The Bulk-Sized Panic Attack

The largest logistics problem to happen in the twenty-first century happened on a Saturday morning, wherein a thirty-four year old marketing director by the name of Amanda found herself trying to find her way around in a large-scale wholesale warehouse club, armed only with one bottle of hot sauce.

While Amanda had an advanced internal GPS system and a top-notch corporate communications plan up her sleeve, she currently found herself sweating, mentally panicking, and trapped in a concrete fortress measuring in at a whopping four acres. All she did was leave her group to retrieve a sample of frozen potstickers, only to discover that she was alone in an intricate maze of floor-to-ceiling shelves in what can be called a localized example of capitalistic isolation.

Amanda was resolute in carrying out a search-and-rescue operation the right way, thus she marched confidently down the central aisle avoiding the wandering shopping carts which were almost as large as full-size pickup trucks. Amanda watched with dread as entire families filled their flatbed carts with 48-packs of toilet paper and enormous quantities of mayonnaise, as if preparing for a long-term shutdown of the entire world. Looking down at her lone bottle of hot sauce, Amanda felt like a total amateur as far as survival tactics went. Trying to send out an SOS using her cell phone, she noticed it showed no service whatsoever; blocked from above by a steel roof of corporate America.

The actual meltdown was when she entered the walk-in cooler full of nothing but giant stacks of bottles of milk and shoppers huddling together in fear. Amanda just froze right there in the middle of all the cheese cases, her teeth rattling, totally defeated not by an elaborate wilderness survival situation, but by an exclusive discount warehouse store. She hadn’t managed to find her way back to her friends, but at least now she knew how to effectively freeze up while wearing her active summer wear and deal with severe shopper claustrophobia.