Supply Chains

 This place is a maze. 

I feel overwhelmed. 

All around me are giant metal racks containing pallets of merchandise. The shelves above are wrapped in layers of shrink, with their contents still visible if I squint.  The skids at eye level are fully accessible; the clinging plastic peeled away to reveal super-sized versions of things our grocery store sells, but for a price we assume is a significant savings. I notice the pallets of things overhead don’t match anything offered nearby.

This alone makes my head swim.

I can’t quite figure out the system that makes this place hum, but I suppose it includes market research and feasibility studies that prove even a cynic, such as myself, will travel a hundred miles or more outside our domestic domains - just to spend copious amounts of cash in this consumer-land amusement park.  

I’m not sure if we need any of it, but it’s something to do on vacation that feels both extravagant and frugal. So I follow my husband, who is driving the extra-wide cart. 

He shows delight at each turn. His face lit up at seeing reams of colorful sticky-note pads in sizes that fit the curve of his beefy hand when it’s gripping a pen. He chortles as he flings two of them into the cart. So far, he’s collected a few office supplies, a dozen razor blades, a pair of shorts, and a pillow-sized bag of dried fruit as we crest the first turn.  

I don’t seem to have the same luck as I try to focus on a list of supplies our college students desire: a water-filter pitcher, a mattress topper, and an inexpensive vacuum. 

It’s here somewhere, I presume, just in the wrong sizes and price points once located.

For those things, I resign to go elsewhere. Here I will settle on multi-packages of consumables like toothpaste, shave creams, soaps, tonics, sodas, and D vitamins.

I know these are things I can add to the cart without triggering my husband’s left eyebrow to lift a full inch higher than his right. More durable items require more dialogue and the potential for old wounds to resurface. 

Thanks in part to my taking a chance on a $25 name-branded toaster that has since decided unknowably and seemingly on its own whether both sides of the bread would be toasted or whether one side would be scorched and the other left raw.  

“It wasn't the purchase,” He argues quite correctly. “It was you getting rid of the ugly old serviceable toaster that worked just fine.” 

The truth is, I hate it here.

Paying for the privilege of copping here. 

This place, its business model, the whole, proverbial, timeline. It feels like a more accurate Everest. 

Some outsized escapade that requires no small amount of training beforehand and a whole different kind of stamina to get through the judgments that abound at every turn: from the entry, to the aisles, and the checkout lines, and the reading of receipts. Because trust and bargains do not coexist. I always do some deep soul searching afterward, the whole path, like Everest, littered with excesses and detritus all along the way. 

A literal price hike that might cost us our souls.