Your Employees Are Too Helpful

Today, I went to a local grocery store to pick up a few things. Now, this particular store is part of a national chain that I normally don't frequent. Perhaps I have missed the revolution amongst management, but last time I checked, wandering into a Safeway didn't amount to being in a family reunion where everyone wants to help you find produce.

Within the space of five minutes, not one but seven employees had accosted me with their plasticky greetings. I was preyed upon manhandling a peach, gazing at chicken wings, and peering down an aisle. I was looking at a label, considering a magazine, avoiding the liquor section. I was walking somewhere.

Wanting desperately to hunt down the leader of this Stepford salesclerkism, I pictured standing by the popsicles, and intoning in all seriousness, "Sir: your employees are too helpful!" I'd drive home the point: "If your employees keep talking to me this frequently, I am going to have to stop shopping here!" But would he understand?

After all, this is the kind of press that I imagine is the ultimate goal: that luxury and satisfaction are married in the long walk to the checkout aisle. As someone that prizes anonymity and feels more than capable--even desireous--of the hunt that is part of buying food, the thought that I'd want someone less versed in my particular foodisms picking out my dinner with me makes me cringe. I may not hunt wild boar or pluck blackberries from their earthen nest, but I am capable of filling a sack or two. Isn't that what having freedom of choice is about: I worked for the money that I then choose to use on what I will?

But these pizza-peddling Pollyannas are trained to comment even as I fork over a twenty. One gropes my Ben & Jerry's; another makes the "Mm-m-mm" noise as she piles my wings into a bag. Like a coyote, I want to find kill and eat in silence and without help. I claw home, gnaw off the lid and let my wolfen tongue pile on the mintyness. Give me what little dignity, in this world, I have left.