Music To Spend Less Money By

What was that awful noise?

When I glanced at my fellow shoppers to see if they were disturbed, they just kept shoving their carts, seemingly deaf as zombies.

A woman was wailing, crying, howling at the top of her lungs in pain.
"You're so cru-u-el!"

I looked around. Where was she? Was she being tortured? I wanted to help her, but she was nowhere to be seen. I'm a compassionate person and like to think I would come to the aid of a fellow human in distress. Was she being held against her will in the icy confines of the walk-in meat cooler? Was she pinned behind cases of disposable diapers in the storeroom? Was her ATM card rejected by the cashier?

Her agony was insistent, heartbreaking, earsplitting. Was some villain threatening to run her body through the price scanner? Did a cruel prankster attempt a practical joke by setting a microphone nearby while she was striving for an unsuccessful orgasm?

"Baby, baby, Ooooh!" That's about all I could make out.

When I asked the manager why he was piping this poor woman's pain through the market, he looked at me like I was crazy. "It's the music."

"Music? They call that music? Why would you play such noise?"

"It comes from headquarters," he explained. "They decide what we play. Market research." Market research probably began and ended with the hustler who sold this tape to the chain. If anybody did real market research it would show that people who shop in the middle of the afternoon - retired folks mostly - prefer to be soothed. After all, at great sacrifice we have given up our precious naptime to spend money.

Suddenly I realized that the singer wasn't the victim at all. I was.
Next to politics and religion, musical preference is one of the greatest reasons to wrangle. Everybody complained about "elevator music" when Muzak first began wiring the entire earth with loudspeakers.

Little did we realize how wonderful Henry Mancini's tired tunes really were. But if not bland elevator music, what?

Everybody has an opinion.

My husband would prefer classical music. He would genuinely like it if sopranos howled Puccini arias in the market. Imagine the complaints people would make about that.

Country western puts me in a spending mood. But mine is also a minority opinion.

The grandchildren would like rock-and-roll-heavy-metal-rap-hiphop. Or whatever is new. However, I haven't seen them spending their own money at the market.

Some new age folks like those dingly-dangly-woo-woo sounds made by a computer.

Face it, there is no musical style that will satisfy everybody.

I'm convinced that there is an evil genius out there who has decided that nobody, anywhere, should be able to enjoy five minutes without background noise.

Whatever happened to s-i-l-e-n-c-e?

As it is, when I enter a market where they are playing that album I refer to as, "Music to Spend Less Money By," I stick to my list and get out of there as quickly as possible.

This copyrighted column is the intellectual property of Virginia Cornell.
For permission to reproduce it in part or in whole please contact: vcornell@manifestpub.com. Inquiries from newspapers and newsletters are welcomed.