Today, as I was full of lamentation about the grocery store that is about to close in the serendipitous location of one minute from my church, I got waylaid by a lot of TikToks and Tweets about Madi Hart. The two don’t go together, but I’m going to mash them up anyway because I’m so creative.
When I moved here, twenty years ago, the grocery store was called Giant—in spite of its diminutive size—but was eventually bought by a Pennsylvania franchise called Weis. Some people do a sort of fricative zz sound at the end, Weizz, but we up here in the frozen and desolate North all employ the slithery s option—Weiss. For probably fourteen years, I’ve gone there at least four times a week.
It’s being closed because it’s not making enough money. That’s the word on the depressed, downcast, and spiritually wrecked street.
Funnily enough, in very recent memory, like every other grocery store around here, our little local Wies installed a bunch of self-checkouts. You can wait in line at the one regular line that’s open, or you can stagger past four more that are closed in order to avail yourself of the two self-checkout options. There is always a rotation of people standing there next to the box of blue bags you have to purchase for garbage day. Five large bags cost 7 dollars, which, for us, lasts two weeks. The Weis person stands there, observing you as you scrape your items across the sensor, watching you struggle to answer the many questions about whether you’d like to round up to give a few cents to some unknown organization that ostensibly helps the hungry, whether you want to pay five cents for a paper bag because you forgot your reusable ones back at home, if you want to you use your points, and then how you want to pay. The Weis employee has nothing to do while you are thus employed, except if you forget to put your item down squarely on the weight sensor, or if you ring something up twice. Funnily enough—except it’s not funny at all—theft is up all across my city in every store because of the self-checkout options. And yet, paying enough employees is beyond the reach of even big corporations because our minimum wage is so high.
Four days ago, I was in another such grocery situation—not Weis, but Price Chopper—and all the self-checkouts were full. The sensible and delightfully agreeable lady who is always standing there, she must be about 60 years old, longing to retire even though that’s not a thing in my “community,” took it upon herself to open the old-fashioned line and begin to check people out herself. As she scraped my cat treats, blueberries, cream, and full-fat yogurt, for that, less the feline treats, is my new breakfast every day now that I am lifting weights—across the scanner, she poured out a cataract of speech, rolling down like an ever-flowing stream. She has at least six cats. There’s a new one that she’s been coaxing in with the very brand of treats, or cat crack as we call them, that I was buying. I kept saying, ‘Yes, of course,’ and ‘That’s so wonderful’ over and over while she talked. And then, suddenly, the transaction was completed, the line petered out, and she had to resume her solitary post of theft monitor and IT consultant for dumb software that never works like promised.
Anyway, the Weis is closing and so all the many people who walk across my church’s parking lot to buy milk and bread and also chips and beer—you can’t buy wine or anything in our grocery situations in New York State (I’m sure the mafia has something to do with it), only beer—will have to venture further afield in some kind of vehicular transport, which will be expensive, and also a hassle.
The local inhabitants of the Southside of Binghamton shouldn’t steal, one might say. And one would be right. If they are shutting the store because of too much theft, I guess that’s fair. I don’t know if that’s the case, though. I heard other words on the street that it was a cold, hard, financial calculation that included all the stores in the region, all of which have self-checkout options, and ours is not the roughest neighborhood, though it is smaller and more insignificant. And I understand that too, because the company that organizes these stores has to make money.
So anyway, just as I was about to post about the Weis closing, but then I read Inez Stepman’s righteously angry thread about the ongoing saga of Madi Hart. Without having seen the original post, which I have linked more than once, she (Inez), said this:
I am disgusted. This kind of behavior from adult men has been giving me honest-to-God nausea since I was a kid seeing a lot of it in Palo Alto. This poor poor girl, with a father this immature and selfish she never stood a chance.
I still have TikTok up so let allow me to remind us of where we are. Here’s the original post:
Then her father posted this, which I can’t figure out how to embed. Seriously, you have to watch it though, otherwise the whole thing doesn’t make sense. Then Madi posted this response:
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As I said, Inez is full of righteous indignation. She posted this:
Every man like this should be put on an island and forced to do hard labor moving rocks from one side of the island to the other until they are ready to be men
and this
Men like this always disavow any responsibility for the emotional devastation that springs up in their wake. But I was friends with their daughters and I know what it does to them. They are the scum of the earth.
And linked to someone who said this:
This guy discussed in the video below has spent the last twenty years telling himself he was an OK dad who made a few mistakes because his kids seemingly turned out normal. Nobody died. Nobody OD'd or went to jail. But you can tell behind his daughter's flippant "um, like, whatever" attitude about his misdeeds that the abandoned 5yo girl is still in there, crying out for the security and love he could never promise.
I just have to pause and say that I know some men who have been totally wrecked by their wives who behaved like this man did to his family. A lot of men have been cheated on, have had to put their lives together, and have lived down the street and actually been there like this guy claims he has. Some of them go to my church—with the grocery store that’s closing, where they pop in and buy stuff for their children.
Honestly, it’s not about the store, or the marriage, or the TikTok, or who is to blame. It’s about the fact that there is no good outcome for anyone. Poor Madi Hart is—and I hate to use this word because this is a family blog, but I can’t think of any other—screwed because she was born into a world where breakdancing was a thing, and worse, people following their hearts was the highest and best good. Her wretched father should have been a plowman with no better options. Madi herself should have been allowed to have servants and write a hefty amount of poetry. And all the people who walk across my parking lot should have been allowed to go to a store that figured out the through line between the self-checkout line and the bottom line.
I mean, hear me out. Maybe you can’t afford more employees. So maybe we have to stand in line and listen to actual human people talk about their lives as they scrape items across that wretched sensor. Maybe people who shop are human. Maybe people who work in stores are human. Maybe children need their fathers to suck it up and do insignificant work. Maybe mothers need to accept the limitations of the men they marry. And maybe we all need Jesus. Maybe we have fallen so far abysmally short of the glory of God that only God can save us.
So anyway, have a nice day!
"Maybe children need their fathers to suck it up and do insignificant work."
That's the path I've taken. I think my kids would say that it's worked out for the best.
No maybe maybe maybe about it! Truth! Great writing ACK. And sorry your convenient grocery store is closing.