Appreciated

It’s the little things that matter. Just a little bit of kindness, for example, like that man who helped me put a box in my bag. “Good luck with that,” he called after me as I dragged the bag from the shop to my bike.

Are you already stocking up, or can’t you afford to, or do you think it’ll all be fine and that the war will blow over just like always, just like during the pandemic?

We’ve had the wonderful news that groceries are going to become at least ten per cent more expensive. I wonder how that will play out for the average person. Will everyone on a weekly food parcel now get one item less, or will ‘once a week’ now become once every 8 or 9 days?

Have you noticed that packaging has got smaller again? Now supposedly because it’s for small families, it’s more convenient, or... You can’t make it up, they make it sound better than it is. Whilst everyone is tightening their belts, the same few are raking in ever-increasing profits. After all, people have to eat.

Yesterday I heard how a pharmacy was pretending in its advert that it cares about the poor. People who have to cut back on hygiene (soap and water, I’d say that goes a long way). To be honest, this sort of advertising makes me feel downright sick. For instance, they said: if you buy a pack of Libresse sanitary towels, we at pharmacy X will add a pack for a poor family. Libresse? That brand is expensive, and why should someone who is poor have to use one of the most expensive types of sanitary towels? Why not a cheaper brand? Why doesn’t this commercial say: ‘For every pack of sanitary towels you buy, we’ll throw in a pack’? Or why not reusable sanitary towels that are more environmentally friendly and don’t end up in the bin after an hour?
Why should someone who is poor use more expensive sanitary towels than I have used in my entire life?

The next flashy advert from this shop was about... dental floss. Same story. You buy some, and they give the same amount to a poor family.
I’m sorry to say it, but I won’t be part of this sort of generosity. I can’t stand that sort of populist pandering. The last thing a family living in poverty needs is dental floss. Give them bread, eggs, a bar of chocolate, shampoo, a hot water bottle, nappies, toilet paper, a bottle of body lotion and painkillers. Useful things they actually need, not dental floss. Anyone who has nothing to eat certainly doesn’t need dental floss.

Perhaps the owner of this pharmacy could make a substantial donation out of his own pocket instead of always making the poor pay for the very poorest, simply because they are more decent and socially minded than the money-grabbers at the top for whom a donation is nothing more than a tax deduction and... which they also make their customers pay for.

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