Where did all the empathy go?

Let's start with my favourite bugaboo, odd behaviour in grocery stores.

WHY do people care what the regular price is when an item's on sale? What does it matter? Do you actually buy things based on how much money you think you're saving, as opposed to what the price actually is?

(Don't answer that. Every time yogurt, for example, is on sale, I'll mix up my display. One time I'll put the vanilla yogurt on the second shelf and the peach yogurt on the bottom. I'll sell a whole bunch of vanilla yogurt and almost no peach. Next time I'll reverse it...and sell tons of peach yogurt and hardly any vanilla. Which tells me people don't actually care what flavour they buy...they're so lazy they won't even look for the one they want.)

Related, and something I've harped on before but will mention again now that we're in a recession: if something's on sale and you don't normally buy it, IT'S NOT A DEAL. No matter how cheap it is. Amazing how many people don't seem to get that. You're spending money you wouldn't normally spend. Now, hey, I'm not going to stop you from spending money in my store, but I do have an ulterior motive: those "deals" cost the store a huge amount of money. We all resent the "cherry pickers" who roam from store to store buying up specials and nothing else. On the consumer side of the till, it makes perfect sense: I'm saving money. (If you discount what you're paying in gas and value your time at zero dollars an hour, that is.) But from our point of view, the cherry-pickers piss us off to no end. It's not that they're cherry-picking per se: it's that without fail, the cherry-picker is the loudest, most obnoxious asshole in the place. You can't win these people as loyal customers no matter what level of customer service you provide, and God help you if you're out of stock on that one critical item the cherry-picker came for. (Why are you out of stock? Because of gangs of roving cherry-pickers, of course!)

Seriously. These folks, more often than not, have no understanding of the words we reserve the right to limit purchases to reasonable family requirements. Those words are printed in every grocery store flyer. But the hotter the deal, the more likely we'll see people trying to explain how 240 cans of soup is quite reasonable, or twenty cases of bottled water (30 bottles to a case), or, most recently, ten 2-pack Delissio pizzas. 

All the carts  are outside our store. Probably a hundred or more times a day, a shopper will get a cart, fill it up, proceed through the checkout and then leave the cart in the passageway between till and door rather than put the cart back where she got it. It's not like she has to go out of her way to return that cart. So she's not lazy, she's rude.

Here's lazy and rude: stuffing your frozen fish behind the cereal on the shelf. Or putting your lettuce in the freezer, or your ice cream in the pile of apples, or any number of variants we see constantly. As I've said before, the penalty for this should be some sort of random scattering of the contents of your fridge and freezer throughout your home. I can't begin to tell you how common this idiocy is. 

What I really don't get is the logic chain. What goes through your head as you're walking past the soup that makes you think I don't need this lamb chop any more? And why wouldn't you give the lamb chop to the cashier (since you're going that way anyway)? If people actually knew how much food gets tossed out every day because of this, maybe they'd think twice. Never mind that, maybe they'd think once. 

COUPONS. I HATE COUPONS. They're not very common in Canada, certainly nowhere near the volume you see in the United States, but we do have books of vendor coupons placed in our store by a third party. And the reaction's always the same. I've seen a book of a hundred coupons last less than five minutes on the shelf. Nobody takes just the one coupon, even though they're usually only buying one unit and pretty much every coupon is limit one per transaction. No, they figure they'll grab a two-year supply of coupons which expire at the end of next month. I'm positive that 80% or more end up in the garbage...which is probably why there aren't as many coupons in Canada, come to think of it.

I shouldn't really say this behaviour makes no sense, because all of it makes perfect sense if you simply remove empathy from the picture. Fuck the other guy, I've got MY coupons. Who cares if that ice cream melts all over the place? I won't have to clean it up! Hey, a cart with a baby seat. I haven't got a baby, but I DO have a purse. Why would I even imagine some mother might need that cart more than I do?

WHY DON'T PEOPLE CARE ANY MORE?

This may sound harsh, but I believe that such a display of inhumanity marks you as inhuman. Even our pets have empathy--just watch your dog react the next time you're in pain. But these customers care nothing for anyone but themselves.

The behaviour I see every day is deeply unsettling as we leave the calm waters of prosperity further and further behind. If you can find an old-timer who grew up in the Dirty Thirties, ask him or her about the community and you'll hear tales of pitching together, looking out for each other and self-sacrifice, values that today are branded as hopelessly antiquated. It's been said that the new Golden Rule is he who has the gold makes the rules. Well, gold's getting increasingly hard to come by: perhaps we should revert to the old one. I know, it sounds so corny...treat others the way you wish to be treated. Others? There are others?

In an esoteric but very real sense, no, there aren't, and that's the whole point of the Rule. A New Ager would say things like we are all One and You are All That Is...if that strikes you as ludicrous, change it up slightly: We are all together and There is only us. 

That last is undeniably true, at least until we discover the aliens. We are all on this tired old Earth together and as Marcus Aurelius said, what benefits the hive benefits the bee.

Some thought systems call it karma--you reap what you sow. I don't really believe in karma as an independent spiritual principle--it seems too arbitrary and unforgiving, for one thing--but I do believe that the attitude you display towards others will be reflected back to you. 

If I could make but one change in the world, it would be to dial up the empathy. To let people hang out in the minds of others for a while, just to see what it feels like. Dial up the empathy and you'll improve the general situation in some small way...if enough of us do it, we'll see a huge impact.