My taxable income comes from a paltry wage that I earn at a gas bar. I get the daily weather report from every customer, the odd complaint about the weather and once in awhile I get to have an intelligent conversation with someone - for about 10s. I also get customers who come in talking on their phones and complete the entire transaction without saying hello (rude), people who have an opinion about the price of fuel and once in awhile a bit of a frustration at the cost of cigarettes.
We sell a lot of "junk" in this place I call work..."energy drinks" are horribly over priced, pop is not, we sell milk too. Ironically we sell a lot of milk mostly cuz people don't want to go inside the store and wait in line for 5 minutes to pay for a $5 item. We sell a tonne of chips, chocolate bars, and the latest and greatest of course is donuts. In this tiny cubicle we don't sell a lot of the donuts cuz they are bad for you. I witnessed the other day a mother preferring a chocolate bar for her 5 year old daughter over a donut. Calorie wise the donut had less but the sugar content was about the same, and the donut was cheaper. I figure that if people will still continue to buy junk they will pay whatever price it is going to be. Tobacco and alcohol sales don't necessarily go down because they go up in price, they don't really change as a matter of fact and I think that junk would end up being the same. People with defined addictions will do whatever they can to get what they need, children will continue to cry and embarass their parents in public because the "need" what they are asking for.
There is an 90 something lady who walks to the cube that I work in every few days to buy cigarettes. When the weather had turned exceptionally poor a family member had come in to buy them for her, she explained to us that this woman had actually quit smoking when she turned 80 and then as alzheimers had set in - she had forgotten that she had quit smoking and on a regular basis would walk several blocks to our establishment to make her big purchase of the week. Family members buy them for her and slip them into her purse when she isn't looking to simply protect her from the fall. Addiction is what it is - whether it be food, alcohol or tobacco and people will do whatever they can for their fix. I find it incredibly disturbing that parents feed this addicition to children to keep them quiet (or whatever reason they do it)...I'm not picking on parents, I am one myself of 4 distinctly different personalites and they all have their daily demands. Thankfully they don't ask for food as I haven't really encouraged it as a reward system. I get it - parenting is tough...I just think that for all of the things that we have to pick on in society - we seriously need to reconsider our priorities and look at alternative methods to some of the financial strains that our medical system has on it because we can't say no to something so small - but makes us so big. JMHO. Thats it for today as I go off to earn my taxable income.
No comments:
Post a Comment