Johannes Schult

I like to go shopping. I loathe the title “Ka-ching”, but the song itself is formidable. I enjoy the process of buying and subsequentially owning. I could do without the other costumers, though. It’s not that I loathe them (at least not all of them), but I don’t really care about them. But since there almost always around, you have to put up with them. I spent a considerable amount of my shopping time pondering about elaborate schemes concerning social interaction in shops. Fueled by the themes and of Clerks, I devised wild theories and felt the urge to write a book about social shopping systems more than once. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for this, so a short outline of one of the chapters will have to do. In fact, it’s just a little comment I wrote when I read these questions to the world. One of the questions is, why you make antics when being faced with a child, but not with an adult, when you’re waiting in a queue in a supermarket.

“Title dictates behavior.” As a costumer in a convenience store you’re not supposed to make silly faces – unless, of course, to entertain a little child. Now imagine it’s carnival season. You can dress like a madman and make silly faces all you want without anybody bothering. Naturally, you can behave like that when you’re shopping. But on the long run, every order to stay away from a respective shop brings you one step closer to starvation.

A different explanation, which has nothing to with shopping in particular, is based on rationality, or better: irrationality. Kids don’t mind when you’re telling them irrational stuff. “Sneezing trees” is just one example. It’s not that they immediately believe everything. But they are less inclined to shake their heads when you tell them that an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. It might be the same with antics and the like. Children are okay with you barking like a dog or flapping your arms like a butterfly. They do it themselves all the time. Only when they grow up, they start being rational and stop fooling around. This change is presumably a gradual one and deserves a post on its own. So I’ll finish this one with the words Kristoffer once wrote (in a somewhat different context):

I think the truth of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny does alot more damage to a child than any computer game can. Seriously, think of the damage when a child realises that his/hers parents, the very people who are suppose to take care and look after you, have been lying about that for all these years, and everyone else is in on it as well!