As I was leaving Walmart with a small bag of purchases, a polite young woman in a blue apron was waiting at the exit door, trying to reduce shoplifting.\u00a0 I met her eyes and looked expectantly with a friendly expression on my face, waiting for some word from her.<\/p>\n
(Please understand, I seldom patronize Walmart, so I don’t automatically know the rituals.)<\/p>\n
She said something, but I couldn’t make it out.\u00a0 I kept walking toward her, assuming that I’d be close enough when she repeated herself in response to my raised eyebrows.\u00a0 Then I heard her say “C.R.E.C.”<\/p>\n
I knew that I must have misunderstood, so I was now in her presence and apologetically begged “I’m sorry, what was that?”<\/p>\n
She didn’t slow down, but she increased her volume a little and said a third time “C.R.E.C.”<\/p>\n
Then it clicked in my mind.\u00a0 “Oh!\u00a0 May I see your receipt, please?<\/em>\u00a0 Certainly!\u00a0 Certainly!” and I handed it to her.<\/p>\n I’m sure that she was glad to get that over with, but I doubt that she got a blog post out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I was leaving Walmart with a small bag of purchases, a polite young woman in a blue apron was waiting at the exit door, trying to reduce shoplifting.\u00a0 I met her eyes and looked expectantly with a friendly expression on my face, waiting for some word from her. (Please understand, I seldom patronize Walmart, … Continue reading “Cultural Decline”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p45dxY-7O","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":485,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}