One Size Fits All.
Like so many of the vaccinated, fully sprung from the pandemic, folk I’ve added excursions to shopping places I felt were off limits for a long stretch. After more than a year I’m sure you’ve had a number of things wear out, break, or problems of storage or organization that longed for a solution. I’m reasonably sure you went online looking for answers in the form of products you usually purchased locally.
Take nail brushes, the kind that sit near your bathroom or kitchen sink that you use to get the dirt out from around your fingertips after repotting a plant. I searched for months for a plain, straightforward brush I’d used for years but this product seemed to have disappeared from the world. What was offered in place were silly designs that clearly were not going to do the job. As gardening season approached I chose the best thing I could find and ordered that. Yesterday, while on my first trip back to the very store I’d heard my first COVID coughing (in February 2020 and I got out of there quickly), going through the checkout line there were those basic nailbrushes I’d looked so hard online to find. No longer particularly needing them (the inferior ones I’d purchased online only came in multiples of four), I put them in my cart anyway, longing for that “fix” that had seemed such an impossible quest a few months ago.
Amazon.com, the gargantuan endless supplier of everything is, of course, not that at all. It is algorithms and pushed products paid to get in front of the line. Under lockdown it seemed like (and perhaps was) a lifeline but it is not going to substitute for the hardware store down the street when you need a specific screw–not a package of 100 different varieties you’ll never use– or a lightbulb. But our precious local businesses did not all survive those months of lockdown. Now what?
On another shopping excursion I was in one of those places that seem to sell lots of “overstocks”– clothes, bedding, shoes, etc.– at discounted prices. My rotund, shrunken to 4’11” self swiveled my cart into a clothing isle just as an extremely tall, thin women turned into the same isle from the opposite direction. Giggling to myself, not daring to say out loud, were the words “one size fits all” bubbling up in my brain wanting to spill over into actual communication. I stayed silent but the juxtaposition of our physical selves searching the same clothing racks was absurdly, laugh out loud, funny.
This is the world where we have landed. For the convenience of making money and more money and even more money we marvelous, many layered, many colored, many sized, many cultures, many kinds of thoughts peoples, are seen by corporations as one thing: consumers! We are compressed by media, politics, religion, education and business into narrower and narrower confines with increasingly narrowing choices. At the same time the varieties of our beings are expanding everywhere: gender fluidity, multicultural and ethnically rich, our souls longing for expression and explorations of our true selves, our diversity joyously exuberant.
Can we be convinced that “one size fits all”? That’s a version of trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube.
The Marginal Way 