Small town girl at heart

Before I moved to St. George, Utah, I lived in a very small community of around 5,000 people. St. George has over 100,000 people.

Life in small towns is so much different. It doesn’t take 15 minutes to drive from one end of town to the other. Most everyone knows every one else and they greet each other with a big smile and a genuine “Hi, how are you?” Traffic is not made up of the hurried, harried, and road-raged drivers. It doesn’t take 3 hours to go to 3 different stops in town because town is not stretched out over a very large radius. There is not all the many great numbers of stores to choose from and thus less money is spent in impulse buying.

Sometimes I really miss the little town I used to live in. Life seemed slower, easier, calmer, more relaxed, and just plain nicer, then. Guess I am just a small town girl at heart.

Boy, am I glad that I didn't go!!

I am talking about the early morning day of….and the day after Thanksgiving BIG sales! People have been sharing with me their tales of shopping horror stories!!

Evidently some people are not very nice when it comes to going to several big name stores at 1:00 in the morning just to be assured of getting at the front of the line and standing there until 3 a.m., when the store opens for their “unbelievable early bird sales”.

Then when they open the doors, it’s like a stampede into the store, with running, pushing, bumping, and shoving. And once into the store, there is grabbing of merchandise, yelling at others that you had it first.

But, what the store fails to do, however, is to purchase a fairly ample supply of the sale item. Once into the store, you discover that YOUR item you had hopes of purchasing….well….the store only purchased 3 of them!! One nice mother, having just missed out on the last toy item she had hoped to get for her children for Christmas, overheard the woman who got the last one say, “I just bought it for the fun of it".

A story reported in Las Vegas, commented about the several fights that broke out in the lines that were waiting for the store to open. Police had to be called to the scene.

What gets into SOME people? Where are their priorities? Do they forsake kindness and consideration to others….just for the obtaining of a material object?