Two Worlds Of Joe
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:
Stores are now locking up underwear to prevent shoplifting. That’s backwards – we ought to be locking up shoplifters – but assuming Liberals will continue to own the DA’s offices so the sensible option is out, there’s still a better way to prevent shoplifting without forcing all of us to live in the gulag.
When you walk into the store, there are two doors. The door to the Right will not open without a credit card. The door to the Left is open all the time.
Inside the store on the Right, it’s a normal store. Grab a cart, walk around, browse, touch stuff, load up your cart, scan everything at the checkout which automatically bills it to the credit card you used to get in, take your stuff to your car.
Inside the store on the Left, there are touch screen kiosks like McDonalds in front of a chest-high counter topped by plexiglas. Touch the items you want to purchase. The machine spits out a ticket. When your number is called, go to the counter and pay the clerk, who gives you a receipt and passes your order through the secure pass-through door (like the Walgreens drive-through drawer, only bigger). No pay, no merchandise.
Yes, it would be possible for people on the Right to steal stuff. You could do that now, at the self-service check-out at Cub. So the store has employees watching and if you get caught, they charge it to your card and then they ban your card from accessing the store again. From now on, you pay cash on the Left side like the other thieves.Advanced options might include curbside pickup for online orders, or home delivery for a small additional fee, you know, the way things are done in an ordinary high-trust First World nation, the way America used to be. That was nice. I miss that.
Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park
This – well, the “door to the left” – was exactly how grocery stores worked, until a little over 100 years ago, when the A&P chain invented the shopping cart and accessible shelves. You went to the counter, you told the clerk what you wanted, and you waited while he/she got your stuff and bagged it up.
Of course, we had a high(er) trust society back then.
January 22nd, 2024 at 6:54 am
It is bitterly ironic to observe all the changes to society imposed by DemoCommies (with little or no pushback from Republicans/Conservatives) over the last 50, 60 years that people just accept. Unthinkingly. As if there’s nothing wrong.
Locking up product, especially underwear, as Joe mentions here, because the blindingly obvious solution to the problem in apparently too outrageous to even contemplate.
Or think about that Monty Python sketch from Life of Brian in which one of male characters wants everyone to treat him as a woman and that he wants to have a baby. It was, in its day, outrageously funny – now it’s not either, it’s encouraged, promoted, and you can be arrested in certain places for merely pointing out that it is a biological impossibility.
January 24th, 2024 at 3:06 pm
I guess if we won’t punish shoplifters, then this is what we’ve got to deal with. The funniest thing I ever saw–and pretty sad to boot–was when I lived in Waseca, and the local Hy-Vee had their pregnancy tests behind locked doors. Draw your own conclusions. I guess a lot of people were really poor, but eager to find out whether they were pregnant?
The interesting thing about the matter was that I worked at a factory that shared a building with the local welfare office, and if I took my coffee breaks in the lobby, I could watch a lot of the single moms walking from my employer to the welfare office on their breaks.