I feel sorry for people in retail these days. You’ve probably heard the saying that something is like herding cats. It seems that way when it comes to us humans and shopping.
I went to the grocery store today. I haven’t been there for a while and things have changed in the last few days. You need to have a cart, you have to wash or sanitize your hands and you will hopefully follow the arrows.
They can enforce those first two things fairly easy. Following arrows seems to be a bit harder.
Part of the problem is that there could be aisles that you are not even remotely interested in going down. Like if you already have six months worth of toilet paper, you might not need any more for a week or two. So it’s easy to skip an aisle and end up trying to go in the wrong direction. If you’re paying attention, you might backtrack, go up the next aisle, then back down in the direction you are supposed to be travelling. A lot of people are not paying attention. The arrows seem to mean nothing.
Then there’s the process of finding your way out. Following the arrows can lead you to places you’ve never been before. Then you have to find a way back, still using the arrows. It can be a bit confusing, especially when your normal habit is to go from point A to point B to point E, but suddenly you have to go a couple other places.
It can be a bit of an adventure, so you may want to dress in a leather jacket, a fedora and maybe carry a bull whip. The whip could be very useful in crossing the streams between arrows. Or herding cats. There are probably a lot of retail workers who wish they had one about now.
