My mother spoke no foreign tongues. The grammar of English, her native language, gave her enough trouble. Yet she was a master of “country speak.” She was the one who said, when she was full of food and drink, that she was “full as a tick” or “tighter than a June bug.” It was also my mother who said on the annual February 22nd celebration of our first President’s birthday that we were celebrating “George Birthington’s washday.” And it was Lily Carr who used the term “bass ackwards” to describe a move that was plainly in error. Modern purists today would conjugate that term to be “bass ackwardlyness.”
That description comes to mind almost every time when I do the grocery shopping with my wife. In the last three or four years, grocery stores have begun to play upbeat rock-and-roll and hi-hop music over their sound systems. This is nothing more than noise which the average listener would consider unintelligible. The singers are mostly screamers. There is no tune that I can discern. I can only conclude that the upbeat tempo of the music is designed to make the workers in the food market move at an increased pace. But that is where the bass ackwardlyness sets in.
If I were a merchant selling food or anything else, I would want my customers to linger with the thought that aside from what they had originally come to buy they might see something else and purchase it as well. The upbeat rock and roll music flies in the face of such a philosophy. The net result, in my case, is merely to hasten my exit from the store. There is no tranquility in this noise from the loudspeakers. When I hear that music, together with the screams of two-year-olds as well as the announcements that “Joe Doke, please report to the shipping department,” I am moved to cut short my visit and leave the store.
The upbeat screamers are for children who tend to play their music at the loudest decibels available. There is a mistake there in that what I hear is not music at all. It is screaming and noise. The owners of King’s and the Whole Foods Markets could take a lesson from Nordstrom’s. Nordstrom’s occasionally has a grand piano played on the first floor of their emporium. For example, the piano players at Nordstrom’s offer soothing music from composers such as Debussy and Gershwin, that encourages customers to hang around and listen and to shop a little more. And if one takes the time to listen, he might find a shirt that he did not intend to buy when he came in the door.
If the upbeat go-go music offered by King’s and Whole Foods is intended to make the help work harder, I believe that it is a lost cause because the help has long ago turned off the noise in their ears. They simply ignore it. The end result is that customers such as myself find ourselves being hurried through the store in an effort to avoid further exposure to the noise. From a marketing point of view, this is bass ackwards retailing.
I am indebted to Lily Carr for providing such an apt title for a situation that did not exist in her lifetime. Lily sometimes mangled the English language, but I am sure that if she were around today she would tell retailers such as King’s and Whole Foods that they are going after their customers in a bass ackwardly fashion. If Lily Carr were to deliver this message to the management of those two concerns, it would be delivered with her finger shaking an inch from their noses. And so I am grateful for Lily Carr providing a precise term for a condition that afflicts her seventh child and her last son. I suspect that Lily Carr would say that this noise is my just punishment for not becoming a Baptist preacher. That may well be the case but when the grocery store noise is coupled with television in the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices, the torment clearly goes too far.
E. E. CARR
May 25, 2007
Essay 256
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Kevin’s commentary: I’m beginning to think that I should create a tag specifically for essays concerning grocery store noise. It would now have three entries, including this one and this one.
This essay reminds me of an oft-repeated Shepherd family story in which we were trying to get dinner outside Disney World park. We wound up in some sort of Disney-affiliated bar (which is a thing that I didn’t know existed) which was playing “Jammin” by Bob Marley on repeat. There were no other options that were still open for dinner, so we put up with the constant refrain of “we jamming we’re jamming we’re jamming we’re jamming” through the entire meal. Toward the end, Mom speculated that this was Disney’s way of keeping anyone from getting too hammered at the resort. Unless you REALLY like Bob Marley, most people wouldn’t hang out in that bar for more than a drink or two.