The sad casualty of captalism

I was at Wal-Mart early this morning. And, like most times when I go there, I found myself stricken with the realization that there are 40 checkout lines, and only 3 that are operational with a long line in each of those three lines.
For a logic problem, this has two solutions.

A. Either staff more cashiers
B. Decrease the number of checkout stations.

Yet, there is apparently no logic at work in the reality of the situation. There may be only one time of the year when it is feasible for Wal-Mart to actually have all 40 of those checkout stations staffed, and even during that time period, they don't have all of them staffed. There's no reason for them to. since they have a Wal-Mart on the other side of town with the same 37 empty checkout lanes.
None of this makes sense in the grand scheme of things. But, this is the world we are living in today.  Wal-mart has likely consumed untold millions of tons of steel to create those same 37 empty checkout lanes at all of their 8500 stores(wikipedia) across the world.  That is a tremendous waste of resources when you really start to consider it. You could likely build an entire town from the materials which they've sank into those unused checkout lanes.

It's a sickening waste of materials.

These are the things that I think about while I'm waiting to give them my hard-earned money in a line of my fellow humans. Granted, I could go to another grocer, but much like everyone else I do like to save a few dollars  here and there, and Wal-Mart happens to have these enormous packages of chicken breast that will feed me for nearly two weeks for 12 bucks. So, yes...I am biting the hand that is feeding me, literally, it's my right.

This doesn't change the issue at hand, why squander resources on unused checkout lanes, or produce products that only last two months, or put every single item in it's own fucking bag when there are countries on this Earth that can't even feed, house, or clothe themselves. This is a huge problem, and it makes absolutely no sense.

If Wal-Mart isn't going to pay someone to stand at each one of those checkout lanes when they are open for business, then they need to get rid of them and use those materials for something that will benefit mankind, instead of consuming those materials for the most useless artifact of our capitalist society, the empty checkout lane.

Yet, this isn't even the dagger that pierces me square in the gut. They've taken the extra step to provide a self-checkout option. I've actually used those in the past, and I always leave with some twinge of guilt that I'm stealing from the store. But, aside from that, THOSE ARE ALWAYS CLOSED and there are typically at least 10 of the damned things, again with using up vital resources that could build someone a house, a car, a desk, or a brace  for the back that capitalism has shattered through it's grinding gears.

Honestly though, this is just a prime example of the extensive waste of resources that is at work in this modern world. Packaging is an enormous consumption of materials, especially when the packages are packaged, repackaged, and then packaged again in some other way such as a box full of your bagged groceries, or a vase of flowers inside of a bag that has been put inside of a box. This isn't even touching  on the multitudinous oceans of useless plastic objects that are generated for one-time use then cast away into the ocean to be diffused by the Earth for a thousand years, yes straws, ketchup packs, and all of those stupid little things we all use every day that we just throw away.

Case in point, Taco Bell sauce packs. Yeah, I like the sauce. I use a lot of sauce on my food from there. The sauce is one of the prime ingredients to me that makes their food at the remotest palatable. Suddenly, on a visit to Taco Bell over the summer, I noticed that their sauce pack contained significantly less sauce in it. So, my train of thought gets on the subject of resource consumption.
Does it cost more for them to put more sauce in the package?
Does it cost less for them to use more of the plastic packages, and put less sauce in the packages?
Why the fuck won't they just fill the goddamned packages up all the way, and use fewer of these fucking sauce packs??

Well, it has to be an issue of cost at the end of the day for THEM. But, in the grander scheme of things, IF they have determined that it's a lowered cost for them to add LESS sauce to their packages and instead consume more petroleum to produce more plastic packages for less sauce, THEN these practices are driving up the cost of all of our petroleum based products.

The worst part of the thing is that it's probably a smarter idea for them to just have a huge tank of the stuff delivered to their 5800 locations in the United States, and just ask customers if they want sauce on their tacos when they make the damned things, instead of wrestling with this conundrum that they've obviously been presented related to their sauce packages.

Sauce packs and checkout lanes, think about it. Think about all of the other tremendously useless items that this planet is generating on a daily basis that are just cast away, consumed, and left to decay over thousands of years.

The iFrack coming soon.

I've either become more cynical as I've aged, or stupid people have multiplied across the globe, into positions of power, and have promulgated their numbers onto the highways of America. They are apparently allowed to drive now! God help us all.

Case in point. Here in this town of Cleveland, there is an intersection that contains a monument in the center, two one way streets going each direction, and a road bisecting the one-way streets behind the monument. Well, I'm approaching that intersection to cross the one-way streets and on my way to the apartment when I find someone who has chosen to pause for a length of time directly in my way of ingress. I don't know what they were doing, there were no cars coming, but yet they persisted in their immobility, until after a minute they simply drive out of the way and cease their blockage of all of the traffic at the intersection. I don't know what the heck they were doing, whey they paused in the middle of the road to block up all of the traffic, but thankfully some glimmer of reason entered their mind to trigger their self-removal from the intersection in question.

I don't know if it's that ignorance has propagated itself, or has been bred into the bulk of humanity, but it seems to be on the rise. Common sense, has become uncommon. Politeness has attempted to replace common sense on the highways with great frustration to people who happen to retain some modicum of common sense and knowledge of traffic regulations. As a polite person myself, I won't just up and stop for someone to get out of an intersection if there's no traffic behind me because I know that would confuse the shit out of me if someone did that to me. And this sort of thing happens often to me on the road.

It's not just drivers either, pedestrians, at least the college age variety that I'm coming into contact with lately as a driver are apparently cluelessly hanging out on sidewalks near intersections where drivers find themselves often. They're checking emails, or carrying on inane conversations that are probably better suited to some commissary, public park, or ladies' room in a dormitory. Don't stand on the side of the road chit-chatting, get the fuck out of the road so the rest of society can get on with their business and don't have to pause to determine if they may accidentally squish your eyeballs out of your head as their SUV runs you down at the four-way.

If I have to assign blame for the rise of ignorance in society, I'll have to set that blame squarely on our technology and marketing machine. Lately, I'm finding my intelligence assailed on a regular basis anytime that I'm exposed to advertising. I think I've brought this up before, well I'm on it again. Back off Mr. Faceinyouriphonebooktuber standing at the crosswalk not communicating whether or not you're about to step off into traffic, you're part of the problem, you media consumer! But, I can't totally lay the blame on you. You've been subjugated to something larger, this consumer culture that we seem to have been completely subjugated. For any sort of proof, turn on a television for an hour, and you'll find the most pointless information being broadcast in large quantities by news organizations, advertisers, infomercial producers, and even some television programmers.  All of which want you to give them money for some dumb product that you don't need, really.  You could probably do without that smartphone, heck it might even make you smarter to not have it. You might have to actually use your brain to remember where you parked your car.

All that I'm really saying is that we've apparently reached our level of incompetence as denizens of this planet. The 'Peter Principle' we haz it.

Think about the lack of common sense behind 'hydraulic fracturing' or 'fracking' if you want to call it that. What a terrible concept! Who's the lamebrain who conceived that it was a smart idea to open up fractures deep in the planet with water, when the whole planet is made up of floating plates of crust surrounded by mostly water. It's a recipe for disaster, and I hope that the human race comes out of it's mental cloud and realizes that soon. Especially, since the consequences involve earthquakes, polluted waters, and humongous sinkholes forming.

I think when you really get down to what has caused this collapse in the general gregariousness of humanity is money. There is some wisdom in that old saying, "Money is the root of all evil."
Everything has become at its' core related to generating a profit at any cost, regardless to whomever the stakeholders in whatever project it happens to be, and how much profit that project can generate for the shareholders.

Faceless corporations have been happy for so long to supply mankind's wants, needs, desires, and fetishes, it's long overdue that humanity recaptures some smidgen of self-reliance and starts to think for itself again before time runs out and we're all killed in the crosswalks.