I Have A Love-Hate Relationship With The Bay Fair Target

Today, I went to the Target in Bay Fair for the first time. Much like the Target off the Stadium Spur in Milwaukee (for those of you who are familiar with my homeland), this Target is bi-lingual due to the high percentage of the population demographic that is Hispanic. I had a blast laughing to myself at the sub-par English-Spanish translations. There’s something about seeing a vernacular phrase you see every day in another language that makes it seem utterly ridiculous. However, this fact also means that many of the employees are not familiar with my mother tongue. Which also happens to be the official language of this country.

In any event, I decided to start an herb garden on my fire escape (oregano and basil, not the California herb), so seeing as how this Target had a garden center, I was firmly in business. I first picked up some groceries, and a few things for my apartment (did you know ice cube trays are considered home storage? I didn’t.) and then headed to the garden center. Here’s the funny thing about me: while I’m shopping, I have a tendency to forget that I don’t have a car, a fact that is only remembered once I have passed the checkout. This means that I either have to get home on my bike, or on the train, both of which are almost equally daunting propositions when you are carrying enough groceries and/or housewares to outfit a small Mexican village. This lapse in memory and judgment has lead me to ride my bike home to South Berkeley from the Safeway in Oakland with six full bags of groceries on the handlebars. But I digress.

I walked around the store, picked up my plants, then realized that I needed pots for all of them. Then I realized that I needed dirt to fill the pots. Then I realized that I needed a cart because all this stuff sure as shit wasn’t going to fit in the tiny basket I was carrying. But at no point during all of these realizations did I think about having to carry several hundred pounds of garden supplies to the Bay Fair train station, then onto the train, then home from the Ashby station. I did realize this after I left the Target Store and saw the yawning expanse of parking lot that separated me from my train. So, being the resourceful person I am, I figured I could carry all my stuff across the parking lot in my cart, and then ditch the cart once I got to the edge of the lot. What I did not take into account was that the sneaky target bastards had a trap set for people like me. Turns out at this Target, if you take your cart beyond a certain point, the wheels lock up. Irreversibly. And that point happens to be the middle of the main road connecting all the stores in the shopping center. Which is where my cart still is. I figure if they want to put the electric fence there, they can fetch my cart back from the middle of the intersection with no working wheels. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to do them the courtesy. So I loaded all my bags into my arms, hiked to the Bart station, and waited for my train.

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My central concern about this whole endeavor is the seemingly frivolous use of technology. Doesn’t it seem as though all the research that went into developing shopping carts whose wheels lock up could have been used for a better purpose? Like seriously is there a huge black market for stolen shopping carts? Because the last I checked, most people want shopping carts in the store, not outside of it. I would be really fucking pissed off about all this, except for the fact that my grand total for like eight bags worth of stuff was $44. Damn you, Target, and your incredibly inexpensive merchandise, making me forget that I was mad at you in the first place…