There’s a market close to where I live. You know the kind. Nondescript. Easily missed. Frequented by the elderly who have lived in the neighborhood for a while and the lucky who get to avoid queueing in a megamart. The staff doesn’t look to have changed in decades and yet they all seem to be the same age as they were on your first visit. The décor is also identical apart from the requisite changes in branding of the items that line its shelves. Despite its size, they always seem to have everything you need and most things you want. That is, except on the endcaps of the checkout lines, where an eternal shortage makes itself known.
I know those shelves by heart. Back in the olden days they were my hunting grounds. Rows upon rows of glossy paper bringing me the latest news about cars, technology, and computers, all of it new and delectably photographed. As a kid I could pick one. Just one. Unless I sacrificed my crunch bar, then I could pick two.
I never sacrificed my crunch bar.
Sometimes I got lucky; like the time I got a Maximum PC only to discover that it came bundled with a CD filled to the brim with software to install and toy with for the entire month. The family PC didn’t appreciate it, but I certainly did. To be honest, the excitement over that disk probably lasted longer than the magazine itself. After a week or so, I would’ve already read most of the articles in it; and certainly all the ones I really cared about. From there it was a game of attrition between the reminder of the articles and my boredom.
There’s a melancholy in looking at the magazine rack now. Most of the magazines I found here are still in circulation of course, but merely as dead paper counterparts to their online equivalents and not in enough volumes for this store to bother stocking them anymore. So the most you’ll see on the racks is that one copy of a style magazine that some ancient customer looks at while paying for some cat food (and never buys) and the shrink-wrapped cookbook that has been there for so long that I’m beginning to suspect that the reason that it ended up here was that it was purchased back in the days when cookbooks were still relevant and just fell by the wayside over the years.
Since the neon signs in this store are still neon from when it opened, and the speakers are wood-applique of a kind that I thought had gone away with the H. W. Bush administration, I think that the empty magazine racks will remain in place unless natural disaster or an offer from a particularly desperate salesman throwing a refurbishing in if they buy their product. However, if that happens, I trust they will not touch the other important bit of the checkout line.
I still find it hard to leave that store without a Crunch bar.
