I’m a little freaked out. I was just at Costco picking up Pepsis (caffeine is what I substitute for vitamins) and water and Gatorade and pants (I wasn’t looking for pants, but they were nice: an impulse buy). I get in the line to pay and I leave the drinks in the shopping cart. Then the dude who puts your purchases back in your cart after they’ve been scanned starts lifting up the various cases of drinks, looking carefully between each one, looking, I guess, for the power sander that I’d hidden between the Pepsi and the Gatorade. Dude, I’ve been shopping at Costco for over a decade, and I’ve never seen them do this lifting-up-the-heavy-drinks-to-look-for-the-hidden-boxes-of donuts thing.

I’m not one to throw accusations of racism around, but that shit was racist. I wanted to ask this guy, who was essentially accusing me of thievery, if this was standard procedure (there’s no way that it could be; the lines would never move; I mean, I’ve seen people with stacks and stacks of cases of drinks on their carts, people who, in other words, had more hiding places for and a better chance of stealing than I did, and they never got this treatment), or if he had decided that my minority ass had to be stealing something merely because I’m a darkie, and you know how darkies are, but I knew what would happen: I’d have gotten the run-around and made to feel even worse than I already did. It sucks to be judged by a dude who, not to be harsh or elitist about it, is an assistant to the checkout guy.

Fuck them. I refuse to shop there again until I am out of Pepsi, or am in desperate need of pants.