It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 26, 2011, a full month before Consumer Day Christmas. I walked into the supermarket and was blasted as if with a fire hose to the chest with a horrible rock-blues-soul rendition of some made up Santa song.
I immediately went looking for the cutlery section to end my misery. Then, remembering that I was in Trader Joe’s and they don’t sell cutlery, I went and chugged a tub of organic tofu and downed a bottle of Gaia herbs. Neither worked. I wasn’t dead and the song was still playing.
A few minutes later when I puked into the avocado bin I felt a little better, mostly because the song had ended by then.
Except that a new song came on, blaring through the paper thin speakers in the ceiling, like some guy who doesn’t know his radio sucks but insists on playing his music loud anyways.
I was trapped with a cart half full of groceries, an empty fridge and pantry at home, and ten checkout lines with ten people in each, all tapping merrily along to some pop star’s version of some song that should never have been written in the first place. And these toe tappers probably didn’t even notice the ubiquitous key change – the unambiguous sign of bad music.
I somehow survived the experience, made it out of the grocery store with my physical body intact, but with my mental state severely tampered. It was only the beginning. Holiday music not only in the grocery store, but in every retail store, the drug store, the ice cream shop, restaurants, cafes, elevators, people’s car radios, every radio station, even the hip jazz stations.
I’m half expecting holiday music to start coming out of people’s butts. No, that would be too apt. That would mean that people get it.
So since I’m not going to be able to avoid going to places this month, I’ve come up with a way to avoid the holiday music experience. I put the following sounds in a playlist on my iPod. I’m going to put it on shuffle, and keep the headphones on until December 26. Feel free to copy my idea.
See ya on 12/26, baby!
Enjoy:
About Jared Karol
I feel your pain. Now, take that pain and multiply it by roughly infinity, and you have what your average retail worker feels by the time Christmas actually comes.