...some little thing happens that kind of torques you off. For a period of years I have been buying pop in twelve parks or 2 liter bottles, or maybe in plastic bottles from the machine at work. I have been in the habit of putting the cans and bottles in one of those cloth green bags you see in all the stores. Every once in a while I throw them in the car and as I go in to shop I will stop by the smelly little room where they keep those machines and stick the cans in and receive a printout for a dime or forty cents, or whatever. I stick these in my wallet and throw them in a kitchen cabinet when I return home.
I was at the Hy Vee the other day to buy dog food. The clerk, a grabby and assertive little thing, tried to snatch the chits from my hand and said, "It is our policy now that they (the chits) must be redeemed within 24 hours." "We have been having problems with fake ones being turned in," she sternly went on. I was too quick for her and pulled them back saying, "You keep the cans I really don't need it (the 20 cents) that bad." I crumpled them up and stuck the chits into my pocket. You see, in the few milliseconds that had passed I was first angry, then resigned, and had decided to change my buying habits, I will be buying no more pop from Hyde and Vredenburg. No more lugging 12 packs home, no more smelly little rooms with Group W types lurking about and no more cans rolling around my car. I will drink less pop and when I do it will be in paper cups from fountains at the convenient store.
I'm really not mad, I can do without assertive snots and I can do without Hy Vee, but I do not know what to think of the kind of sleazeballs and scumbags that would bother to counterfeit pop chits. What have we become and why is Iowa City so full of the kind of folk who have two garbage bags full of cans and will not let you put your 3 bottles through? Iowa City was a little slice of Midwestern heaven 40 years ago, now it has been bought and sold to the developers, the slicksters and the jiving junkies the dregs of the earth that hang around a place to beg and leach off an unfortunately growing and prosperous little town.
