Dateline, the Target at Flamingo and Maryland. I had a genuine “what? what? WHAT?” experience.
I was doing some necessary domestic shopping, and had a few items and a bag with some items that I needed to get (in other words, I didn’t think I’d be able to get the right thing without having a sample for comparison). I parked my cart at the end of an aisle and walked down it, looking for some dry-erase markers. I had to go down another aisle to find them. I headed back to my starting point, and all of the sudden I was like, “Dude, where’s my cart?”
My cart, with my hard-won cache of consumer goods, was gone.
Luckily, there was a Target employee right there. I gave him a description of the cart, and we started looking for it. He got on his radio and learned that the guy who returns empty carts to the front was on break, so even if he mistakenly thought my cart was empty, he wouldn’t have been around to take it. I went to the front of the store and continued the search, even talking to a store manager about my quandary.
Then, circling back to the scene of the crime, the guy who I first talked to was looking for me. He pointed at a pile of stuff sitting in a ground-level bin.
“Is that your stuff?”
“Hey, it is,” I replied with a sense of relief. “What?” Then it all sunk it–my stuff was there, but the cart was gone.
Apparently someone needed a cart and was such a lazy slug that he/she couldn’t walk to the front of the store to get one–instead he/she had to dump my stuff and take my cart.
This isn’t a side of Vegas that you’ll see at the Country Club at Wynn (I hope) but it’s definitely one that us locals get to experience. And they wonder why there’s a lack of civic spirit here…when people don’t care enough about their neighbors to steal their shopping carts, is it really a surprise that most people in Vegas don’t care about the broader community?
In the coming months, you may see more of these ruminations about life in Las Vegas from me.
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If you want serious gaming-type news, here’s something for you: Tom Breitling is speaking and signing books at the Stan Fulton Building at UNLV at 6 PM tonight. He probably won’t string together a sentence with three “ats” in a row. I’ve gotten to work with Tom a little on this event, and I’m convinced of two things: he’s a great guy, and he’s got an interesting story to tell.
You may have already seen my review of Double or Nothing, and if not you should check it out–the review and the signing.
I should be there. Just don’t swipe my chair when I’m not looking.