HAVE A NICE DAY

Hell hath no fury like the American consumer. Road rage may be in fashion, but shopping rage can overtake it when someone wants money back. Eleven dollars and nineteen cents plus tax is a sum sufficient to invoke verbal brimstone as I discovered during my tenure as a volunteer for our co-operative store. Founded a quarter of a century ago, this venture, like any co-op, was designed for those of us who prefer a human texture in our surroundings to the more sterile one of most supermarkets. This is our downfall.

Aside from granola and organic tomatoes, our co-op offers classes in yoga, running, and a plethora of other topics not even thought of in the aisles of the usual shrines to cost-cutting. Our classes are generally a calming influence. Part of my weekly duties is to give customers the forms to register for a class and to direct them to the cashiers where they will pay for it. The lady who appeared one Saturday noontime for a one o’clock Feng Shui class had no need to hurry, but she quickly became irate when I told her I could not take her payment at the desk. She assaulted me with the argument that she had always paid at the desk and insisted that she was right with all the passion of a lawyer arguing a case and none of the decorum. By the time she sulked away with her form to fill out, I was so exasperated that I muttered Too goddamn bad lady, under, or almost under, my breath. Back she came, like a schoolteacher this time, with Did you make a remark? I cannot tell a lie. Yes, I said, and I shouldn’t have, but it is my nature to do so and I feel better for it. If anyone needed a meditative session in oriental philosophy, she did. I hadn’t seen a customer so angry since another lady spat at me when I told her I was not a US citizen, and did not intend to become one. It was a matter of a few weeks before the milk of human kindness ran dry again.

Being a small business, the co-op takes a harder line on returns than its corporate competitors. I fielded a telephone call at nine thirty regarding dog food. My dog won’t eat it, said the customer, can I bring it back? Following the guidelines I receive, I told her we could only offer a refund if the goods were defective. He just won’t eat it. Life can be hard for dogs as well as for people.

Three hours later the lady with her husband in tow stood before me with an opened bag of dog food which they now decided was rancid. They were clearly following the vote recount saga and were learning that no decision is ever final. I’m sorry, I said, I can’t do anything about this. They demanded to see the store manager with all the demeanor of James Baker III. The manager doesn’t deal with these problems, I told them, and he isn’t here today anyway. To show willing, I went off to find a lower court justice who was qualified to grant a verdict on the rancidity of the dog food. She wasn’t much help to them either, and pronounced the product not guilty. Wrangling continued. When it comes to eleven dollars and nineteen cents plus tax, American shoppers will stop at nothing in their quest for justice. The tone of discourse deteriorated. Only a dog, I decided, could settle the argument so I went away to look for one.

As luck would have it, someone was tabling on behalf of an animal shelter outside the store and she was accompanied by a friendly pooch. After scooping a handful of the dog food, I marched back outside to test it. No problem. The canine found nothing wrong with his snack and I came back to announce the fact. This was the signal for the ultimate threat: legal action. No effort on my part to calm the troubled waters did anything but escalate hostilities even further. I left my colleague to negotiate an out-of-court settlement while I retreated. Had we been discussing nuclear disarmament I could have understood how we had come to such a low point in relations. Florida suddenly looked peaceful compared with this little corner of counter-culture Arizona.

It seemed logical to deduce that the couple were George W. Bush supporters upset at the latest turn in events that gave Al Gore hope. Republicans shop at co-ops as well as Ralph Nader fans. I began to ponder the word co-operative, and reflected on the internal politics that pit one well-meaning faction against another within the business as it struggles to survive in the face of new competition from health food chains. Now that capitalism has caught up with the organic vision that first launched the co-op, we are not doing well. The property is to be sold, I believe, to a banking concern. So the world turns, on the high finance roundabout, and we shall just have to get used to shopping in a boring atmosphere where the sales clerks guarantee a smile with every purchase and returns are never a problem. Perhaps by then, the political scene will finally become so vitriolic that even consumers’ rage with their own dissatisfaction will fade as we become exhausted with arguing every detail of our lives.

David Chorlton

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. He enjoys listening to very old music, birding, and hiking in the Arizona landscape. Along with poems in magazines, he has a list of chapbook publications with Places You Can’t Reach (Pudding House Publications, 2006) being the latest, and recent books: A Normal Day Amazes Us (Kings Estate Press, 2003), Return to Waking Life (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2004), and Waiting for the Quetzal (March Street Press, 2006).

Email: David Chorlton

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