29 December—If you didn’t know, the self-checkout terminals that have proliferated in supermarkets and other retailers of any size are called kiosks. That’s rather stretching the meaning of kiosk, which comes from Turkish and means “pavilion”; these days a kiosk has become a small structure like a phone booth, newsstand, or pissoir. A self-checkout terminal would more accurately be called a station, which comes from Latin meaning “to stand,” because that’s what one does at a self-checkout terminal while self-checking out. But if languages didn’t evolve we’d still be speaking proto-Troglodyte. So, like it or not, a self-checkout station is a kiosk.

Anyway, as I was self-checking out at Litchfield’s little Stop & Shop yesterday I witnessed an incredible event. The person self-checking out at the next kiosk—a complete stranger whom I’d never before seen at Stop & Shop or anywhere else—actually picked up a Hearst Sunday Republican with a cover price of $2.50 and scanned it nonchalantly. I kid you not. Likely an out-of-towner, I reckoned, probably a New Yorker. But why then didn’t he—for the stranger was a man—take a Sunday New York Times? True, that’s even more expensive than the Hearst Sunday Republican, but it’s also a hell of a lot bigger and better. But obviously the stranger didn’t worry about value for money.

Because, without getting into the value of the Hearst Sunday Republican as a newspaper or anything else, the stranger at the next kiosk also bought a little package of firewood for $10.99, a 12-pack of Stella Artois beer for $18.99, and assorted overpriced processed junk-food comestibles, all at full, non-promotional prices, for a total $103.22. (That would keep me going for at least a month, but that’s irrelevant.) I know that because the stranger, who used a cell phone rather than a card to self-check out (something I hadn’t thitherto seen, though I had heard about it), neglected to pull the register receipt out of the dispenser and I’m a nosy bastard. Make that a curious bastard. Nah, back to nosy.

Had the self-checkout computer I was using not failed to reflect the advertised promo on so-called baby-cut carrots, I’d have followed the plutocrat who blew $2.50 for a joke of a newspaper and a fortune on other overpriced junk to see what kind of car he drove and where it was registered. (Not that you can tell anyone’s actual residence since Connecticut’s local property tax on motor vehicles encourages scofflaws.) But I summoned the friendly Stop & Shop attendant and got the two pounds of baby-cut carrots for free, per state law, thus saving the two-dollar promo price, which was $1.49 off the egregious regular price . . .