Friday, June 4, 2010

Trust in supermarkets

Why do cashiers check if there is something under my bags or my backpack, and do not check what I have inside of it? It happened three times now, and once there was even tomato sauce (from another supermarket) visible inside my backpack!
I understand that probably they can't ask to look inside your backpack. But then it doesn't make sense to look outside of it! Do I look so stupid?
And it would be OK to seal backpacks, like in big Italian supermarkets. Then it would make sense to look outside.
Whatever. It's just weird. From my point of view, they're just literally crazy. And the idea that craziness is relative from the point of view is interesting. If a person made this in Italy, he'd be put in a psychiatric hospital. OK, not really, but at least would be regarded as quite weird. Here it's normal. And you can find examples of cultural differences which would make somebody simply crazy. Say, an Italian working as much as a Japanese wouldn't be that good.

Part of the book I just read (Lila, from Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance) is exactly about this, and it's not just the opinion of the author, which in some cases can be quite unconventional; this part is much more widely known and accepted. Anyway, I am going to talk about Lila another time.

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