«If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied during 1930s Germany, now you know.»
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Germany might be light on the Covid lockdowns, but they are still there. And recently, they have gotten worse. But apparently, there are ways to profit from it (would be strange if there weren’t).
(And yeah, the following sounds like bitching, but there is a point to it.)
Turns out, my local supermarket, well, one of my local supermarkets, decided to adhere to a 170 person limit, probably based on their area. 170. That’s a lot. And no, they don’t consider that some areas might be … in higher demand than others.
And they do so by trying to force customers to use shopping carts. Prior to this regulation, they also had plastic baskets. They removed those. Usually that meant they were all at the checkout. This time, there were none. They were simply removed.
Now, using shopping carts to count customers seems like a logical idea. Customer numbers keep track of themselves. If there are 170 shopping carts, and if shopping carts have to be used, then when there are no more shopping carts available, customers cannot enter, thus elegantly keeping the 170 customers limit.
Yeah, but why shopping carts? Why not use those plastic baskets? You don’t even have to use all of them, just take 70 of them, or even 50. They had — roughly — 120 of them available prior to this lockdown.
Might it have something to do with the — likely although untested — effect that customers buy more when they use a shopping cart than when they use a much smaller plastic basket?
I mean, that basket is roughly 1/6th of the size of a shopping cart. Might this be *the* or at least *one*, perhaps even *one major* reason?
And frankly, that’s the dangerous thing about these regulations. About the government interfering into our lives. It’s not just that they interfere with our basic liberties. It’s that they get others to support these measures, because they profit from them.
And no, I don’t think the managers of the supermarket thought this far. They see an easy way to measure customer numbers. And yeah, perhaps they even see higher profits by using much larger shopping carts instead of shopping baskets.
But in the end, they are supporting … very questionable solutions to an existing but hugely overestimated problem.
BTW, the reason why I *always* use shopping baskets is because I *walk*. I don’t own a car. I don’t want to own a car. And giving that I carry what I buy — usually 1-4 km — I need to know how heavy it is. How much space it takes. A shopping basket fits into my backpack, a shopping cart does not. Which is the reason why when the cashier told me: “Please use a shopping cart next time.” I answered with “I’ll shop somewhere else next time.”
Because frankly, if you act this way, then “Go fuck yourselves.”
And yeah, nobody wants grandma to die (save useless nephew Eric), but this thing is going out of control. It all stands and falls with how seriously you see Covid-19 as a disease. Nothing else, just who dies, and how many of them die. And after almost a year — it’s people who are very old, very weak (esp. regarding respiratory diseases). And no, this doesn’t mean it’s okay that they die. It just means *they* should be protected, and let the rest of us just *get on with our fucking lives*. We really don’t need some care-ethic obsessed politicians with delusions of being saviors.
