cultural phenomenon I think is crazy

When I lived in Seattle, I got most of my prescriptions filled at the Walgreens a couple blocks from where I lived.  Eventually I changed pharmacies. Walgreens is a particularly conservative company. if you doubt me, go into one and look around for all the ways it proudly proclaims its wave-the-flag conservativism. Just look for images.

When I moved to California, first living in Mountain View, I used other drug stores but had the same experience, although this is changing.

I noticed, both in Seattle and then MountainView, that upon entering the store, one faced a couple aisles jam  packed with make up, hair dyes and other 'beauty' products. I had to walk that gauntlet, deliberately positioned to force me to go through it, to just pick up my insulin.

As I began to write this, I thought of the CVS I use here in Berkeley as well as the Walgreens and Target stores that also sell prescription drugs, that are each one block from where I live. What does it say about our contemporary corporatist culture that there are three chain drug stores within one block of my downtown Berkeley home?

And yet. And yet. None of these three stores, and admittedly Target does not promote itself primariy as a drug store (neither do the others anymore -- they each had grocery departments these days), have the beauty products gauntlet anymore. 

I am sure each of these three stores still has beauty product aisles but I don't know where they are.

I almost never enter the Walgreens.  I do pop into the Target once in awhile for I pass it the most. Having spent over 20 years living in MN, where Target began and where I actually knew members of the Dayton family that founded Target as an off shoot of their now-all-Macy's family department store Dayton's, I used to be quite the Target addict, buying all my household cleaning supplies, hardware supplies, toys, socks, clothing for my kid as she grew, office supplies. Now I don't really buy much of anything but the Target one block away is a tiny shop.

When this quick-shop Target first opened, I popped in to buy some Brillo pads. Or any other brand of soap filled wool pads. They didn't have any. This Target is mostly a purveyor of highly processed foods, a few token homages to healthy food like the display of organic bananas near the check out lane. Mostly they sell things Target had determined college kids want.

With Walgreens directly across the street from Target, it is easy, and shocking, to see that Walgreens charges more for just about everything than Target or CVS.

One day, I lost my glucometer late in the evening. I can't go overnight without my glucometer. I have to test all the time so I know how much insulin to inject. Maybe I could have gone to bed without testing but I needed a glucometer the next morning.

And yet Target, in spite of claiming to have a full service pharmacy, did not sell glucometers. Walgreens did, at price gouging cost. I bought one anyone. I would have bought my new glucometer at CVS but it was after ten, CVS closed. Target, focussed on college kids who seem to become more awake as the night grows older, stays open to eleven so, no surprise, the Walgreens across the street now stays open until eleven.

That one night, I was glad Walgreens was open, glad I could ease my anxiety and get a new glucometer right away.

Anyway. None of these drugs stores has the make up and other 'beauty' supplies at the front of the store. Since I am no longer forced to run that gauntlet, I don't know where the beauty aisles are, or even if these stores have beauty aisles.

I used to run that gauntlet, which would have hundreds of different lipsticks and hundreds of different eyeshadows and other make up products whose names I have not retained. What do they call the liquid women put over their faces to give their facial skin a more even color?  I remember the word blush.

What came to bother me most about those beauty care gauntlets was this:   I would think about the fact that all those crappy products were made by humans who relied on their jobs making crap.  I would think about the packaging, polluting our home planet. I would think about the warehouse employees, the truck loaders, drivers and unloaders, the pollution from the transportation as well as the pollution from the manufacturing. I would think of women everywhere thinking that their own natural beauty needed crappy products to enhance their beauty.  I would see a goddamned mess.

And then, on my more eoyore days,  I might glance around at the rest of such crappily corporate stores and think about all the crap sold, all the packing that will be polluting our waterways and especially our oceans. I would think of an endless wave of humans dependent on what were likely mostly crappy jobs enabling this, imho, insane manufacturing, marketing and consumption.

Air fresheners:  plastic, chemicals, crap.

Cleaning products: loaded with toxins that end up in our drinking water sources.

Energy wasted, both physical energy and human energy.

Human dissatisfaction with themselves.

All I buy in CVS, and it is not a great store but I need my insulin, is prescription meds and toilet paper.

I think I could buy toilet paper cheaper on amazon but I just can't bring myself to do that. Toilet paper already wastes a ton of this planet's resources to land in a store, or in an Amazon warehouse. I can walk one block, each way, to buy mine. I don't need to be responsible for trucks hauling my toilet paper one more time, polluting my home commons one more time.

When I used to menstruate, I had taken to using cotton flannel menstrual pads that I laundered and reused over and over.  I guess I could use cloths instead of toilet paper, then launder them. But what about the water, soap and use of those natural resources?

Life is complex and getting more so, eh?