The wife of a friend of mine is a very talented artist. She’s one of those crafty people who is always making things — pillow cushions, Christmas ornaments, sourdough loaves, you know the type. They’re very annoying, of course, up until the moment they bake a delicious apple pie with a lattice-style crust and serve it with homemade vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce or weave something out of what looks like twigs and dryer lint that you could easily frame and hang on your wall.
Crafty people, in other words, are a mixed delight. On the one hand, they’re immensely gifted with their hands and eyes, but on the other, they tend to be earth-loving recyclers and dour pessimists. They’ll make you a delicious pie, sure, but it’ll come with a lecture about how most apples these days will give you deadly cancer and that the reason there’s no cinnamon is because cinnamon is factory-farmed by nonunionized indentured migrants. Sort of takes the deliciousness out of it, to be honest.
I was over at their house for dinner recently — as usual, an incredibly tasty meal served on hand-thrown plates atop placemats made, it seemed, from old salad — and I tried to steer the conversation away from potentially incendiary topics to other things. It’s been a hard week for our crafty-recycling-fair-trade friends, and if there’s one thing I believe in, it’s the power of reconciliation. Also, I really like eating dinner over there so I want to make sure I’m invited back.
There was a time when you could simply bring up something anodyne, such as the weather, and truth that would inspire 20 minutes of soothing, meaningless small talk. But even the weather these days is a dinner-table conversation minefield, so instead I asked her to tell me about the current projects she has going on her workbench.
That, as it turned out, was also a problematic topic. She told me a story about going to the local branch of a very large chain of craft stores on a mission to find a very specific kind of metal fastener. They’re pretty popular, she told me, with people who work with fabrics, and she’s bought them at this store many times.
This time, though, they were out. And not just out but out for good. “We don’t stock those anymore,” said the helpful salesperson. And when she asked why on earth a retailer with enormous shelf space would stop carrying a popular item, the helpful salesperson turned a little less helpful. “No idea,” he said with a shrug. Then added, brightly, “But I know you can find it on Amazon!”
“I can find everything on Amazon,” she said. “That’s not the point. I like coming here. I like buying local. That keeps this store open, it helps the community, it creates, um, jobs,” she said, emphasizing that last word a bit so the salesperson could make the necessary economic calculations about customer + stuff to buy = store stays open + groceries paid for.
She told me that the salesperson looked at her curiously, as if it had never occurred to him that these things were linked. He made a last-ditch effort at being helpful: “If you order it now, Amazon will deliver it to you tomorrow. That’s pretty good, right?”
The correct thing to do was to listen to this story and cluck-cluck sadly along with the chef. But instead of doing that, I blurted out that this was, in fact, a general phenomenon. In Manhattan, for instance, I said — even though her husband and my friend was doing that thing with his eyes you do when you want the person who is speaking to stop speaking right now — in Manhattan, and in big cities all over, most of the stuff in stores such as CVS and Walgreens are locked up behind big plastic sheets. If you want to buy detergent or razor blades or nearly anything, you have to call over a salesperson and get them to liberate the product from behind the wall.
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In a way, I continued though I should not have, it’s as if every single progressive, soft-on-crime, super-woke public prosecutor is driving more business to Amazon. They are the ones, I said, making Jeff Bezos so rich! Isn’t that ironic? I asked, totally missing the frantic signals I was getting to shut up.
She did not think it was ironic. She thought I was being needlessly tendentious and political. And I noticed a lot less pie and ice cream on my plate when dessert came around, which I hope is not a sign.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
