Buggy Vengence

Being a college student that lives on campus a few miles away from the middle of nowhere, our dietary choices are rather limited. We have a slightly overpriced bagel shop, a small grill named after something you find nailed in a wall, and the one place we have yet to escape throughout our elementary, middle, high, and college years: the Cafeteria. Luckily for us, God poured out His love through the vessel we call Wally-World only ten minutes down the road. 

As humans (and starved college students) our eyes tend to be a bit bigger than our stomachs when we go shopping, so if you see Hot Pockets looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in our arms, don’t be surprised. The simple solution to not dropping everything all over the place (because we all know that we end up with much more than we intended to buy) is to grab a buggy.

The dilemma is not the crazy drivers you encounter as you shop, or the inconsiderate lolly-gaggers that stand in the middle of the aisle, but where you decide to leave your buggy once you are finished. So Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you six motivational ways to put the buggy back where it belongs.

1.      The Obesity Fighter

a.      Obesity is a (literally) a growing epidemic in America. We are the fattest country in the world.

                       i.      About one-third of U.S. adults (33.8%) are obese.
Approximately 17% (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2—19 years are obese.  

                    ii.      We are supposed to walk 10,000 steps per day. The average human stride is 2.5 feet long, so that calculates out to 5 miles a day. If you push that buggy back where it belongs, you can fight obesity one step at a time.

2.      Poor Retail Workers

a.      Buggy Retrievers have to brave sleet, rain, snow, wind, whatever. There’s always that one buggy at the very end of the parking lot, taunting them. Don’t be that guy.

b.      When shopping in a department store, when you realize you left your wallet at the dorm, don’t just drop the buggy where it is and run (because if it's at tj maxx, I'll be sure to accidentally ring up your most expensive item twice), put everything back at least where you think it belongs. I appreciate you trying to help me get my steps in at work, but I calculated it one night, and within a four hour shift, I walk about 12,000 steps. So thanks, but no thanks.

3.      Good Condition

a.      When people desert them, they get shoved out of the way and always manage to end up rickety and broken.  When you finally give up the “I’m a super hero and can carry eighty pounds of clothing mindset” and realize you need a buggy, your eyes fall on the only one left. Time goes into slow-mo and you make a run for it. Drop the clothes in buggy, take a relaxing breath, push buggy and realize it’s broken. It’s so messed up, it’s popping up and down like a car on hydraulics. Let’s face it, no one wants a broken buggy because the constant noise of what sounds like a jar of dying crickets can get a little annoying.  

4.      Quarter Back

a.      When shopping at certain stores, you have to pay to use a buggy, normally twenty-five cents. Many people are like, yeah, so what, it’s just a quarter, no biggie, but when you’re a broke college student pulling an all nighter and you need a Mountain Dew to keep going and all you have is a dollar and your Crusader Bucks were spent within the first week of the semester because you were reunited with Einsteins, you’re going to wish you had your quarter that someone else now has.

5.      Homeless People Cannot Steal Them

a.      Now, I do have sympathy for the homeless, but when you’re venturing downtown for the first time with all of the confusing one way streets and people that fearlessly walk out in front of moving vehicles, homeless people can no longer hit your car with their buggies or have things readily available to throw at your windshield. Better safe than sorry.

6.      One Word: Karma

a.      When people say what goes around comes around, it’s true. If you leave a buggy deserted in a parking lot sooner or later, when you come rollin’ up to the V.I.P. parking spot in front of your favorite store on Black Friday, it’ll return as a big grey buggy staring you right in the face. And in frustration, when you jump out of the car to move it, you’ll find out that it’s broken.

It may seem like these things all happen separately, but in actuality, every incidence works together like a snowball effect. The homeless guy snags the buggy at the end of the parking lot that the poor Walmart employee didn’t want to trek through the pouring rain to get because someone was too fat and didn’t care enough about their quarter to walk it back to the designated area.

So have a heart, when you put that buggy right back where it belongs, you can take pride in yourself as you stand by your perfectly parallel-parked, dent-free car downtown with Mountain Dew in hand, looking just as skinny as ever.