Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

There is something wrong with me. I can’t get over class rage.

There is something wrong with me. I can’t get over class rage towards individuals. About twenty years ago my friend Nicola – a working class English girl – told me that seething all the time only hurts me; it doesn’t affect anyone of privilege.

I have kept a series of little TVs in the corner of the counter in my tiny kitchen. When one TV dies, I usually find another for free as they’re the old-fashioned tube TVs and no one wants them. The picture on my present TV, given to me by someone who wanted it out of their basement, has started to shiver.

Someone we’ll call XY advertised a 14” set on Craigslist. He lives just a few miles from me. XY was asking $30 and when he admitted that the TV was from 2001 - i.e. a couple years past its bar mitzvah, I asked if he was flexible about the price. He gave an emphatic no. I went to see it today. He and his wife – we’ll call her XX – live in a disconcertingly fancy gigantic apartment with vaulted ceilings about four stories high. The flat is one of a number constructed inside an old stone church as part of the gentrification of the area. XX told me their bedroom was upstairs along with several other rooms – “two or three,” she said, “I’m not sure. We don’t really use them.”

XY was transferred here to Boston by his company – one of the biggest corporations in the world.

I just could not bring myself to give him $30, even though I need the TV. I should have said that. Instead I said I didn’t realize it had such a huge rear-end (the truth) and I didn’t think it would fit my tiny kitchen counter (not the truth). I should have said, “You are disgusting for charging for something that only a person without many resources would need.”

His wife tried to be helpful. “Why don’t you just buy an iPad and use that? If you don’t have much counter-space you could set it up on a little table.”

If I could afford an iPad for my kitchen, would I be scrambling around Craigslist, asshole? I didn’t say. Instead I said, “There’s no room for a table in my kitchen.”

All that happened to these wealthy people was that they wasted 15 minutes. I’m sitting with a stomach full of acid and a heart full of resentment, and I know that Nicola was right.

Beware of Rapacious Whole Foods

Whole Foods charged me $6.90 for a tiny eggplant that, after I insisted, was correctly priced at $1.84. I caught the mistake – not the vegetable department, not the checkout woman, not the supervisor, and not the store manager. It took me 30 minutes to convince them that their product was wrongly rung up and when they said the wrong sticker was on it, it took me more time to question their lack of concern about all the other customers who had been over-charged.

“We’re fixing it now. They’re changing the stickers. Everything’s okay.”

“No, it’s illegal to mark products wrongly and to overcharge. How many eggplants did you sell today and why don’t you seem to mind having ripped off other customers.”

“We get it right 99% of the time.”

“How do you know? It’s me that identified the problem, not any of your staff.”

“There’s nothing I can do about the other customers.”

“And you have done nothing for me, but waste my time. I’m going to send you an invoice to cover these 40 minutes of my life that you’re forced me to work on your store’s quality control.”

They give me a gift card for a paltry $20. I wonder how regularly they make these “mistakes.” Beware Whole Foods. From their prices you can see they are rapacious. And now we know they not only make charging “errors,” but don’t even apologize for having wrongfully pocketed our money.

I take my bag of groceries and leave the store, only to find that on this, the first day of Spring, it is pouring snow and my car is covered with it. “Oh shit,” I say at the exit. “Oh shit,” says the guy next to me.

“You know what?” I tell him, “one more winter like this and Boston’s going to lose half its population.”

“Already happening,” says he. “I’m moving to Atlanta in three weeks.”

“And we,” says the woman of a couple right behind us, “are going to Florida next year from November to March, aren’t we honey?”

Ripped off and snowed on: Is it any wonder that I’ve arrived home and am slumped in front of my third hour of “Murder, she wrote.”