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One virtue of our economic system is that the customer is king. But just how regal have you felt lately?
For instance, have you noticed how real hardware stores have almost vanished?
At a real hardware store, which is dark and shadowy with the faint scent of floor-sweeping compound, the merchandise sits in bins and drawers. If you need only one chest handle, or precisely seven moly bolts, that's what you get.
At the ersatz hardware stores
that spring up in
shopping centers, bubble-packed chest handles come only in
pairs, plastic-boxed moly bolts come only in packages of
ten, and you could no more buy washers by the pound than
you could find a clerk that knows a spud bar from a stove
bolt.
Or go to your grocer for a three-pound can of coffee. The last one I saw was in May. The largest size now available is a mere 2 lbs., 7 oz.
Some of those undersized tins have labels which inform
us that this coffee is richer, so you can use less.
There are just as many smooth, rich cups in this 39-ounce
can as in a 48-ounce can.
Sure. It says something about mathematical education in this country that so many people were willing to believe this. And thus the genuine three-pound coffee can has become just as available as all-malt beer, silver coins, passenger trains and Nesbitt's cream soda.
Another endangered species is free air at gas stations. Air now comes from vending machines. It isn't the money, really, since I doubt any air compressor runs for free.
But airing one's tires should be a leisurely process, with ample pauses for stooping, stretching, muttering, shaking the gauge, inflating, deflating, etc. Now there's a clock ticking back there while you work. As always when the clock is running, the pleasure is gone.
All this was getting to me last weekend, so I decided to curl up with what promised to be a good book, The Tidewater Tales by John Barth.
Barth is an acquired taste, and someday I hope to get
even with whoever induced me to acquire that taste. In a
more sensible society, impressionable students would be
taught to Just say no
when some friendly stranger
sidles up and opens his trench coat to reveal The
Floating Opera or The Sot-weed Factor.
Like controlled substances, such books offer an illusory escape from the mundane and oft-depressing cares of the real world. You do not so much read a Barth novel as move into it.
I was comfortably sailing on Chesapeake Bay when the text exhibited a monstrous discontinuity, far beyond anything even a self-proclaimed experimental novelist would try. This was a San Andreas Fault of discontinuities, a Black Canyon of breaches, a Front Range jumping out of the prairie without benefit of introductory foothills.
Perplexed, I examined the folios. Page 97 immediately followed page 64. I crashed back into reality with the glum realization that a 32-page signature had been left out of the book when it was bound.
My first impulse was to call my attorney, and have him threaten Fawcett Publishing. I figured they might offer $1,500 for the $12.95 paperback, just to avoid embarrassment.
But I would spurn that trifling offer with the threat to go public. Fawcett might raise the ante to $50,000. After all, if that was the price the Florida man wanted for his alleged distress at finding a rodent in a can of beer, then consider how much greater the mental anguish when you start getting involved in a book, and then you're interrupted by a manufacturing defect.
Further, the publishing industry should hasten to quell this scandal. If word gets out, people browsing in bookstores will paw the merchandise, wetting their fingers, besmudging and wrinkling as they flip through the books, trying to make sure all the pages are included. Any volume on the shelf for more than a fortnight will be so shopworn as to be good for little more than starting fires.
But I can't think about that any more. I've got to run to the store for more coffee. The 39-oz. can just ran out. A real three-pound can would still be going strong. If we consumers are indeed in charge, why can't we ever buy what we want, instead of cans and books that come up short?
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