The garlic thief

The garlic thief
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — I confess. The other night, I robbed the supermarket.

Here’s what happened. Hotlips was making pesto from the rampant basil plant that had swallowed our balcony and was threatening to re-enact The Day of the Triffids in the parlor. The missing ingredient in Hotlips’ recipe was garlic. So I volunteered a stroll over to the store, where in less than a minute I found a nice firm garlic bulb.

Then, ready to rush back to my own true love with her seasoning, I turned toward the checkout area and suffered a crushing onset of moral fatigue. The store had made it so difficult to buy a lonesome garlic bulb that I trembled at the prospect. Suddenly, I found myself pondering larceny. I could almost feel, physically, my ethical core shrinking to a pinhead.

Mind you, I understand the razor-thin profit margins that have always plagued the grocery trade. I know how (potential) shoplifters like me exacerbate this life-or-death mercantile dilemma. I know that the cost of employees, their wages, benefits, uniforms, overtime and — yes — their pilferage, is a curse that has consigned historic supermarkets, from A&P to Piggly Wiggly, to history’s ash heap. Every cashier, stocker and bag boy is an unwitting, uncaring parasite sucking from its daring progenitors the lifeblood of the enterprise.

I’ve understood this perversion of capitalism ever since my first job at Octopus Car Wash. Back then, once in a while, as I wielded a damp rag at the end of the buffing line, I would pause to observe the man we called Boss climb into his spotless Fleetwood and drive off, glancing anxiously at the crew of wage-earners whose ruthless pursuit of personal wealth was draining away the very substance of Octopus Car Wash. I realized even then — at age 15— that every hourly dollar and a dime that I took from the Boss was like opening my ravenous jaws and biting a bloody chunk out of his love-handles.

Hence, in my moment of garlic ambivalence, I sympathized with the Bosses of my local market. I understood why they had opted — in their desperation to stay in business for my sake — to replace most of their workers with self-service barcode-reading terminals.

My reluctance to plunge into the pre-supper throng of shoppers struggling with this high-tech advance in retail sales is that barcode readers cannot yet process every victual available in your typical general store — including garlic. The oldest difficulty posed by barcode readers is that “machine vision” has yet to progress to the level of a barn owl in the daytime. It sees poorly when it sees at all, and it has particular difficulty with all those skinny parallel lines in a barcode.

Beyond this fundamental flaw, there’s a human factor. Curmudgeons like me would rather buy our provender from a person, rather than try to coax an astigmatic gadget to go “beep” at the sight of an RSS databar.

Finally, there’s simply the problem that a garlic bulb or a beefsteak tomato, a bunch of grapes or an eggplant, don’t carry barcodes. Buying loose produce at a code-scanner is slightly less intricate than removing a brain tumor with a hacksaw and a teaspoon. Grocery engineers have yet to devise — affordably — a doo-hickey that can emblazon every apple, artichoke and parsnip with an indelible, non-toxic, biodegradable ink-jet barcode that won’t leave black stains on your teeth. Nor have they yet conceived a machine-vision retina that can laser-read a QR code off a rib-eye in a San Jose Safeway from a satellite in orbit over Kazakhstan.

We know they can do it. But they need more time.

Meanwhile, I languished in the produce section, clutching my garlic, gazing at a throng of puzzled laypeople struggling to smooth the barcode on a shrink-wrapped pork shoulder, trying to flatten out a twenty-dollar bill so the machine wouldn’t keep spitting it out, consulting one another over the numerical code for cauliflower. One or two employees were present, each engaged in a three-minute tutorial with patrons about the care and feeding of a semi-literate robotic “reader.”

At that moment, a wave of high-tech angst coursed through my psyche like an electromagnetic pulse. I even considered surrender, thinking, “Hey, how bad do you really need garlic in a batch of pesto?”

That’s when the devil on my shoulder whispered in my ear. Why not palm my garlic, whose reality could not be plumbed by a machine, which had no embedded “security device” tucked twixt its cloves? And then, why not just walk out?

For that matter, why be sneaky? (said the devil). I could probably wave my grocery item over my head and announce, “Yo! I’m outa here, dudes. I’m taking my garlic. And I ain’t payin’ either!”

Who was there to stop me? The machines were helpless to impede — or even perceive — a carbon-based life form absconding with an unmarked analog vegetable. The few surviving employees were preoccupied by confused shoppers and temperamental technology.

As I stepped through the automatic door — which worked perfectly — I paused, tossed my garlic up in the air, for all to see (but no one saw), caught it deftly and crossed the threshold into the night.

Here, alas, was my fatal error. Briscoe and Green will be coming after me soon.

I forgot about the cameras.