The superior people of far-Leftist Berkeley
All ego
As most veteran customers know, it takes a pretty thick skin to successfully navigate the Berkeley Bowl, this strident city’s most popular grocery store. Outside, petitioners seeking signatures for ballot measures have come to blows with opinionated residents. In the tiny parking lot, nicknamed the Berkeley Brawl, frustrated motorists have been known to ram one another’s cars. At the checkout, people have thrown punches and unripened avocados at suspected line-cutters.
When one shopper was told she couldn’t return a bag of granola, she showily dumped its contents on the floor. Culyon Garrison, who works at the customer-service desk, recently had a loaf of bread thrown at him.
The produce emporium — one of the nation’s most renowned retailers of exotic fruits and vegetables — creates its own bad behavior. Kamikaze shoppers crash down crowded aisles without eye contact or apology for fender-benders. So many customers weren’t waiting to pay before digging in that management imposed the ultimate deterrent: Those caught sampling without buying will be banned for life — no reprieves, no excuses. (Not even “I forgot to take my medication.”)
Raphael Breines, who was ejected last year for eating on the premises, said he couldn’t decide between two types of apricots, so he sampled both. Security stopped him in the parking lot. “They treated me like a thief,” said the 37-year-old park planner, who was photographed and required to sign a no-trespass agreement. “Technically I was stealing, but I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I was just deciding which type of apricot to buy.” Breines, a longtime customer, sent an apology letter, asking to be reinstated. His request was denied.
Store manager Larry Evans says the policy is a fair response to doctors, lawyers and college professors who help themselves to bags of cookies, nuts and vitamins, stick their fingers in pies and guzzle from bottles of sake, assuming the rules don’t apply to them. “There’s a sense of entitlement to this town,” Evans said. “People think, ‘If I want to do it, I’ll do it, just try and stop me.’ ”
Seven years on the job, he said, has given him insight into the city’s sometimes sharp social elbows. “Berkeley residents are angry — they’re mad at the president, the economy, all kinds of stuff. And this is the place where it seems to get released, the local supermarket.”
Longtime Berkeley residents also think they have a grip on the good life, so being banned from the Bowl is no small matter. On a typical summer day, a shopper at the Bowl is likely to find 20 kinds of apples, eight types of mangoes, half a dozen varieties of papaya, six kinds of garlic, five types of ginger and 40 different tomatoes.
(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, OBAMA WATCH (2), POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or “mirror” sites here or here — for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is “down” or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)
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Posted by JonJayRay on September 25, 2008 9:24 am
» Filed Under Democrats, Moral Relativism, News, Psychology, Stupidity, Unhinged
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2 Responses to “The superior people of far-Leftist Berkeley”
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Syndicate Me
I will admit to no small amount of delight in having the bad behavior of the denizens of that hotbed of elitism exposed to the light.
I have witnessed the brawls first hand at this store. All it took was one time for me to go through there to decide I wasn’t coming back.
Watching people sample fruit and put it back sickened me.
I am all for the store owners decision, but it isn’t going to stop it.
There is a reason why native bay area folks nicknamed the town “Bezerkly”