Retail hell is nothing new to any of us. Enough content on consumer culture and the employees who bear the brunt of it has been generated to fill every Wal-Mart Superstore to the bulbs of their pallid fluorescents. Still, what I’m about to say is going to be a revelation to some of you: if you have ever shopped at a store, be it grocery or department, clothing or electronics, eaten at a restaurant, drank at a bar, any variation of the myriad institutions legal or otherwise whereby goods and services are exchanged, you are hated by someone.

That’s right, somebody hates you. Not the general “you” that connotes our society at large but the real, three-dimensional person staring at these words on their laptop or phone screen who has already pinned where I’m going with this. Somebody out there hates you with such a boiling passion that acknowledging your very existence spikes their adrenaline and demolishes their belief in a higher power. The thought of having to speak to you makes them want to catch their genitals in a moving escalator or impale themselves on a sharpened selfie stick. If by some great misfortune, they are reminded of you outside of their tedious, soul-sucking workplace, they can’t think of anything they would covet more than instantaneously developing a deadly nut allergy and than being hit by a Snickers truck.

Yes, you are that bad.

Shut up. You are, and all of it boils down to a lack of self-awareness that stems from no regard for your own attention and how or to what you pay it. Now before you peel away from this article kvetching about how I’m just another bitter, entitled counter boy airing his grievances in a colorful screed, it’s worth noting that you are not like this all the time. [1] Outside of retail environments you are intelligent, conscientious, perhaps even wise and/or kind. We all move through different spheres with different rules and dynamics and those experiences go on to inform what shape each of our compartmentalized selves will take; there’s you when you’re alone, you with your family, you in your circle of friends, you as a citizen, as an employee. You’ve learned how to function in all of these roles so when it comes time to transition from one to another you thoughtlessly fall into the rhythms necessitated by each. That’s normal. Where the multiplicity of your identity most often goes off the rails is when it comes time to be you as a consumer. That is, your Consumer Self is most likely a garbage person being continuously rewarded by those in charge of selling you things (not to be confused with the people on the ground actually doing the selling without reaping any of the profits) who, by the way, wouldn’t have you any other way.

A strange thing happens to you, the good person, when you step into somewhere to make a purchase or order food. You tend to regress into a twisted Gollum-ization of your childhood self that is defined by the one-dimensional pursuit of obtaining whatever thing it is you want, only instead of having to appeal to a parental figure to mediate between you and the desired object you possess the income yourself and retain your adult sense of authority. This toxic autopilot setting is responsible for interactions I have every day with people who, for example, bring me a single three dollar bag of cookies and wait for me to ring them up before pointing out, “They were supposed to be two for five dollars.” That actually happened, and when I asked if this was the only bag of cookies left on the shelf so that I might appropriately discount it, the customer scoffed and snottily replied, “No. Can I not just get the one bag?”

This was not some floundering dunce with a caved-in head or a pajama-ed junkie mad on bath salts. This was a man with nice clothes and a wedding ring and keys to a Lexus that dangled from a hand that also clutched a copy of Forbes Magazine (not that material possessions correlate at all with quality people). This is what I’m talking about. Out in the world you might be successful and educated, but when you allow the unconscious behaviors cultivated by the free market antichrists we call big box stores to usurp your conscious attentions, all of that well-formed humanity is transmuted into a dribbling failure of evolution dispersing confounding spores that infect every criminally underpaid plebeian in your vicinity with suicidal rage, psychotic misanthropy, or both over years of exposure.

You see, everyone knows with eye-rolling familiarity that corporations only care about money. Again, how many people remain deliberately and consciously attentive to that fact I can only pessimistically guess, but beyond the reality of the bottom line, the transitive property is at work. The corporation values only money and so it measures everything in how much money it gets. It gets that money by providing you with something you want badly enough to surrender your money for. Therefore if the corporation’s end goal is money then that goal is inextricably tied to what you want. If it’s all about money then it’s all about you. You you you. You are the only thing that matters because it is only you who can decide to part with your money so when you step into a chain restaurant or a two-story store that basically only sells towels, you are stepping into a universe in which someone very clever would have you believe you’re the sole inhabitant. No one else. Just you. Nobody else to consider and by extension nobody else to abuse. It’s understandable then that you end up acting like anyone who found themselves sovereign of their own pocket universe: like a complete tool.

How do you fix it? I’ve already told you if you’ve been paying attention.

It’s up to you.

[1] Yes, I’m making sweeping generalizations and yes that is kind of gross and overblown and you may think that the perceptive acumen with which you’ve noticed the unfairness inherent to the generalizations I’m making excludes you from the subset of people this writing is actually aimed at. It doesn’t. People who aren’t a nightmare to deal with in public are concretely aware of that fact without me needing to clarify my statements to exclude them just like you should be aware that your powers of perception would be better spent assessing yourself.