Wednesday, November 20, 2019

To Our Valued Customers...

I spotted this sign at a grocery stores the other night. Originally, I was just going to post the photo with no remarks, but the more I looked at it...

First of all, its a sad, yet probably accurate commentary on our obese and/or entitled society, that a sign like this even needs to be posted.

What buffoon thinks that’s it’s actually ok to eat the food in the store before they pay for it - let alone before they make it all the way back to their car. Are people so hungry that they can’t last the ten, maybe twenty minutes it takes to get back to their car, without having to shove something else into their gaping maw?

Even worse is that it must be happening with enough frequency that the store felt it necessary to post a sign to try and put an end to this apparent epidemic.

Obese and/or entitled customers aside, there is also the question of the admittedly artfully designed sign itself. Maybe its projection on my part, but I sense barely restrained hostility in this sign.

As you may have noticed, sprinkled among the semi-normal mix of upper and lowercase letters, are a few key words. Not only are these key words shown in ALL CAPS, but they're also underlined and in bold - just in case SOMEONE is NOT GETTING THE MESSAGE. (HELLO? IS ANYBODY HOME!!!???) See if you can find them.

And, as if that were not enough, there are asterisks on either end of the “BEFORE”. What’s that all about? Have they approached powdered sugar-encrusted customers in the past about this problem, only to receive an indignant response along the lines of, “Hey, I was gonna pay for it!!!”

There’s also the capitalized “Must”. This looks ambivalent to me. Was this going to be another ALL CAPS and they thought better of it? Maybe they felt it would detract from the more important “*BEFORE* and "NO EXCEPTIONS". I guess I agree with this decision - though it would have offered a nice visual balance to that particular line.

Finally, there’s the problematic conclusion. “Thank You, the management”.

Really? Thank you? If this isn’t sarcasm, it totally undermines their message. You just reamed people out (rightfully so) and now you want to be friends?

And then there's “the management”. For god's sake, at least capitalize it! If the "Thank you" before it is supposed to be sarcasm, then don't stop at standard capitalization. Put it in ALL CAPS - maybe even with a few exclamation points at the end. And if the "Thank you" isn't sarcasm, then "the management" should be in a really tiny font (weak).

One last thing I would like to note. For all their effort, the pastry case behind this sign is entirely empty. I'm not sure if there's any significance to this, but I feel it should be mentioned.

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