TANTRUM TIME
You probably never had to wonder very long to realize how the shelves in grocery stores are stacked in patterns as traps for parents with small children.
They also serve as a convenient, foolproof study areas for anyone observing parental control of such children. Nowhere else provides such natural, uncluttered lab conditions for a student to observe parental reactions to their children's ways of showing defiance and setting their rules of independent choice.
Be it by sheer chance, or by devious connivance by management and shelf stockers, the most colorful, slowest-moving, or most costly and hence, more profitable items such as certain dry cereals are always placed in abundance at a small child's eye or stoop level.
Bundles of woe await any parents who walk into such a commercial trap with a child meandering ahead of their shopping cart down the fascinating lanes of canned, boxed, bottled or packaged foodstuffs.
It usually starts rather naturally. The child sees a particular product he or she knows and gathers one or more close and runs to the parents for it to be put in the cart. This is the exact moment of crisis in their young lives but it is amazing how many parents do not see it as a tragic act at the time. If that initial item of childish choice is accepted by the parent and placed in the cart, they have, at that very moment, unleashed a torrent of trouble.
One of life's most most worts scenes occurs right in the public market place with scores of people appearing out of nowhere to watch and listen. Outright rebellion takes place with a screaming, twisting child seemingly being beaten into submission by vengeful monster of a mother or father. The child is, usually, seen to be playing to the growing audience, and among them will most certainly one or more who will report the encounter to the authorities. The young couple will become gossip circle victims as child beaters, potential molesters or worse.
Before parents take small children shopping with them is is wise to teach them that one does not touch, certainly not handle, anything which does not belong to them. Teach them the items in the store e belong to the store 's owner. stare owner. I have often felt sorry for distraught mother's who were in such a situation. When stores were entirely different years ago, the chances of such a thing happening were rare.
I some times have blamed part of it on a wonderful food stores which came to our small southwest Virginia town in 1926. when they expanding from their home area of Memphis, TN. Clarance Saunders, the founder of the chain of food stores called Piggley Wiggley had devised anew shopping system 1916 which allowed self-service shopping to become a reality. One entered the shopping area itself though a turnstile and picked up a bag or basket in which to put selections. You then zigged or zagged the length of the store several times between aisles of foods and you selected the items you wanted. With a final zag you arrived at the checkout counter where you paid for the items selected.
The stores called Piggley Wiggley still prosper, I understand in the Midwest, but I wonder if they still have the unique floor plan that made food shopping such a family pleasure for us many years ago.
I hope the distraught mothers and suffering children are a thing of the past as well.
A.L.M. August 9, 2003 [c578wds]
