An Evening in the Sam's Club Parking Lot

It is a fascinating sociological and anthropological study to spend three hours observing what transpires in a Sam’s Club parking lot. What I discovered was i) invariably a car alarm will go off every hour and keep sounding for a minimum of five minutes; ii) the whole “disassembled box instead of bags” experiment that these bulk food stores use is a complete failure – I witnessed numerous cases of items falling out of the flimsy boxes onto the parking lot; iii) sales of Charmin have not been impacted by the economic crisis. Now what was I doing in the Sam’s Club parking lot for three hours on a Friday evening? No, I was not stalking anyone (believe me a Sam’s Club parking lot is a stalker-free zone). No, I was not hanging out with teens. And no, I was not waiting for Charmin to go on sale. I was collecting money for the Special Olympics by offering free Tootsie Rolls. Remember Tootsie Rolls? They were quite popular when I was a kid, but not as much today. And some non-children who took the free Tootsie Rolls did not grasp the concept that perhaps since I was standing there in a yellow vest which said “Please donate to the Special Olympics” and had a can in my hand which said the same thing meant that a nice quid pro quo for the free candy would be a donation.