Shopping

Google Street View of the Hillsboro store, just slightly out of date. They finished the landscaping well over a year ago. I don't know how far over, not my job to remember stuff like that.

Went to Walgreens this morning to get some drugs, man, and while I was there I thought I would pick up a couple of other things, cause like, I'm already there, ya know, man? I don't like Walgreens, they just reek of soulless corporate bean counters. We had a nice little home grown pharmacy down at the local grocery store that worked just fine, but then they got bought out by the evil empire and moved down the street to this huge, new store that is just full of the most worthless crap in the world. I mean who needs four hundred shades of eye shadow? I certainly don't, or at least I don't want any. Other people might think I need it, but they're crazy and you shouldn't listen to them.
    In any normal sales transaction, you have a buyer and a seller, and a business cannot be "bought out" unless the current owner is willing to sell. So we can't blame Walgreens entirely here, the previous owner of the pharmacy had to be willing to sell. Maybe they were tired of running the business and wanted out, or maybe Walgreens made them such a generous offer that they felt it would be foolish to pass it up. I doubt whether Walgreens would have made them "an offer they couldn't refuse". I just don't see that there would be enough profit in it to make it worthwhile.
    Anyway, I need some toothpaste. I've been making do with sample tubes that I get from the dentist, but we seem to have used them all up, so I'm going to have to break down and actually buy some. I'm here for the drugs, but they ought to have toothpaste, so let's see if we can find any. Of yes, of course we can. They have a whole section with 47 different varieties. Do they have the original Crest paste that I grew up on? No, Crest stopped making that stuff years ago. Now you can't buy toothpaste unless there is something special about it. The least expensive tube of Crest was $2.79. There was also a tube of Walgreens brand for under $2, but I couldn't bring myself to be that cheap. Too many years of using Crest has got it firmly engraved in my brain. Score one for Madison Avenue.
    Any time I go to a store and hear a canned line ("would you like to apply for a blankety-blank credit card", or "Welcome to blankety-blank", for example) my hackles go straight up. I am not by nature a chatty person, and I don't want to engage in meaningless chit chat. Hello, thank you and good-bye are more than enough. But what really bugs me is that the people working there are required to repeat these annoying phrases. It's like we are all cogs in the corporate machine. Employees repeat the meaningless phrases that cue the customers to open their wallets and shovel money into the cash register. It all makes the money machine go 'round, products get dispersed and maybe ten percent of them actually prove to be useful. Maybe if you do it for eight hours a day it would become automatic and you wouldn't even notice it, much less let it bother you. I wonder if anyone actually enjoys that kind of work?