This little piggy went to market

This evening I traveled to the local Jewel over on Humbolt to do some long-put off shopping. After all, the take-out bills were mounting, and I needed to replenish my dwindling junk food stocks. As I jockeyed my cart through the produce section looking for the perfect Granny Smith apple, I heard a crackling interruption in the lovely, soothing muzak. An announcement then said…

“Nigger dial 501, nigger dial 501.”

Needless to say this caused me to temporarily halt my apple selection. I looked up and glanced around at the other people in the department. Surely I couldn’t have been the only person to have heard that. The old lady shifting through the onions didn’t skip a beat, and the fat woman with the screaming kid by the deli counter continued to drool over the potato salad unabated. I convinced myself that my mind was playing tricks on me and by this time my ADD had shifted my attention to a bin of MacIntoshes. Seconds later the muzak stopped again and I heard.

“Nigger dial 501, nigger dial 501.”

Again! This time I know what I heard, but alas I seemed to be the only one to have picked up on it. Was I crazy? Was I starting to lose my mind? Was Cuba Gooding Jr. really once an Oscar winning actor? Damn, there goes the ADD again. Perhaps it was the tone, there was nothing aggressive or nasty about it, just a routine announcement. It was almost as if they were calling for a Mr. Nigger who worked in the store. (the one in frozen foods, not the one in dairy, nobody wants to talk to him) At this point I became depressed over the general state of things. Were we really at a point in this society where somebody could shout a racial epithet over the P.A. in a crowded supermarket, and nobody would notice, much less object? Is this truly where we have arrived as a people? How low have we…ooh gummi bears!