August 4, 2010

A Lesson In Common Sense and Decency

Yet another contribution from one of my loyal readers.

Please welcome and please enjoy one of the better posts you will ever read. I could not agree with it more. Guest Blogger Matt D. gives us all A Lesson In Common Sense and Decency.

Picture this…

You’re parched. Perhaps you’ve got a sweet tooth that’s barking at you. You swing by your friendly neighborhood convenience store and start to browse around. Ah Ha!...That’ll do it…a 32 oz Gatorade (Lemon-Lime of course). After impulsively grabbing at a box of Entenmanns Chocolate Chip cookies on your way to the check-out, you see the line is 4 deep. No worries, you’ll take a minute to decompress where you can. You’ll be at the cashier in a jiffy. Suddenly, the equilibrium of the entire situation is thrown off by the sheer greed of the clown standing directly in front of you. Get this, he decides he’s bucking the system and brazenly opens his drink prior to physically paying for it. It’s disgusting, I know….

Now, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that most of you reading this have also decided to abandon social order and do it as part of your normal shopping experience. It’s wrong and annoying…STOP!

It gets worse…

Every now and again you’ll find a shopper that deems it ‘ok’ to open a chip product or perhaps a bag of Cheez-Its while roaming through a store. Give me a break…please. It’s pretty well-known in certain circles that this eats at me like nothing else. Over the years I’ve heard it all….

- “Well, I’m going to pay for it.”
(Then it shouldn’t be an issue for you to wait until the transaction is complete)

- “But, I’m really thirsty.”
(Listen, if you’re stuck in the middle of The Gobi, I’ll cut you some slack. If not, suck it up and wait 2 minutes)

- “Lighten up, everyone does it.”
(Get a clue!)

- “The owner doesn’t care.”
(Oh yeah, have you ever asked him/her?)

- “It’s the only way to keep my kids from crying while I grocery shop.”
(Bring a bag of cheerios with you from the outside)

There’s a natural order to the way things work. You want to ride the merry-go-round, ‘you pay the quarter and the horse goes up, down and around.’ You want a meal in a restaurant, you eat and then ask for the check. You want to make a purchase at a 7-11, choose your bag of corn nuts, stand on line, pay for them, leave the store, get settled and then open them up and shove ‘em down. It’s Logic 101.

It just seems that patience went out of style with powdered wigs. Instant gratification is ‘It’ these days. It’s become the EZ Pass, the Fast Food, the Netflix, the Internet Machine, the ‘I want it now and I don’t care who I’m upsetting or what social more I’m stepping all over.’ This specific example of putting the cart before the horse is just a symptom of the epidemic. For now, let’s baby step to tackle this problem.

Step 1: Pay for things before you open them.

1 comment:

Meaux said...

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't eating at a restaurant putting the horse before the cart? Aren't you consuming the food product PRIOR to paying for it?