The Waukesha Sewer Raccoon News was recently informed by Waukesha sewer raccoons themselves that there is an encampment of hoboes on the northeast bank above Frame Park, cooking, using a metal shopping cart as their grill. This was of sufficient interest to dispatch a photographer to get a picture, shown above.
The reporting raccoons thought this was veritable raccoon-like behavior and they were proud to tell the story. Their only complaint, they said, was that they are not of sufficient size to use a deserted shopping cart as a cooker themselves. The coons go about with much smaller gunny-sacks over their shoulders, gathering what their stature allows: bottle caps, bits of shiny glass, pieces of metal bent just so, wind-fall apples, and the occasional street-jettisoned cold pizza.
There was a feature article in this, we conjured.
Not long ago we heard of a young woman who snapped a shoe-string, and considered going on-line to order a new pair of shoes. Her roommate chided her. "Why not just go and buy a new pair of shoe-strings? It would be a lot cheaper."
The hipped woman decided that was right and sensible. She went to Walmart for the shoe-strings. A congenial geriatric gently rolled one of their cavernous carts up to her, and she took it. As she rolled the cart toward the shoe department she realized how foolish she was to push the big cart when she could easily carry the shoe-strings in one hand.
Due to her age she wasn't aware that in the 40's and 50's the great Atlantic and Pacific (A&P) stores inaugurated the shopping cart, supposedly for their customers' convenience. With the carts, shoppers could carry more stuff than what they could hold in their arms or put into their brought-in shopping bags that would just have to be emptied at the counter. That led to the proliferation of omnipresent carts, and the need of paper shopping bags.
Unbeknownst to the sheep-like customers, the store managers, who at that early time hung out in elevated cubicles behind one-way glass supposedly to keep an eye out for thievery, were really watching the buying habits of their customers, and rubbing their grasping mercantile hands together, grinning and salivating at the increased profits their checkers were ringing up.
So much for customer convenience.
Skip ahead to today's era. Now the carts are outlandishly huge. They and the bags are all one size: BIG. Because the shoppers' wants, behavior modified, are BIG. The parking lots outside the stores have designated aisles for the carts that now neatly-fold into each other; the loads of just-bought goods are hoisted into commodious SUV's and mini-vans. Or double-cab pick-ups.
The shoe-string buyer pushed her cart around shopping (shop-shop-shop) customers at the Walmart store, bent on getting her laces, and that was all. Period. OK, she thought briefly about getting some of those colorful, well-illustrated snack food sacks for her chums back at the dorm, but she resisted. And she lingered to study a rack of "On-Sale" sweaters. Then she espied some AA batteries. She could always use more of them. But she resisted everything, got to the shoe-string department and dropped the tiny parcel into the yawning and much-hungrier cart.
Keeping her eyes focused straight ahead she worked her way through other masses of alluring merchandise to the check-out counter. She passed the last-minute display of candy bars and gum( and more AA batteries) just ahead of the conveyor ramp at the cash/check/credit card register. How many tons of stuff went down those conveyors each day she did not wonder, but she dropped her teensy shoe-string packet on the gobbling rubber belt that made to effortlessly move considerably more weight than shoe-strings.
The checker peered at the shoe-strings. "Is this ALL you're buying?
The sucessful shopper victoriously answered, "YES!" YES!!!!
"Wow," the money-handler said. "This is definitely my smallest sale of the day!"
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Thanks to the sewer raccoons for the news of the hobo shopping cart grill! SR News advice: Take a shopping list and stick to it. Carry a hand-basket.
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