Computerization finds spending habits, greed determines merchandise ...

Computerized Candy Land.

By Paul A. L. Hall (paulhallart, paulhallart.com. youtube.com/paulhallart, Hi Paulhallart)

In the mart, every purchase is noticed, recorded electronically. It's the perfect voting machine. What is bought is what is restocked. One problem (among many). People aren't always buying what they really need. People are seldom buying what they really need -- until they need it.

Slowly, the truly needed items are being replaced by the fun stuff and eventually, as more stolid shops with inventories driven by real people are shoved out by the huge warehouses with cheaper things, the only things left available will be the things the simple-minded majority found amusing enough to be preoccupied with. I often joked that the next thing they should do is have the computer systems buy and sell from each-other.

Normally I would have worried about the way this sort of thing was going, but I realized that a situation like this would destroy itself before too long. As I say, Frankenstein saves nine, or Einstein is not as good as swi stein. Or it's the calm-puter before the storm. But the storm will wipe the landscape and denude the world as we know it before it's done. The dilemma is a lack of creative imagination coupled with computerization as of yet too primitive to really do the job they're expected to do. The simpletons expect too much from their computers.

So there will be a dramatic shift in inventory from usefulness to the amusing coupled with sham. But you'll find it far from amusing, particularly if you have to get affordable clothing and you're outside of the generic sized person with the most spending power and that makes the most mart purchases. Let's say the middle class suddenly became all pygmies. The mart, soon the only store in town, would sell only clothing, bedding, back packs, ect.,  that would only fit pygmies. All the rest of the gentry would have to take up making their own clothing like Mahatma Gandhi.

Worse yet, customers who must come to depend on the mart for necessities may find the item they need no longer stocked and they with no where else to go save the internet with the accompanying shipping and handling. Also if they arrive in a location, for example where it's winter and they need gloves, the mart may have "pulled" all possibilities in order to anticipate the oncoming season months in advance which is more lucrative to do in lieu of holding needed items in stock toward the end of season.

You see, it's a synchronization between the customers and the computers that report their purchases, every one, and subsequently their buying habits to the producers. The resultant situation is the exponential sort of reactive increase of a narrow selection of items that get more and more forced into categories to fit stereotypes. There is little if any human creativity on the part of producers to innovate and come up with totally unique products that depart from the norm or the mainstream of what is considered salable.

We can borrow from the Sea B's famous motto, "Can Do!", but this time put forward the parody, "Candy Do".