Magazines

In the grocery store last night, I passed the magazine rack. Two shelves of rags total, the top one apparently for women, the bottom one apparently for men.

The magazines on the top shelf looked all alike: a single female (some celebs, some just models), shown from head to about the knees, in various outfits, from bikinis to wedding dresses. I couldn’t tell one from another—they all looked so much alike that the whole shelf kind of just blended together in one collage of women.

There was one section of the top shelf, about a quarter of the space, for “home and garden” type mags. The only one that caught my eye was Gardens & Guns: 21st Century Southern America. This is the only book I took down and looked through—it’s mostly “garden” and no appreciable “gun,” so I put it back on the shelf. What a piece of false advertising. I’d have bought it if it had advice for shooting garden gnomes—“Rifles or shotguns?”

The magazines on the bottom shelf looked very different from the top shelf, and even from each other—mags about cops, cars, games, music, computers, and women. There were three mags on guitars, three on cars (plus one specifically on just trucks), two on computer games (plus one on computers in the general), and a bunch of gansta and rock idiots with too many tattoos and too little common decency.

Looking over this rack made me think just what kind of shoppers this store has to layout this selection of reading material. But then, this is a store whose head cashier is a young hispanic girl with blonde hair and a name tag that reads, “Barbie.” (No lie!)

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com