American to the Core

I just spent over 45 minutes in a grocery store line waiting to buy a package of wheat crackers. This grocery store is the most inefficient and unpleasant place in the entire western world to shop, but I go there cause its close and cheap. Were I not so lazy I would go somewhere else, and that is a promise.

Today I am not really sure what was going on. Of course, there are five cashier's stations and they keep, at most, two open. Of these two, they are able to maintain only one in working order. In the meantime the other cashier is trying to solve some kind of problem, and this usually involves at least 15 minutes of wandering through the store in conjunction with a 5 minute smoke-break outside.

Now keep in mind that Danish "supermarkets" are about the size of American gas station markets so they are already difficult to move through. As the line backs up and weaves its way through the store's aisles, all two of them, it gets to be like moving in a phonebooth with 5 of your closest friends. This is intensified by the fact that many of the grocery stores have been closed for much of the last weekend due to Easter. Even the Danes need to supplement their five packs of cigarettes per day diet with a little bread from time to time.

So I am standing in this line with every fiber in my scrawny arms straining from the basket I decided to carry my one package of crackers in. People are bumping into me and pushing me into the candy stand. I begin to wonder if perhaps we can condense this mass of humanity into a small enough space and generate enough heat to fire up an internal combustion engine.

This is also the precise moment that one of the employees decides he wants to wheel out the 15 ft. high stack of shopping baskets that has developed. Of course, it falls over...mayhem ensues...and I swear to you that a women, zeroing in on a century-old, cuts in front of me. How she pulls this off I do not know because she looks to be buying about $400 worth of merchandise...not the kind of load a delicate elderly women slips past you. What next? You guessed it...her credit card doesn't work, and she doesn't have any money. She has to try to slide it repeatedly for a few minutes while this crack squad of commercial retailers that run this joint confer on how to deal with the latest crisis. The solution undoubtedly requires another cigarette break. Finally one employee, we will call him "brilliant," decides to open another register and begin ringing up the rest of the line.

While all this is unfolding I am quietly losing my mind because I realize that I have been waiting in this insanity for a $5 package containing 15 wheat crackers....I don't need the wheat crackers, and as one more punchline to the joke that is my life, I am sure these very crackers will give me another one of my wretched stomach-aches.

This is how you can be positive that America has thoroughly soaked into your second nature. I want something I don't need. I want a lot of it, a lot more than I can get. I want it for so cheap that it should have brought those who labor to produce it near the brink of starvation. I want enough space in the market where I am going to buy this thing that, were I so inclined, I could drive my gas-guzzling, overpriced, and unsafe SUV up and down the aisles. And finally, I want all of this to happen so fast that it both proves and disproves Einstein's theory of relativity simultaneously. A second or a penny too much makes me furious. I won't be bothered with voting in a local election, but God forbid I have to be inconvenienced when it comes to getting my luxuries!