Ep. 49: "A Red Light in a Strange Town"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Well...
I woke up this morning.
I went downstairs.
You know, you and I pushed back the beginning of our podcast as a matter of routine.
As you do.
But I always assume that you are pushing back the start time because you have many things to do in the morning.
You have to get some hot dogs.
You have to go to the...
Post office.
Walgreens.
Walgreens.
You have to go to Walgreens.
I am always pushing it back because I'm still asleep.
And I look at my phone and I go, oh God, it's time to do it.
I push back, push back.
So this morning I went downstairs.
I made a pot of coffee.
I realized I didn't have any cream.
And so I had to use vanilla ice cream.
And as good as that sounds, I don't like to start my day with vanilla ice cream in my coffee.
That's nice as an option when it comes up and you're in the mood, but, I mean, that's like having to eat popcorn for breakfast.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
I'm not celebrating this.
I mean, there's a vanilla taste now to my coffee, and that is a little bit like sissy coffee.
Sissy coffee.
And it's...
It screws up your coffee workflow because you're introducing – well, I don't have to tell you this.
You're living it.
You're introducing a whole new level of temperature and flavor and texture.
There's a greasy texture now to it?
Oh, absolutely.
That's the xanthan gum talking.
And did you make your coffee any differently?
I'm guessing you made your – you make great coffee.
Did you make it any different?
Thank you.
No, seriously.
It's amazing how fast you can make it.
And so did you realize at the time that you were going to have to use the ice cream?
Did you plan that?
No, that's the thing.
I did not prepare.
It was already done.
It was hot and in the pot ready to drink.
Yeah.
I didn't prepare the coffee in any way.
I don't even know how I would have done that.
So you had a clock running.
I did.
I was like, coffee's going.
I'm ready.
I'm going to put some clothes on out of respect for our listeners.
And out of respect for you, Merlin.
Thank you.
And then I got some clothes on and I got my mug of coffee, which says Spatenbrau Munchen on it.
And it was all full of coffee, and I go, oh, there's no cream.
And I mean, I can drink black coffee, but it's not how I prefer it.
And so ice cream.
You know, I think if I had not been so sleepy, if I had had a second to think about it, I would have said...
I would have foregone the ice cream and just had black coffee, but I made a snap decision.
And now I'm drinking xanthan gum.
It's all about... Yuck, it starts with an X. That's the way to start your mind.
X is a post-noon letter.
Yeah, we had kind of a white funk band called xanthan gum in the mid-90s, but it never took off.
They were white, huh?
Well, I was in it.
What'd you play?
I don't remember.
i i think there's something to this though john and it's it's about expectations like for me once that coffee the reason i ask you if there's a clock running is like to me once that coffee has dripped and it's going yeah personally i'm in a different state of mind like no matter how tired i am on some level if i get up and the first thing i realize is i don't have cream half and half in my case like that is going to factor slightly into it like you can't walk to your 7-eleven where the junkies are you you would have to get in a hoopty and drive there right
But still, I mean, you might from the outset say, well, I need to make some different decisions.
Maybe I should have a very strong tea.
Well, maybe I should live in a different place because there is a bodega two blocks from my house.
Is it licensed?
It's a licensed bodega.
And I walked in there the first week I lived here.
And there was a Korean kid sitting behind the counter playing a video game.
And I said, where's your half and half?
And he looked up and said, what's half and half?
Jesus Christ.
And they literally don't have half and half there because it's one of those bodegas that sells Faygo menthol cigarettes.
And lottery tickets.
And lottery tickets and like 75 different kinds of malt liquor.
It's really more of a juggalodago.
It's a juggalo bodega.
You can't have milk.
One milk in here that isn't flavored with strawberry quick.
And he's like, listen, man, I just – my folks own this place.
I'm just waiting to get out.
John, you know me.
I don't like to work ping pong, but I'm just saying.
This sounds like something from a rejected Spike Lee movie.
You're in the African-American – well, you're in a very diverse part of town to put it factually, right?
You're the only white person in the entire part of your county.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
No, in fact, my county – Aren't you in a desperately, ridiculously, insanely, impossibly diverse neighborhood?
It is literally – and you know how I don't misuse that word?
No, never.
It is literally the most diverse county in America, which means that there are just as many white people here as there are South Pacific Islanders.
or Native Americans, or any group you could care to name, there is an equal number of that group demographically.
And that bears out even on my block.
So you take Westchester County, New York, as a pie graph, and there's going to be probably a pretty big white piece.
Yeah.
There's 80% white people, 20% Jews, and 0.3% other.
Just for my card, you break out the Jewry?
You break them out in a pie graph?
I don't have a problem with it at all.
Do you do Sephardic versus Ashkenazi?
I think they would do that in Westchester County just to give the appearance of diversity.
Here in Seattle, I don't think you would count Jews as a separate group.
You don't need that.
Does it look like a clock?
I mean, are there like perhaps 12 slices?
I mean, I guess there are.
That's right.
Is that right?
Because, you know, the West Coast is a very diverse area in the first place because we have had numerous waves of migration from not only from Europe, et cetera, but from Asia and points beyond.
We got sushi first here.
That's right.
We have the best Thai food in America here in Seattle.
So but but there's also I mean, I think you I think they actually break this pie graph here down into like, OK, you know, these are the Tongans and these are the Samoans and we're registering.
That might all be the same slice of pie in a lot of places.
In a lot of places, you would – South Pacific Islanders would not even rate a slice of the pie.
They would be lumped in with other.
But here they're – Well, think how long it's been that – you remember – this is actually, I think, becoming kind of a thing, especially with voting and so forth and census.
But it used to be for the longest time when you had to check off that little box, it was either white, black, or was it – it was white, Hispanic, or black, non-Hispanic.
And then I think maybe they introduced Asian later.
I think Asian was a form of black for a long time.
Nowadays, I don't remember exactly.
It's been a long time.
But I'm just saying like now you go down by where Scott Simpson lives, that part of the peninsula.
And I mean you would need to break down the Pacific Islands in some very specific ways.
I think there's a lot of Samoan people, especially at the food court.
And there's a Filipino fast food place there.
Is that right?
Philippine?
Filipino.
Filipino, Filipina, but you can say – I think Filipino is the overarching term.
Well, as you know, I've traveled extensively.
I've been to at least six states and three countries, and I know when I was in Hawaii, I was completely baffled.
I ate all the food, seemed like a joke on the white guy.
I didn't – Shave ice was the only thing.
You didn't like the fried spam?
Oh, man.
Fried Spam, like on the face of it, sounds like a pretty good deal.
Sure.
There's a lot of joke foods in Hawaii, as you know, that keep the good food for the locals.
Is that right?
Oh, yeah.
Was that your sense?
Oh, are you kidding me?
Those folks are pretty big.
They're eating some pretty big ribeyes.
Poi, really?
Oh, yeah.
Here, I have some taro root.
With your black coffee.
And that's my question to you, John Roderick.
Now you're in a working neighborhood.
These are people apart from yourself who work for a living.
What are they drinking in the morning or taking in the morning that's helping them get through the day?
How are there not more people that need half and half for their coffee?
That is a really good question.
I think this gets to a very Roderick on the line type question here because, you know, as you've taught us so many times in the past, you can tell a lot about a location, right?
Are there hills?
Are there rivers?
We could see Boston was laid out by cows and so forth.
It has never occurred to me.
And now I'm wondering whether my neighbors aren't all putting vanilla ice cream in their coffee.
And I have just like crossed over some invisible line.
I'm now I've just become a local.
And just as much as you can recall or say, do you remember if there is a frozen area inside of the lottery store, let alone a vanilla ice cream section, do they have frozen goods there?
They do, but they're all in the ice cream sandwich and popsicle variety.
I don't think you can buy a carton of ice cream there.
That's a goddamn tragedy.
It really is.
And you know, this store is perfectly... Sugar?
They sell sugar.
I bet they sell sugar.
Well, there's sugar and everything, but I don't think they have any staples.
I don't think you could go buy a bag of flour.
I mean, I think you could buy a bag of flour.
Oh, out front, out front.
He's going to pause his game and help you with the flower.
I'm saying out front.
Yeah, I'm saying out front of the store.
But, you know, I walk into the store and I look around and I think, wow, wouldn't it be great if there was like a little rack of artisanal cheese and some and an olive case?
Not all the cheese, just three or four nice cheeses.
Yeah, and then some local wines and little hand-picked produce, and this kid put his video game down and he had a white apron on, and he was like, hello, welcome to Kim's, may I help you?
Oh, and Kim could cut you off maybe, what was it called, pied-a-terre, maybe some kind of like a pate, a local artisanal pate?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or, you know, he would, I'd walk in and he'd hand me a little paper cup with a toothpick sticking in some kind of, uh, some kind of little like chopped fish or whatever and say like, Oh, would you like to try our, our kimchi of the day?
And I'd be like, Oh, hooray.
But in fact, no, it's just, it's a bunch of donks parked out front and everybody's like coming and going, uh, just buying juggalo foods.
Yeah.
Well, the reason I bring it up is, as you said, it used to be that there were correlations we could draw in this country.
There were Venn diagrams that we could draw in our sleep, right?
There was – the Venn diagram between scrimshaw and tattoos was once – I think there's a lot of integrity to that.
So, I mean the thing is, it's supply and demand, right?
This is basic – I think this is Howard Friedman, Milton Berle, whoever the economist is.
The great economist Milton Berle.
The great economist.
He'd take out just enough to beat you.
It was Thorstein Veblen.
Thorstein Veblen.
Is that a Pacific Islander, to your knowledge?
Thorstein Veblen.
That sounds like a Norwegian, one of those little skinny countries.
Well, you know, I think I have all the Norwegian countries pretty well mapped out.
And Thorstein Veblen isn't one of them.
Like Iceland.
Iceland is one of the Norwegian countries, right?
Iceland is a Norwegian country, yeah.
You know, Eric, it was Eric the Green that did that.
He misnamed them on purpose.
It turns out that Iceland is the one that has Finns in it.
Finland is actually the one that's icy.
Not a lot of people know that.
And this is why, this is why, to this day, throughout all of the Swedish countries, this is why only Vikings today put their lottery tickets into their coffee.
And maybe that's the question that I'm asking.
You go in there and let me guess.
I've got a couple things.
Can I just really quickly blow through this?
No, blow through it.
Okay, things you find and don't find in the store, lottery tickets.
Yeah, you find those there.
Okay.
Funyuns.
Absolutely, you're going to find Funyuns.
Okay, and I think we take it as red.
Faygo?
Did you say Faygo?
I'm going to say, you know, because Faygo is a regional drink in America.
Is Faygo the juggalo drink?
Faygo is the juggalo drink, and it's really a drink that's located more or less in the South, although you can get it in Seattle at Ezell's Famous Chicken.
But he imports it specially.
Oh, like a Hispanic American Coke.
Exactly.
Okay.
So I'm guessing that you cannot get Faygo at this store if you really search for it, but what you can get is drank.
You can get orange drank or grape drank.
And that's cough syrup?
No, it's like sugar pop, but it's off-brand sugar pop.
Like Professor Faygun or something.
Professor Falcon.
You can go in there and get some Jonah Falcon.
Would you like to play a game?
Would you like to drink a grape soda?
I've always been intrigued by the different kinds of generic store brands of, you know, Professor Pepier and stuff like that.
But this is the stuff – this is the soda pop that you get when your business does not shop at Costco wholesale.
There's been cutbacks and we can't cancel the party, so we should get something.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Okay.
All right.
So there are flavored things there.
There's probably a huge amount of xanthan gum and high fructose corn syrup.
And you say the ice cream is mostly limited to ice cream sandwich type things.
There's like a freezer case that has, again, like weird off-brand ice creams where there's like a rabbit that kind of looks like the Trix rabbit, except his nose is kind of longer and he looks like the camel.
He looks like Joe Camel had sex with the Trix rabbit.
Yeah.
And you're like, that doesn't look appetizing.
I don't want to eat that ice cream sandwich.
Silly rabbit, stomas are for kids.
Silly rabbit, your nose looks like a penis.
What about they sell propane there?
Any meth cooking stuff?
No, this store is absolutely useless.
It's grab and go.
It's all grab and go.
You're going to get in there.
It's six guys on a truck covered with drywall dust and Carhartts.
They jump in there, grab and go.
You get a Faygo, a lottery ticket, an ice cream sandwich.
You get the fuck out of there.
Is that right?
Yeah, pack of cigarettes.
And like a brown bag with some kind of booze in it.
And I mean, they're making a living, but I think they're dragging down the whole neighborhood.
And you know what's interesting?
You might not have noticed this, but there's like an acre, a vacant acre of land not far from my house that they are converting into what we call here in Seattle a pea patch.
Is it like a community garden?
Community garden.
Oh, that's lovely.
It's going to be nice.
So that's a few blocks from me, and that's going to be... Now, I've just given away my location, basically.
There's a lot of community gardens in African-American neighborhoods in Seattle.
Don't worry.
There's going to be a whole community... It's going to bring the community together in a way that this bodega has been tearing us apart.
Pride of ownership.
That's right.
And people are going to have fresh vegetables, and it's only a matter of time before somebody opens a little store with an olive bar and like six different kinds of coffee creamer, all organic.
You're from a modest background, right?
I mean, you're not from a rich family, right?
Well, it depends.
Well, rich certainly in a certain kind of discipline and dignity.
Culturally rich.
God, you know what?
Culturally.
But I'm always concerned that something's a trick.
And I have to tell you, I think I've said this in many places before.
I really believe this.
I think that when you're not from a place where you know a lot about what's fancy in the right way, I think I'm constantly parsing things for tricks.
And so not the cereal with the rabbit.
But for example, like olive bars, I think it's a fucking trick.
It's absolutely a trick.
I walk past those, and I'm like, you've given this much real estate in your store to things that look and smell and taste like rotting toes?
It's basically a toe bar, and I'll bet you, you take anybody in there, you pull them out of their Prius, you give them an artisanal blindfold, you sit them down, you give them six fucking olives, and they will not be able to tell you.
Oh, this is salty and tastes like olives.
You give them six fucking olives, and then a plate of chopped up human toes...
That have been soaked in formaldehyde for a year.
Luckily sourced.
And they will go down and they'll be like, mmm, delicious olive.
Mmm, delicious.
Oh, this one's got a little, like, a little... Is that a pinky and pimento?
It's like, mmm.
Yeah.
You know what, though?
But this is the thing, John, and this is the thing about the scrimshaw and the railroads and the steamers is that it says something about the community.
It says something – we learn about the language.
We learn about the way people dress.
We learn so much by these regional things that take a long time to go away even if they're not –
They're not there anymore.
Even though we're not building ships in this place anymore, there's still a shipbuilding culture.
They're probably not pushing out as many jets at Boeing as they used to.
I don't know.
But I'm guessing.
Well, they've outsourced it so that what happens now is that the tail assembly is manufactured in Japan and the wings are made in Italy.
And then they bring them all here to Seattle.
or to nebraska or somewhere and they try and bolt them all together this happened a couple of years ago but they they sent the plans to italy and nobody converted the measurements from metric to oh come on that sounds like an urban myth it's absolutely true and they spent you know they tooled up and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars building these parts and they got them together
the wheel the wheel of no fit hey hey what's the matter for you what's the matter and so and they're like oh outsourcing i've heard stories like that before i think that happened didn't that happen on the space shuttle wasn't there a space shuttle huge space shuttle gaffe that involved metric conversion
it happens all the time and i and i and you know and depending on where you're standing like if we if we were doing this podcast in milan right now we'd be saying to the effect of we'd be saying something like uh why why america have a uh this uh measurement that no one else uses gotta be different yeah like uh metric is used by everybody right so why the hell what's our problem
But then the flip side is, from our perspective, no one in America has ever heard of another country.
Yeah.
And most people here don't believe other countries exist.
Well, I mean, it could be a mass hysteria, but I mean, there's at least two levels to this.
Yes, absolutely.
On the first level, it's probably a little bit crazy that inside of a certain profession, you don't have a standard.
I think it's sensible, probably, if you're working on Japanese cars, to talk in metrics, right?
There's got to be a Google...
thing that just translates your your wing diameter uh measurements immediately into whatever form you want it oh i've got an application oh i got an application right here i'm going to show you you can it turns anything into anything it's mind-blowing but here's my question to you this is the deeper problem here's the deeper problem let me put it to you this way okay my kid's school uh my my wife uh texts me and says hey can i sign you up to change the strings on the guitar and i said absolutely absolutely
Okay.
Is your wife now playing the guitar?
She doesn't tapping.
Okay.
So now let me throw this by you and see what your response would be.
Let me recommend a scalloped fingerboard for you guys.
I did that with a rasp.
I told you about that.
I invade my guitar.
Anyway, go ahead.
So she texts you.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
Somebody says to you, hey, John, John, can you change the strings on this guitar?
And you know, if it's somebody you like, you'd probably say yes, right?
So you go out and buy some strings, right?
Yeah.
What kind of strings?
Electric or acoustic?
Exactly.
Is this a trick question?
No, it's a non-trick question.
I said, okay, send me a photograph of the guitar.
I didn't ask her if it was classical or steel string.
I said, send me a photograph of the guitar, and especially if you can get a picture of the bridge and the headstock, that'd be great.
But I could eyeball it in a second and see that it's an old crappy classical guitar.
But do you see what I'm saying here?
Yeah, you need some gut strings.
Well, the problem is that, yeah, it's silly that they didn't get the conversion right, but it's even sillier that they assume they didn't need to check the spec better.
It's like somebody saying, paint my house, and I assume, oh, I've got this green, so I'll just use green.
This is the problem with nobody using slide rules anymore, John.
Well, you know, and what the problem is is that I guarantee you in the corporate culture of Boeing, as is true of the corporate culture of everywhere in the world now, there are 42 different levels of management, and then you've got like three guys that know how to use the equipment.
And so I'm sure those specs went across like 40 people's desks until it got to the guy who was supposed to build the tool.
And the guy that's supposed to build the tool kind of assumes...
that somewhere along the line, somebody would have... If there was a problem, somebody would have picked up on it.
Oh, I think it's totally true, but here's the other thing.
If there were, let's just say for, you know, I don't mean this in a ping-pong way, if there were nerds along the way, you know there were nerds along the way who said, hey, look, I mean, you're doing this, you're doing stuff in Microsoft Excel.
Like, how can you miss that these over here are... This says 1.0, and this one says...
Two and a half, right?
Well, are we talking about centimeters or inches?
Like what is this?
How would you – and I bet they said, you know what?
We should probably make it really clear to people that this is in centimeters and not inches or better put probably in inches and not centimeters.
And you know what?
I bet their boss said don't be a dick.
You know what helps me navigate all of this stuff is the cartoon Dilbert.
I really get so much wisdom from Dilbert.
Is that about the guy who has periodic cultural bumps in the workplace?
I think that's a good description, yeah.
He's trying to navigate his workplace.
It's called Dilbert, is that correct?
Dilbert, yeah.
This isn't the guy who sleeps in Lakes Lasagna.
No, no, no, no.
That's a different guy.
This guy, he has a job and he goes there and oh my God, his boss.
What a nut.
Anyway, I went to a grocery store the other day in a different neighborhood.
This is in the north part of Seattle, which as you know, my theory of American cities is that the north side of the city is always nice and the south side of the city is always bad.
Oh, 19 times out of 23.
No question.
Yeah.
And anybody... You say south side of town, you might as well say MLK Drive.
Exactly.
And anybody that's going to say... And not to say that MLK... No, no, no, no, no.
Not at all.
He was a great president.
No question.
He was a wonderful man.
But even people who come to me and say like, well, what about East St.
Louis and West St.
Louis?
I say, what about Southeast St.
Louis?
And then they have to go, oh, okay, you're right.
You can triangulate that.
Right.
So anyway, I go to a grocery store on the north side of town, which is sort of a rare occurrence for me.
And I walk in and there's like Muzak playing.
And a guy walks by me in an apron and he says, good morning.
And then somebody else walks past and it looks like, and this grocery store looks like
It looks like the grocery store where John Denver worked in Oh God.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's when they knew how to run a goddamn grocery store.
You know what?
I'm walking around and I go over to the deli counter and they're like, oh, would you like a stuffed pepper?
I'm like, a stuffed pepper?
How long has that been sitting there?
They're like, what do you mean?
We just made them 20 minutes ago.
And I start to quiz the person.
I'm like, well, what about the ones you don't sell?
And they're like, oh, well, we usually sell them all.
I'm like...
What about the ones you don't?
They're like, oh, well, we throw them away.
I'm like, this is amazing.
This is a grocery.
These people are grocers.
And they're not simply preparing food.
It's not like in Florida where you could go and buy pretty good macaroni and cheese.
Stuffed pepper is a pretty rarefied vertical market.
Yeah, I'm looking behind the counter and there are more people working behind the deli counter than there are customers in the store.
And I was like, it's amazing.
And this is why people buy their houses.
This is why people buy their houses in nice neighborhoods
Because they get nice grocery stores and the cops don't fly helicopters over their houses in the middle of the night.
And the reason people buy houses in poor neighborhoods is they can't afford houses in rich neighborhoods.
Because they don't have enough money?
Because they don't have enough money.
I was having a real eye-opening experience.
The people on the north side of town that have the more expensive homes and the better jobs make more money than the people that have not as nice houses.
That's right.
And they have nicer things there when they go into stores.
Just as a side note, there are no stuffed peppers at your bodega, to your knowledge.
There are no stuffed peppers at all.
And not even at my local big grocery store are there stuffed peppers.
So I was learning a lot of pepper.
That's an eye-opener, John.
And then I realized that I lived in my neighborhood because I didn't have a lot of money.
You got a lot of house for the dough, though.
That's a pretty nice place.
Well, that's what they say.
That's what they say.
Well, can I suggest there might be one thread here?
Money.
Money.
Yeah, because here's what I think your local and the upscale northern place have in common, and it's a term that I'm going to throw out called profit per square foot.
Yeah.
Now, it's my understanding that in the grocery racket, the margins are thin at best.
Right.
So if you're going to sell flour, right?
I mean, if you go anywhere – like think about if you've ever been to like – I want to say like – I don't want to say a resort town, but you go somewhere where there's very limited –
a small footprint for the place where you buy stuff.
You go in there, they're going to have some $40 crappy sunglasses.
They're going to have some $90 suntan lotion, those $85 Marlboros or whatever.
You go in there, it's all stuff that tourists would want to buy that cost a lot, but they don't have flour on sale because there's not, I know this sounds obvious, but again, the important thing here is money.
Well, and flour is always a lost leader.
You get them, people come in for the flour and then they stay for the stuff.
That's right.
You give them a little bit of the sex.
You show them a little bit of leg.
You say, we got it in here.
But so anyway, this is – I mean I think the point about money is not obvious.
But I think the deeper point is that this is why it's all about lottery tickets and fucking gift cards or Faygo for that matter is if they – the baffling part to me is in some ways – and this is sad, John.
As a cultural critic, I hope you'll remark on this.
But it's not to me so amazing that they don't have two leaders of Faygo.
At a reasonable retail price at that place, or even that they don't, God forbid, have cheese in there.
What blows my mind is that it can remain profitable for that place on the north side to have... An olive bar.
I'm trying to do a quick mental calculation.
To have something like 80 square feet...
of olive bar.
Yeah.
Was that about right?
Square, that's a lot of square footage for olives.
Yeah, it is.
And it is amazing that it can remain profitable, but, but I mean, I look at that stuff and I think it's, it's a thing when I go into a grocery store and I pick a thing of Faygo up off the, off the counter and I look at it and it says 99 cents for two liters of Faygo.
Right.
I am, for whatever reason, much more conscious of the,
how much money I'm spending and what I'm getting for that money.
Then when I look at an olive bar where they say, you know, a cup with seven olives in it is only $14.99.
Yeah, I bet they've got a hot food buffet that's like $17 a pound.
But you don't think about, you know, you're lulled into a state of sort of feeling like these are luxury items.
Right.
And it's worth it because this is – It's much more abstract because it's bulk for one.
Right.
You don't know.
You're going to have to weigh your own olives to find out how much money you're going to owe.
Oh, my God.
But check this out.
You walk in.
You walk into that.
Oh, gosh.
Oh, God.
It's so embarrassing.
My olives.
That is so undignified.
I went to a supermarket the other day and a different.
This is not a nice supermarket, a regular shitty one.
And there are a bunch of people in line waiting to get through the supermarket and then there's this new check yourself out.
Never go through the check yourself out.
And I'm looking at it and I never do either because I feel like whatever amount of money that I'm paying to buy things at this store, I want...
The human interaction.
I am paying for it anyway.
I want the person to touch my cans and I want them to ring it up and I want them to tell me to have a nice stand.
I want them to hold up the receipt at the end and say, oh, Mr. Roderick, you saved 14.
You like those exchanges.
I do.
And the thing is, it's factored into the price of my goods.
They're not giving me a discount to go over and check myself out.
You're screwing yourself out of money and time.
That's exactly right.
I have already paid for this person to talk to me and touch my cans.
I'm not going to go over and do it myself and talk to a robot unless I get 10% off.
Those robots are taciturn.
Anyway, so they are.
So I go over and it's one of these things where there's seven carts.
It's like somebody is...
it's like somebody's outfitting a ship that's going to sea for a year and and so i can't i can't wait in line i've only got i've only got a handful of items i can't wait in line over there to talk to a human being so i go over to the electronic checkout and i'm trying to navigate this thing and it's telling me to put my items in the in the bagging area and it's telling me to do all this stuff that i don't want to do i don't want to put my items in the bagging area it tells you that you've placed something in the wrong area in the wrong area that's right
What the fuck does that mean?
It's saying I placed it in the wrong area and I'm like... You're the customer, John.
I'm yelling at the thing.
I'm like, it's where I want it.
It's in the area that I want it.
I'm not putting it in your area.
And this thing is resolute.
It doesn't listen to reason.
And so I lean over and there's an employee, a Safeway.
And this is a Safeway store.
There's a Safeway employee there.
And I kind of lean over and I say, can you help me with this?
Because the machine is telling me to...
And this employee, the Safeway employee, is having an argument with another employee of Safeway.
And they do not want to be interrupted by me.
And I'm like, excuse me.
And they're like, well, I said that I was going to be there.
You know, I said I got a 15-minute break.
And you said that.
And they're having this like Safeway employee argument.
Right in front of you.
Right in front of me.
And like basically kind of like giving me the hand.
And I'm about to say, where's your manager?
And I look, and one of them's the manager.
Oh, God.
And so I'm standing in between this robot that's given me orders and a manager of a grocery store that is not only having a public argument with one of her employees, but is giving me the hand.
And so you know what I did?
I stole a potato.
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In any case...
They had so much more than that coming.
I think you let them off easy.
You could have demanded a lot of satisfaction and given a very extensive and penetrating course in managerial procedure to that young lady.
I could have done.
But instead, I just put some produce in my bag that I did not weigh and did not pay for.
And I felt...
I felt ashamed of myself.
I've done that.
At the same time, I felt like this is the cost.
This is the cost that you grocery store are going to incur for putting me through this.
This is my 10% off.
You want a comment card?
Here's the comment card.
Start counting up your fucking potatoes.
And in fact, it was not a potato.
It was an onion.
Now that I recall, I recall it was an onion, not a potato.
But I said, this onion is your tithe.
Do you know what kind of onion it was?
Well, you know, I have this problem all the time.
And that's why self-checkout is a clusterfuck.
You really, you want me to look, is this a Bermuda onion?
Is this a white onion?
Is this a yellow onion?
Is this a scallion?
Now you need to tell me Merlin, because you're a person that knows this type of thing, but I go and I look at the onions and I'm making, I don't care what kind it is.
I just, I don't want to have to talk to a robot about what I put onion.
I put in the wrong place.
That's the wrong kind.
And I got to run my card again.
This is before this.
I have this problem before this.
I look at there's 14 kinds of onions, even at a shitty Safeway.
I don't know the fucking difference between an onion.
This is a yellow onion.
This is a white onion.
Am I really picking it because of color?
Yeah.
I'm going to throw it into a soup.
Mm-hmm.
Tell me, Merlin, what is – I just want – you know what I want?
I want the right onion.
And I don't know how to tell the right onion.
Oh, I would be happy to give you some of my own practical heuristics on this if it would be useful to you.
It would.
I would like to know how to choose the right – because I look at these onions and I end up just picking one that looks friendly.
Like I look through the onions and I'm like, I like this guy.
He's – I like him.
He's got a nice shape.
He's a –
Yeah, and he's got a little kind of papery outside, but he kind of looks fresh, as fresh as an onion.
I'll tell you the best that I know.
I mean essentially setting size aside for a minute.
I mean obviously you could have your scallions or your green onions if you want some little onions.
I'm just talking about round onions.
I think –
Yes.
Amongst the round onion, I think there's basic – it's not super complicated.
Yes, there's purple.
There's white.
There's yellow.
There's like how much you want it to taste like an onion is the question.
And there is a continuum and it's not super complicated.
At the one end, you've got a white onion, which is useless.
Oh, really?
A white onion doesn't taste like an onion?
A white onion doesn't really taste like an onion.
It's –
Yeah, it's sort of like an Ivy League onion.
You've got a purple onion, which is kind of a sweeter taste.
You've got the classic yellow onion, which is the onion you should buy.
Okay, good, good, good.
You can buy a yellow onion.
You can buy a Bermuda onion, which is funny because they're so big.
But again, you know what?
We could be fine with yellow onions.
That's all you need.
I'm glad that you say that because that dovetails with my decision-making process, which is that if a thing has more color, if a vegetable has more color,
I assume that it has more stuff in it.
I buy yellow onions instead of white ones because I assume that the yellow represents stuff.
You found a meta pattern.
You ever have a white peach versus a yellow peach?
Fuck that white peach.
White peach bullshit.
I don't want a white peach.
Exactly.
You want the darkest color of thing that you can get.
The richest non-rotten color, and that's how you're going to find the right onion.
I think it's a terrific point, but have you ever seen a new checker?
I call them checkers.
Have you ever seen a new checker where they've got to go flip-a, flip-a, flip-a, flip-a?
Oh, yeah, to find out the price of them.
Yeah, it doesn't always have a little sticker on it or anything.
They end up charging you for artisanal kale when you're really buying fucking celery or something like that.
Well, I'm the guy that stands there after they check me out and reads the receipt and checks everything.
Good.
I think Safeway needs your friction.
I feel like such a dick when I do it.
And I'm always friendly, but I'm just like... Oh, man.
Do you want to talk about supermarkets?
I am totally okay to talk about supermarkets.
I got a lot on supermarkets.
I know you do.
I know you feel strongly about this.
Well, let me start with one thing just to get this out of the way.
First of all, self-checkout is for suckers.
It's really stupid.
I have friends who insist that it is faster and more efficient and more pleasant, and to them I say, you are full of shit.
You know who those people are?
They're the Judenrat.
Oh.
That's different if they get uniforms?
They get uniforms.
These are the people who are complicit in their own enslavement.
Got it.
They're the guys who run the block and they get a badge.
That's right.
They're the ones who are like, oh, they made me the sheriff of Nottingham, so I agree with their policies.
I got it.
I got it.
I got it.
So I see those people all the time who are like, oh, no, this is way better.
I got this app on my iPhone that allows me to pay for gasoline without taking a credit card out.
They're complicit in their own tacit cultural enslavement.
Judenrat.
Judenrat.
Hmm.
You should get a yellow Judenrat or a white Judenrat?
White, right?
A white Judenrat.
Let me ask you a question here.
And this is a rhetorical question.
So, you know, you can answer it rhetorically if you want.
But have you ever stood at self-checkout?
And let's be honest, self-checkout line, always longer because everybody's waiting for the convenience.
You wait at yourself.
God, this is like a fucking stand-up back.
I hate this.
But you stand there.
Have you ever been to Ikea?
What is the deal with shopping carts?
Who is coming up with this stuff?
But here's what bugs me.
I see that line.
I've tried to go through self-checkout on maybe three occasions ever, and I've had precisely the same experience every time.
First of all, it's a very long line of people who think of themselves as mavericks.
Yeah, that's right.
They're the people who all have Bluetooth telephones.
Oh, absolutely.
On the one hand, you've got tall guys buying ice cream.
It's always a tall guy with ice cream.
Tall guys buy a name brand fucking non sandwich style ice cream.
Right.
And, and, uh, you know, and, uh, they're not going to be bothered with all that flibbity gibbity of having to go wait in a line like a sucker though.
No, they're going to do this.
Okay.
But then all, you know, the things in there are variety of people and they're all stupid.
And then you get up there.
I have never seen – I will say this.
I have seen some people have transactions on occasion that went without a hitch.
But I'm going to say 79 times out of 87 times there is some glitch.
The robot yells at you.
It didn't like your card.
Oh, you want to buy some vodka?
You know, here's the thing.
People who are good at this self-checkout have gone through a self-training where they've gone and they have spent the time and energy to be trained by this machine how to use it.
The machine will, you know, if you do it 40 times.
John, that's the thin end of a wedge.
Yeah, the machine trains you.
And then they're good at it.
And then they're like, look at me, ba-da-ba-da.
Look at this.
I can scan really well.
But of all the people, of all the things that I want to be trained in...
Of all the welding classes I could be taking or artistic macrame I could be doing or whatever, the last thing I want to spend my mental and emotional energy on is being trained by a supermarket computer how to use it.
To buy onions.
To buy onions that I could be talking to the checker down the road.
You're buying onions you don't understand from robots that think they're better than you.
That's right.
That is galling.
It's really galling.
And there are lots of things I have allowed myself to be trained to do.
Like using a Macintosh computer, which everyone says, oh, that's so user-friendly.
Well, it's user-friendly if you sit in front of it and let it train you to understand...
it's impenetrable internal logic right like i've been using them long enough now that i kind of understand how the how the people how the dopes in california who designed the way this machine thinks how those dopes think like i've i've worked through it you know and i i was forced to let this machine train me to use it because there's no other way to interact with human beings anymore if you don't know how to use your stupid macintosh computer
Yeah, I have to agree with you.
And in talking to your mom about the old days, and I was asking, oh, did you use command line applications?
You might be familiar with DOS, right?
Or using an Apple.
And she's like, oh, no, this is before even command lines, let alone GUIs.
This is back when you had – before cards even.
I think you actually sat there with a soldering iron on a computer and made the program.
I mean she spoke machine language, and she spoke it like at the dinner table.
When I was an eight-year-old, there were times when I would put my head down because, you know, my mom and I were good friends my whole life.
And she would come home from work and she'd be so excited about having solved this problem in these mainframe computers that were the size of oil tankers.
And she would start talking to me about it.
You know, I'm eight or nine years old.
I would sometimes put my head down on the table because my brain was so full of numbers and lines and, you know, and she's just so excited about it.
She really wants to talk to me about it.
I was trying to be cool and show off, but every single technology I came up with as an old technology, she's like, oh, no, this is before that.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and I'm sure she said this to you, but her principle, the way she interacts with the modern world is, she said, for the first 40 years of computers, we worked into the night to make sure that no user ever experienced an error.
And we tested and tested and tested and tested until there were no errors.
And she said as soon as Microsoft took over the world and as soon as the software became the technology, she said from that point on, the policy has been send the errors out.
People will find them, and that's how you improve your product.
Your users will report errors back to you, and then you refine your product based on people out there using a thing they paid for that doesn't work.
People will tell us if these speeches are bad.
Yeah, exactly.
And she's like, it drives me freaking crazy.
I mean, we were using computers to put a man on the moon.
We did not have the luxury of errors.
But now, your machine crashes...
Your device goes, you know, tits up.
Your this happens, your that happens.
You can't get it to long run.
And what's the diagnostic say?
The diagnostic says, the network diagnostic says the network didn't work.
Yeah, run the diagnostic.
It doesn't work.
Oh, great.
Thank you.
Did you try unplugging your device?
I'm going to fucking shoot you now.
Would you like to have a live chat?
And she's like, there's no reason.
There is no earthly reason why they could not...
Why they could not make these products error-free.
The only reason they don't is that it's more expensive.
And so they just push it out the door.
They know it's not ready.
They know it's not good.
And then they send you an update.
And the update is a product of...
of 5 000 people being so frustrated that they're pulling their hair out and then it's like oh we figured out that this needs an update because it doesn't fucking work and she you know so she has this i mean she's 78 years old she's seen it all but she has this feeling about about the lives that we're leading and the interaction we have with machines and she's like you what you're interacting with is someone on the other side uh
of the corporation who decided that it wasn't worth the extra 50 man hours to make the thing work.
Right, and in the case of somebody like Microsoft in particular, but really anybody who's making consumer products, if you're trying to make something that's broad enough to sell to a lot of people, it's got to do so broadly, do so many different sorts of things generally.
And then there's, you know, the more stuff that something does, the more things there are to test, the more things there are to go wrong.
When you buy a car with power windows, like that's something that's going to break, right?
When you get that kind of stuff.
But, you know, here's the other thing though.
Don't get a car with power windows because if you go off a bridge.
No, you can't get out.
Your car is sinking.
I read about that.
What are you going to do?
you have to have one of those have you seen those things that they sell the little hammer thing window hammers but but you're you're that's one of my favorite uh the black metal bands window hammer window hammer your your car is sinking in a cold river in the middle of the night and you're gonna find that fucking window hammer that you have in your glove box we gotta rehearse i don't think oh that's right so you have to rehearse but this is why this is why in my opinion yourself to use the window hammer
Again, now the car is training you.
The car is training you.
The car is training you because the false luxury of an automatic window.
But, you know, actually, just one quick derail to myself is this is why I've never gotten the hang of most voice recognition software.
Like I have friends.
I have friends, listeners to this show who've written, you know, 50,000 word pieces of writing using dictation.
But the thing is, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you have to train the dictation.
This is the funny part.
Quote, unquote.
You have to, quote, unquote, train the dictation.
You have to speak.
I tried that one time.
And this dictation program produced four pages of the most incredible Dada poetry.
Yes.
I mined it for lyrics for 10 years, but it never once produced a sensible paragraph.
I can tell you as part of the live chat here, I can tell you basically what the likely problem was, was you didn't quote-unquote train the software.
Are we having a live chat?
Is that what you just said?
My name is Lawrence, and I am to be enjoying volleyball.
But isn't that funny though?
Is this chat roulette?
I should take my pants off.
Why did I get so uncomfortable?
But this is – OK.
So here's the funny thing.
So they call that training the software, right?
But really it's the software training you.
It's you learning to speak.
When you open up Dragon Dictate, it shows you about 34 pages of things that you read and it tells you how well that you're doing.
It recommends that you speak –
Try to imagine speaking like a newscaster.
Are they neutral?
And so anyway, yeah, no, they're training you how to talk, period.
New space, new line, new line.
But here's the thing, and you're really on to something, I think, with the grocery checkout thing, is this bigger pattern, setting aside for a moment, we should come back to the profit per square foot, but
it's really about making something seem now i'm talking like i'm doing dragon dictation it's about making something seem like it's good for you when it's really just easy for the company that's what it is it's cheap it's cheap because you don't have to pay that idiot manager to sit there and uh and run your groceries over a scanner my god heaven forfend and this happens to us all the time this is part of the this is part of how we are domesticated so that we can live with one another like i understand
that a stoplight at an intersection, it is not natural for me to come to that thing and stop.
I have been trained and I've trained myself to recognize that red light is not just an alert about a potential danger, but it has become just a thing that now I acquiesce to without thinking.
I stop at the red light even if there's nobody around.
I stop at the red light just as a matter of course.
I have trained myself to do it.
Nominally.
For the most part.
During the day.
During the day, and if it's not an intersection that I know well enough to know that the red light doesn't belong there.
It's a serving suggestion.
There are plenty of red lights on stop signs in this city that I have determined are superfluous to my needs, and I don't stop at them.
But we're just talking about, let's say, a red light in a strange town.
Mm-hmm.
But the point at which I am being trained in that same way, like, here's a red light, stop, the same kind of unconscious training that happens, where the only point of that training is to improve the profit margin of a company that I hate, that is where I rebel.
And generally, like, when I go through the supermarket checkout line and talk to a real human being, I am conscious of
of the fact that that is actually taking it's actually costing the store more you understand it right yeah i am i am i'm aware that that my interaction with this person like aggregated over a over 10 000 interactions costs the store more than if i went through the checkout and i am
And there are certain stores and certain retail encounters that I have where I use that as a punitive measure.
I go through the process in the most labor-intensive way possible as a way of punishing the company.
I know it's a small thing.
If only you could directly punish the company.
Well, there have to be ways.
I know.
Well, see, this is the – take off your clothes.
Yeah, exactly.
You throw the chair through the window.
But see, that's my problem is I go in there and I'm going to go pick up – I'm going to get a magazine.
I'm going to get some yogurt and maybe a handle of tequila.
And the lines are now going down all the way down the aisles.
And so you know how I give it to the man.
I put all those things I got down.
I just put them down and I walk out.
Like that'll show them.
Right.
But like all I'm doing is making work for somebody who's going to have to go clean that up.
Right.
It's a shame that your potato cannot be registered, you know, in some way or excuse me, your onion could be registered in a way that could express your descent in a more muscular way than being just short an onion.
That's a goddamn shame.
Well, and I feel like I feel like the because routinely I think this happens to me at least once a day, maybe sometimes on a bad day, five times a day.
But where I come up to the counter and I see that a store is being run badly or a situation – a commercial situation is being managed poorly and it costs them my business.
Like I look at it and I go, right, I was about to spend X number of dollars here.
But because I don't approve of the way this store is being run, it is costing them my business.
And that is a way – and that is a – it's a mute –
I don't go to the manager and say, you know, this cost you my business.
Use your mind bullets.
I just send my mind bullets out and I say, boom, I'm not buying this now.
I'm not shopping here.
But I think a big part of why I do that, why that is a mantra, is that a lot of people go into those commercial situations and the frustration builds up in them, but they need the thing or they think they need the thing that they're there to buy.
And so they endure...
The shitty exchange, but they're storing up all the frustration and anger in themselves because they have put their need above any other consideration.
Oh, the need exists in obscurity, and they're almost worshiping that need in a way that has them setting aside their cultural dignity.
The need is way up in the clouds.
It's way up above where they can see.
And so they're in these situations that are just like, there's nothing I can do.
I need this thing.
And now they're kind of mad at themselves, too.
And it turns into a form of self-hate.
So what I do in those situations is my primary...
interaction, the need is below the desire to have a positive exchange.
If I can't have a positive exchange, then the need goes away.
And it's a way of keeping myself sane in a world that does not care about me as a customer.
Now, is this all inward turning?
Is this internal soft regulation, a kind of anger meditation?
Or are you, how is this, how is this, where's the healthiness in this?
Well, by saying like, you're not getting my business.
But not saying it.
But not saying, not saying it to the people, just saying it to myself.
Like, you're not getting my business.
Then I, then I kind of have a moment where I read that.
But I will go across the street or down the block or across town to a different store if I actually need a thing rather than have a bad customer service experience with a shitty store that's being run poorly.
And it's a small thing, but I think if more of us thought this way, this is precisely capitalism as it is.
meant to work or capitalism as they discuss it.
Oh, it's evolution as it's intended to work.
As Thorstein Veblen would discuss it.
As Veblen has cited numerous times, this is how it should work, supply and demand.
Well, you know, if you're stuck and you want a Faygo out in John's hood, if I may say, not to work ping pong, but if you want that, well, you know, you may be out of luck and you may have to satisfy this for a Dr. Faygon.
Right.
And this is precisely why I never, ever, ever go into this little Korean bodega by my house because I went in there five years ago when I moved in here and the kid looked up from his video game and he said, what's half and half?
And I never went back.
It just echoes in your head.
That was like me in the racist fireman bar.
I was so excited.
The Racist Fireman Bar.
When I first moved to a place down in the corner, I was like, does Reese's have a new candy bar?
It's Mason Reese.
It's Mason Reese, the child actor, who's still a child, oddly enough.
He had a pituitary problem.
No, I was so excited because, you know, I was excited in Florida to have a place that I could kind of call my own, my own little sort of cheers.
Oh, your Racist Fireman Bar there in your neighborhood.
Yeah, O'Connor O'Connor's.
Yeah.
But yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I told you about that the first time I went in there.
You walked me past there the first time I met you, and you were like, that's a racist fireman bar.
I never go in there.
I was so excited.
I went in there like, oh, this is cool.
It's kind of blue collar.
And I went in there, and within the first couple of seconds, I heard, ah, the nigger sitting around all day watching TV.
Ha, ta-ta-ta-ta.
And I was like, well, check, please.
And I'm not saying that they did a nigger.
I'm saying they did, I mean, they really let it peel, and that was just okay.
They were throwing lucky charms at each other.
Yeah!
Apparently, these folks just watch TV, and they're women, and they keep getting promotions, and they love their TV, these folks, apparently.
Yeah, they're 47% of the population.
And so I didn't, you know, but it's a funny thing.
There's several places in my neighborhood that only in the last couple years have I returned to after what you're describing, which is the initial, like,
Whoa.
Experience.
Like there's a place, you know, about money hands, you know, some place.
He's amazing.
He's the best part of your neighbor.
And, you know, I've told you this before, but one reason I love that guy, I have an inside man here in the neighborhood who's in the emergency association, tells me all the dirt.
And what's great about that place.
I don't know if I ever told, I think I told you this is that, um, it's, it's not just purely amazing that they had cats in the kitchen.
Yeah.
Here's the really, really cool part about it is they didn't mind that there were cats in the kitchen.
The health people didn't mind.
Here's the thing.
No, no, no, no, no.
Money Hands.
Money Hands had cats in the kitchen.
Here's where it gets great.
So you think, oh, ha ha, that's funny.
They're silly.
They're mad and trying to shush cats out with a broom or they're insane and let cats hang around.
No, no.
It's much weirder than that.
There just happened to be cats persistently in the kitchen and they – it just was just a thing.
And so that's the dim sum place we go to all the time.
That's the best dim sum in the world.
I had dim sum for breakfast the other day.
I was so jealous.
I saw your photograph.
It was very delicious.
You had six Shaomai that I could see right in front of you.
Yeah.
When she came and she said, Shaomai, I was like, give me two.
Give me two.
Keep moving.
Keep moving.
Is it one of those places where they keep badgering you while you're eating to get more?
Oh my God.
It was the worst.
I hate that.
Not the worst, but I mean, we showed up, we were shown to our table.
I was putting the baby in her little baby seat and
Sticky bun?
Sticky bun?
There's already a woman there with a cart trying to foist sugar-covered pork buns on me.
And I'm like, hey, lady, I got my coat on still.
I haven't even sat down.
Oh, no.
That is hard sales.
You know what that is?
That's when she looks at me like she doesn't speak English.
It's a dim sum boiler room is what it is.
Come on.
But anyway, the dim sum guy in your neighborhood who never washes his hands and who has now... Constantly touching money.
Cats in the kitchen.
But somehow San Francisco is fine with this guy and they never shut him down.
Well, I think our entire...
I think our entire health inspection thing is a total racket.
I'm pretty sure.
Two places that – well, one place that I've been to a few times and another place I've been to a lot of times have been shut down in the last couple months for what I would just say are some fairly egregious problems.
Yeah.
Yeah, a place that I, like, when people come to town, I always take them to this one.
Have we ever gone to that place, Toulon, the Vietnamese place?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Went there with Eric, I think, yeah.
Yeah, they had live and dead roaches.
They had eggs that had been out for three days.
It was just really pretty bad, like all the way down the line.
I think they had live and dead mice.
And that's, you know, pick one.
You know what I mean?
Dead mice.
Dead mice and live mice.
So even the mice are kind of like, you know, not real picky.
Yeah.
While I'm talking to you, I'm standing up now, and I'm going to swat a fly with this map of Central America.
Let's see if this works.
Oh!
Ha-ha!
Costa Rica.
Oh, my God.
Live and dead flies in here.
Live and dead.
Red light in a strange town.
There's only a dead fly now.
There are no live flies.
I realize you're probably not a big Dead Kennedys fan, but again, trust your mechanic.
This is the problem.
Trust your mechanic.
The guy that you go to, that you go into and you say, hey, like your dad, right?
Your dad needs his car.
So then he can go to his mechanic.
He needed a car so that he could drive to his mechanic every week to find out what needed to be fixed about his car.
Is that a fair assessment?
That is exactly correct.
Okay, well, God bless your dad, but that typifies the cultural problem that we're talking about here in some ways, isn't it?
It's kind of this learned training by these various societal robots.
I feel like that's a lot of people's relationship to alcohol, too.
I need this alcohol to...
get over these problems that are being caused by needing alcohol the real ones float oh that's good john that's good huh here's my problem um i wish self-checkout worked and in some ways i think self-checkout is the thin end of a surprising wedge like i i think that is a stupid fucking hack on top of something from basically the 19th century which is waiting in line to have somebody ring up your stuff
Like if you think about it, like if you're going to really try to, if you like upend that paradigm, it wouldn't be to make a slightly shittier version of a shitty process.
Right.
It would be to do something smart.
I'm with you.
Well, I mean like in some ways, let's be honest, it's going to go the way of Amazon.
If there's any sense to this, you'll make a giant grocery order and go pick it up somewhere.
Right.
Or a guy in a brown suit is going to show up at your house with your groceries.
Right.
not necessarily but see like walmart for years as as goofy and scary as walmart is like they're really smart like they use our fizz they know where everything is they know everything about their their supply chain the way they've been able to do what they do is they have these warehouses all over the place it's super lean just in time other douche talk but but but here's the thing so how are you going to improve this okay here's me here's me okay this is me at safeway where i'm just always so angry i'm so fucking angry at safeway
So here's me and your beloved cashiers.
This is my transaction.
Okay, I've got – here's what I've got.
I've got some yogurt.
I've got some tequila.
I've got some lime juice, and I've got four ribeyes.
Right.
Okay, ready?
This is a daily thing, right?
You'll get four ribeyes and some lime juice every day.
Yeah.
That's one of my favorite Howlin' Wolf songs.
And so I'm greeted.
I'm greeted in this incredibly grim way.
I go, hello, did you find everything you need today?
And I go, you can't really see because I'm barely making a noise.
I'm mostly just nodding my head as if to say no.
Like I just – I don't even want to respond.
Why the fuck do you care for Fenway?
You know why?
Because I told you to say that.
Yes, I found everything I need.
Okay.
Are you enjoying your day?
Yes, thank you.
Did you have a loyalty card?
Could you type in your phone number?
Yes, yes, yes.
Is it going to be a debit or credit?
Cash.
Would you like to donate a dollar for penis cancer?
No.
Thank you.
I like penis cancer.
I would like to see it continue.
did you see that we have m&ms on sale i did thank you steaks yummy oh wow you really you really have to have a real chatter yes yummy lime are you making pie no i'm putting it in the fucking tequila you piece of shit now listen i think you're doing this wrong and i hate to be a one that tells you you're doing something wrong
Did you bring your bags?
No, I didn't bring my bags.
I'll put it in my backpack.
Thank you for saving a tree.
Here's your receipt that's 16 feet long with seven coupons.
I leave sitting there.
Fuck you.
I take the same approach to cashiers that I do to taxi drivers.
Turn it off.
Turn it off.
They say, hi, welcome to Safeway.
Do you have your customer card?
And I say, yeah, right here.
And then I say, so where are you from?
Where'd you grow up?
And they're like, huh?
Oh, I'm from around here.
And I'm like, oh, really?
Right around here?
The neighborhood?
And they're like, well, I mean, no.
And then you turn your tables on them, and then pretty soon you're finding out about them.
Oh, you're asking them.
Yeah.
And then the guy behind you who's trying to buy the 8-pack of Imodium is kind of tapping his foot a little bit.
Well, the guy behind me who's trying to buy 8-pack of Imodium is like –
You know what?
I'm not going to shop here today because this is bad customer service.
And so he steals an onion.
He puts his emotive down and he runs the Us Magazine rack, steals an onion, he's out the door.
Okay.
And that's how I do my part.
Where are you from?
You're from... And so you give it straight back to them.
You give as good as you get.
You're selling the salesman, right?
You're watching the watchman.
Oh, even better.
I don't let a clerk...
Give me his memorized patter.
Are you kidding me?
John, I've peaked.
They have a sign back there with three bullets on it about the three things you're supposed to say to every customer.
Number one is ask them if they found me.
Give me memorized patter.
My goal is immediately to break their patter.
You're going to ask them a question for which there is no tab in the binder.
When somebody comes to my door and they want to talk to me about Jehovah, I immediately – I don't let them go three words into a patter.
Your panties smell like grape juice.
I get all Rob Delaney on them.
I'm like, how hairy is your bush?
In most cases, they end up coming in.
We end up getting to know each other.
I had a friend who was a DJ at the college radio station.
She's great.
She's a great musician.
She's a really nice person.
But I later found out it was a friend of mine who had been terrorizing her, which was pretty much all the time.
If she did anything more than back announce what the song was and say what's coming up, my friend would call her on the phone and say, let's talk more rock and hang up the phone every time.
Let's talk more rock.
And she would – she'd be in tears.
And I found out it's actually a friend of mine, a really good friend of mine.
But I'm wondering if that can be our onion replacement.
Let's talk more rock.
Oh, how did you find everything you need?
Let's talk more rock.
OK.
Are you enjoying your day?
Let's talk more rock.
Did you have – let's talk more rock.
Did you want penis – let's talk more rock.
Penis – let's talk more rock.
Less talk, more rock.
You know what?
That should be – That's pretty good.
I mean we already have a lot of T-shirts.
I think it's certainly a companion piece to keep moving and get out of the way.
But what I like about that though is it's like Heil Hitler.
It's something everybody can understand.
Yeah.
Right.
Let's talk more rock.
I just love that your friend is sitting there listening to the radio poised by the phone.
It's a Sunday morning acoustic show.
It's the acoustic.
It's like Sean Colvin and shit.
And Dave picks up the phone and poor Jen is there and answers the phone, you know, WFS.
Let's talk more rock.
That's wonderful.
You know what it is though, John?
As awful of a person as I am, especially in public, I'm not such an awful person in private.
And you've seen Scott and me try to make the waitress like it.
It's hard to watch.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you seen us both really go at it though to make the waitress like us?
it's i have seen i genuinely want to be liked my and that's my problem with the onion is that i wish i wish there was an onion that i could throw directly at pleasanton california because i don't want to hurt the safeway cashier person because that person is just doing a shitty job i feel bad having to tell this woman who looks like a manatee let's talk more rock because she's just reading off the fucking card but john can i just say what happens when we all start reading off the fucking card what happens
Sudetenland.
Sudetenland.
No?
Wow, Sudetenland.
Wow.
Well, Vichy.
You become a, what is it, a skate ratten?
It's a Juden skater?
It's a Juden skater, but there are many, many, many of us.
I write on cars, John.
I don't read off them.
Boom.
I hate to constantly be the voice in this podcast that sounds like some kind of crazy tea partier who doesn't understand politics.
Yeah.
But there are many, many of us who are never going to be in the park.
I thought we'd reached a quiet detente on the tea party.
And the thing about somebody who's working in a store, or working in a restaurant, or working anywhere, and this is the thing about you waitress appeasers that I keep trying to get through your heads.
is that dignity they're working a five-hour shift they are not on salary so there it's a five-hour shift whether you send them back to uh check to see if there's blackberry pie or not it's the same five-hour shift whether or not you put your imodium ad down in front of the us magazines and walk out of the store and somebody has to take it back like it's a it's the same five-hour shift
It's a fixed pie.
So the thing is they're going to pay people to be at the store, whether that's counting onions, removing Imodium from Us magazines, or collecting the money for penis cancer.
It's all going to be – it comes out of the same big rotten pot.
Yeah, and the mentality that waitress appeasers bring into the world is that this cashier or this waitress has something very important to do or that her time is somehow so valuable that you can't – you don't want to bother her to ask her to go back and check again to make sure
that they don't have one slice.
You're slicing my onion a little bit because I am not doing the liberal, ooh, your job is really hard.
No, thank you.
I'm not doing that.
I just want her to like me.
Yeah, I know you want her to like me.
It's a little different.
It's a little different.
But part of that is you don't want to send her on a wild goose chase.
But the thing is, five-hour shift.
She's there anyway.
And if you send her on a wild goose chase, maybe she goes back there and has a menthol cigarette before she comes back out.
Oh, I could be giving her, it's an opportunity cigarette.
Yeah.
It's an opportunity cigarette.
And so when I walk around grocery stores and I decide, hey, you know what?
The line is too long.
I'm going to put this carton of milk down right here in front of their point of purchase display offering me the opportunity to buy a super large candy bar and I'm just going to walk out of this store.
Yeah, some kid has to come along and put that thing back.
But that kid's going to be... Do you think he's going to feel if it's still cold?
No, that thing goes right back in.
It doesn't matter.
Why do we go to grocery stores, John?
It could be covered with moss, and he would put it back in the – nobody's thinking.
I'm not sure if I shared this photo with you, but where I really get the suggestive sell is at Walgreens, and I have a photo that I shared on my internet site, which was a picture of a big rack of M&Ms that I had been pointed to because his name is Fan.
Fan is one of my checkout guys.
Mm-hmm.
And not to be confused with P.O.
P.O.
's the guy I trade X-Men comics with.
This is his fan.
And I think he's a man.
Fan is part of the management.
Fan with a P.H.
He was Jason for a while, but now I think he's gone back to Fan Mellencamp.
I think his given name is his cougar name.
It's Fan Mellencamp.
Fan Mellencamp.
And he says, see we have M&M's on sale.
And I said, yes, I did.
But as you can see here, I am buying a quart of chocolate fudge brownie ice cream.
So I think I'm good.
But best of all, my hand to God, I'll show you this photo.
This might be the show art.
It is literally, it is a sign can right next to the M&Ms and the Snickers bar where you can donate for diabetes research.
Oh, wow.
It's no penis cancer, but it's something.
Oh, this is an example of a thing.
I'm still mad at my iPhone about this.
This happened nine months ago, but I was at the grocery store late, late at night.
And I'm looking for a ribeye or some imodium or whatever it is.
Tequila, lime.
Late at night.
And so there used to be a grocery store down in this neighborhood where I live because there used to be a grocery store that had a very big kosher section because in addition to all the South Pacific Islanders, there is a large contingent of Orthodox Jews who live nearby in an enclave that is surrounded by a wire.
Samoans love a nosh.
But so there was this section that was all kosher and then the grocery store that had the kosher section decided that that was not a good use of square footage or something or they closed or I don't remember what happened.
But so there was all of a sudden now a diaspora of kosher foods.
A virtual exodus.
Every little grocery store.
An exodus of kosher food.
In the neighborhood had to start stocking some glot ground beef in order to accommodate this community of people who cannot eat food that the rest of us eat.
They're vegans, except it was written in a book a long time ago.
Mm-hmm.
And nobody did the magic trick over them.
There's no magic trick happened.
So I'm standing, I'm looking at the meat counter, and I look over at the kosher food display.
There's like a refrigerator that has all the sort of the beef that's been bled in the correct way and all this kosher food.
And right in front of it, there's a cardboard...
One of those like six foot tall cardboard stands that says, you know, special this week, pork loin wrapped in bacon with pork sauce and a pork garnish.
And it's like it's almost leaning against.
Oh, no, it's really, truly adjacent.
It's right there.
It is in front of as though they're shopping for your kosher beef.
How do you miss that?
That's got to be an obvious – that's got to be a deliberate fuck you.
I don't think – I think it was just – I think it's just one of those things.
John, why is there no – what's the name?
Adam Smith?
Adam Lissagore?
Why is there no guiding hand?
Why is there no invisible –
adam no one in this place no one in this grocery store there's one guy in this grocery store and he's probably the assistant manager who has ever put any thought into like religion or culture at all you know the big picture they got no big picture
They got no big picture.
So I'm looking at this thing and I'm like, this is the greatest synergistic moment.
This is if I was going to be on Instagram, this would be my Instagram moment.
And I get my iPhone out to take a picture and the iPhone shits the bed.
and i'm like your finger is in the wrong area and i'm like you fucking thing you goddamn thing that i have now i have invested myself emotionally this is your shitty iphone this is the same shitty iphone you've got this is the little shitty iphone it doesn't it doesn't work at one point it was a great iphone and then oh it's shitty then i changed the software one time yeah i upgraded my software and then it became a crap iphone and then i upgraded it again and it became a shitty no your iphone is super shitty
And it's a 3GS.
It should be just as good.
There's nothing wrong with it, except that Apple has plannedly obsolescenced it.
But that's like saying you've got a good pack mule.
It doesn't really account for how much stuff you're going to put onto the donkey.
You used to have a good donkey, but now there's too much shit on your donkey.
You know what I should use it for?
I should use it to level my refrigerator.
I should stick it under one corner of the fridge to keep it... Once it comes up.
But so I'm standing here, and this is a situation where... Oh, John, that's brutal.
Ten years ago, before there existed phones with cameras...
I would have stood at this moment, this kosher display with the pork sign in front of it.
I would have stood there.
I would have appreciated it.
I would have gone, man, wow.
Because that's all there was to do at that time of night was to sit there and enjoy that ephemeral moment.
That's right.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
Well, or that was all that was available to me.
I would have gone, look at that.
And maybe, you know what I would have done?
Maybe I would have walked over to the front.
And this is actually true.
I would have walked over to the assistant manager.
I would have said, hey, did you notice that you've got a pork advertisement in front of the kosher foods display?
Like, maybe you should think about that again.
Like, I would have had, something would have happened where I would have,
I would have gone and talked to somebody about it or maybe I would have just grabbed the sign and moved it somewhere else on my own.
I would have taken that responsibility.
But now...
My first impulse is to take a fucking picture of it and put it on the internet.
And you were thwarted.
And I have been trained by the machines to say, this is my reply to this.
The machines have trained me to say, ha ha, tweet.
And then the fucking machine doesn't work.
You've become a machine for turning serendipity into anger.
They've trained you.
They've trained you to change the way you've retooled your factory.
And then I'm like a duck that got caught in a six-pack container in some kind of six-pack plastic, and I'm out in the water, and I can't get my wing to work.
And I'm like, what the fuck happened to me?
I don't want to put this on the Internet and make a joke out of it.
I don't want to.
I don't.
I don't.
You know, and the thing is, the first thought that is supposed to come into my mind is, boy, I need to go down and get a new phone.
I need to go spend $500 to get a new phone so that I don't miss these opportunities.
I just can't believe that this failure of technology – it's not that I can't believe that.
It's just fascinating to me that this failure of technology is what's caused your Hebraic direct action to be thwarted too.
Because another time, five years ago with a feature phone, you would have jumped right in there.
Right?
You would have gotten all fucking Menachem Begin on that shit and moved it out of there.
I would have gotten it out of there and I would have gone and talked to the manager and I would have given them a brief lecture on Judaism and on cultural sensitivity.
And then I would have gotten my rib steaks and my New York super fudge chunk and I would have gotten in my car.
I would have said, I did my work for today.
But instead, I'm standing there with this impotent phone with some plastic wrapped around my neck so I can't use my wing.
And I'm thinking, I need a more expensive phone so I don't miss these incredible opportunities.
John, even you are susceptible to this training.
It's astounding.
It happens on a daily basis and none of us are conscious of how much we have been trained by a stupid world to just be like, to be complicit rather than to
Yeah.
If you want to talk about it in terms of like what the capitalists, what the GOP capitalists would say is I should go in there every day and say, do you have any half and half?
Until the guy finally gets half and half.
Or shoots you.
Well, he's not going to shoot me.
Or he might shoot me with his virtual video game.
His phone works fine.
Yeah, his phone.
Because you know what?
He got some kind of Android phone and it works fine.
Boo it.
But no, I should I the capitalist model is that when enough people want half and half, they'll get half and half.
But it's been five years.
And as far as I know, they don't have half and half.
As far as I know, nothing has changed.
So do I – I mean is it enough?
Does it matter enough to me that I get half and half two blocks away instead of 15 blocks away?
Not enough.
Yeah, but I think sometimes a bodega is more than just a bodega because in this case, you're in literally – It's a harbinger.
It's a harbinger in the nexus of cultural diversity.
It seems to me that you are at potentially a retail inflection point for making – for affecting a lot of change.
Well, in this particular neighborhood, I am the diversity.
I am the only one who wants half and half at this grocery store, apparently.
Where's my parade?
It's hard.
It's so hard to be white.