shopping cart 50 yards to his waiting Hummer, he has to call in the cavalry. Did he need help loading the cart in the first place? Nope. Did he get tired bagging all these wonders of the modern world himself? Not at all…didn’t have to lift a finger. So why does he need a little waif to push his cart to the parking lot?

Simple: It makes him feel important. It makes him feel special. We are a culture so based on the overwhelming, burning desire to feel like we are important and unique and essential individuals that we will spend more money on the same groceries just so we can have someone carry out groceries to our car. We will belittle someone else because that just means that there is one more person that we are ahead of. That’s one more person that we are ahead of. No matter how crappy my life is, at least I’m not pushing someone else’s groceries across a steaming hot parking lot! In your face young, disenfranchised youth!

Let’s get real. Take your own groceries to your car. Load your car yourself. Be your own person and stop subjecting others to hardship just because you need to feel that much better for yourself. Do you want to feel better about yourself? Do you want to feel like you are important? Instead of making this little high school student work for minimum wage carrying your groceries, go volunteer at a shelter. Go spend time with the elderly. Go down to the SPCA and volunteer to play with and tend to the animals. Or better yet, go to your local school or community center where this same teen could spend some amount of time bettering herself and preparing her for a better, more productive life as an adult so she doesn’t have to be a 70 year old Wal-Mart greeter.