December 2008 – Page 3 – Hopeful Romantics

Everybody wants a slice of the pie. Pumpkin pie, that is. It is tasty and seasonal. Pumpkin pie is well worth fighting for. Just ask some of the customers at Costco.

Mumbai had its terrorists. Wal-Mart has its trampled workers. Costco has its pumpkin pie. While the world recoils at the horrible slaughter in the Indian City, or the poor guy who was run over at 5 A.M. by a brutally zealous Long Island crowd, Costco shoppers kicked off the holiday season by shoving each other out of the way in quest of the great seasonal dessert. I mean, if you can’t find your pumpkin pie at Costco, where else can you find it?

This, of course, to the saner among us is a rhetorical question. Pumpkin pie is everywhere this time of year. Albeit it, is is neither as large a pie as those served up at Costco, nor is it as cost-effective. Costco pumpkin pies are big and relatively inexpensive. When you are watching your bucks, it’s a good place to pick up three or four for the Thanksgiving dinner at a very good price. It’s not worth the risk of getting hurt for it. Not offended, but physically hurt.

There was a battle for the pumpkin pies. For dozens, it was a principle worth fighting for. They needed dessert and they were going to get it no matter who got in their way. Old women, small children, the nerdy, the needy, doesn’t matter. Keep you hands off my pumpkin pie.

You see,the Costco bakery ovens can handle a mere sixty pies an hour. That is going full tilt. This of course is usually more than sufficient. But come the holiday season when the craving comes for pumpkin pie, things are very, very different. When you have hundreds of customers standing around waiting until the next round of pies come out of the oven. And when there aren’t enough to go around, the flimsy veneer slides off the patina of civilization, and the battle is on.

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In this case, I expect some attorney will claim Costco was negligent by using bakery ovens that could only turn out sixty pies an hour. And when the Costco workers, attempting to be fair, tried to limit one pie to every party, this poor excuse sharing the wealth elevated mere negligence to cruelty and deprivation. Human rights were violated.

Human rights? Don’t laugh. Family values were violated. Every family member needs at least a couple, few slices. Piece of the pie! Isn’t that what America is all about? Otherwise, what will do with all that extra whipped cream? Because any fool knows you can’t eat the whipped cream without the pumpkin pie. You can’t have your turkey without the expectation of pumpkin pie. Lack of pumpkin pie could result in serious disillusionment and a grievous sense of loss.

Sharing was not an option. Customers elbowed and shoved each other out of the way. A melee broke out in the bakery section. People weren’t getting their pumpkin pie. And those that did, were only allowed to buy one instead of the four they were planning to have for that special Thanksgiving dinner.

I am not one to mince words about the assault on the quality of life and the decline of manners and etiquette. And certainly there are things to be said for our national obesity and smaller portions of everything would best promote the general well being. A trip through Costco should tell you that. Double wides in every aisle. Double wide shuffling through in somnambulistic stupor. Until you take away their pumpkin pie. Then they come to life.

We have heard candidates and pundits talk about the quality of life and the need to make adjustments. For the sake of our country, they say, we need to sacrifice. We have to learn to do without, and we have to think more about our neighbors. So come election night we hold hands and look to the future. We are promised change. Or not. But what we didn’t get was pumpkin pie.

By now most of the known world has read in the New York Daily News or elsewhere about the tragedy at a Long Island Wal-Mart, where an employer died after being trampled by a couple of hundred people. Apparently, he made the mistake of trying to hold them back and paid the price with his life. Other people were also injured and there was a controversial report that a pregnant woman miscarried.

If this episode wasn’t so tragic we could find it funny. There have been numerous comedy scenes in television episodes and feature films, comic strips, even, where overzealous shoppers trample each other in search of the ultimate bargain. The old comic strip, “Dagwood,” comes to mind. The artist had regular strips depicting women fighting each other, playing tug-of-war for bargain goods.

But the fact is it is pretty tragic. It is also very telling. It is telling on different levels. On one hand we can view this as a reflection of the bad economy where the need to save money has driven people to wait outside the doors of a department store for it’s special opening at 5:AM. Some stores even had special midnight openings. For a country that goes to bed after the Jay Leno or David Letterman monologue, it says something about the need to find a bargain.

It also says quite a lot about consumerism. I have to wonder, what are people doing out there at five A.M.? How much can you really care about buying something that you would stand there like cattle waiting for the doors to open so you could fight you way under fluorescent lighting to get something for your wife and kids, girlfriend, whatever? What does this really say about us, and the fact we cannot cure that disease, that we are consumer addicts.

Seventy percent of this economy if built on consumerism. We buy stuff. We buy a lot of stuff we don’t even need. We buy stuff to impress our friends. We buy dumb stuff, and in good economic times we pay a lot of money for overpriced, status seeking stuff that has the requisite branding. We don’t save; we spend. We buy. We don’t buy things that last, most of the time, anyway, we buy instead things that are fashionable. Things that we buy are built to be obsolete. We even buy quality cars that were built to last and trade them in because we are bored with them.

We are so obsessed with buy, apparently,we don’t mind elbowing and even trampling a few people to buy more stuff. Okay, so it’s the holiday. It is a holiday in the worst economy in perhaps 100 years, and here we are buying. Hang out Santa Claus and a few pretty lights, and we kick into buying mode like so many Pavlovian Dogs.
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Of course others have a different take on the incident at Wal-Mart. Some are blaming the greedy retailers for having the temerity to open their doors in the wee hours of the morning. At least for me it is a wee hour of the morning. Some are more racist in tone and issue forth deplorable comments that the writers don’t even bother couching in more acceptable, or polite, racist content. Pretty amazing.

As for the consumerism itself, it would seem a bit obsessive to be buffeted around by crowds at pre-dawn hours, waiting for a store’s doors to open. I would think you have to be nuts, but then there were so many standing there, they couldn’t all be crazy. Just sick. Sick with what, I’m not sure. And if not sick, not real logical.

The fact when the stores are stuck with unsold merchandise, say three weeks from now, they will practically be giving it away. You can waltz in, make a better deal, and walk out without fear of getting trampled. Or if you are really smart you can wait until after the holiday when they may be paying you to take this stuff out of the store. You could buy on line and save gas and sanity, life and limb. Or you can be really, really smart and be more discriminating and not get so caught up in shopping it becomes a major distraction.

Whatever you do for the holidays, this is certainly not the way to do it. If you are that bored with your life, and your life is that stale that mobbing the front of a store, in cold weather yet, seems like a good idea, perhaps you should seriously consider ceasing to populate the earth any further. We really don’t need more people, and we certainly don’t need more shoppers.

You may see the light. Or the only lights that may penetrate the huddled masses are the twinkly lights of Holiday Season. I would say Christmas, but it really has little to do anymore with the birth of Christ, Winter Solstice or whatever else you celebrate. It is about you and how much you can shop. It is about shopping, and not really so much about the giving. You shop till you drop. Or kill someone.

No matter how you see this, there is one thing you definitely won’t see standing in the middle of a department store, either at 5 A.M. or any other time where getting frazzled and frustrated is considered part of the experience. Definitely one thing you won’t see. Me.