"I'd say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances"

Woke up early on a Brookline morning: sunshine, wind gusts at bay. Jaunted over to Shaw's/Star for the week's grocery shopping. Bee-lined for self-checkout. Reconsidered my decision when I came to a tin of four chocolate chip muffins and rosemary-olive oil focaccia.*

[Note 1: Wish I could apply footnotes to my blog. Nonetheless, spell check does not recognize "focaccia". Suggests "flaccid" as a replacement.]

These were no ordinary muffins/focaccia; I pulled them from the sale rack in the back, which in a caste society equates with the population of untouchables. Nonetheless, I touched, I placed into cart, I tried to purchase. Does the four-digit PLU code work? Does the machine recognize the reduced-value of the sticker price? Does the man governing self-checkout have a clue what his own employee number is?

Various Star employees pass by, none of whom help me.* Ten minutes pass by as well. It's too early on a Saturday to be impatient, so my time diddles into nothingness as I wait it out. I will have my muffins and focaccia.*

[Note 2: I go to self-checkout for the sake of velocity; I'm not going to spend all my time waiting in line while other customers can't find their credit cards. Ten minutes of stilled self-checkout, though, convinces me to stop buying sale items.]
[Note 3: No red flag this go-around. Maybe spell check assumes that if you use a word incorrectly four times, by that point you must have a reason. Dangerous for the consonant challenged.]

At last he concocts a brilliant scheme: to type in the price himself. In the dormancy of our past ten minutes (days?), he must have forgotten I have two bakery items. This is the story of how I received free chocolate chip muffins from the grocery store.

An ethical dilemma arises: I notice this right away and think, "that's his fault for not charging me."* But he's clearly new and inexperienced; what about his uppers, who should take care of their downers in a moment of mini-crisis? For my free muffins cost the store $2.40. It's futile to imagine this solely on a small scale when, in cohoots with the Butterfly Effect, my response belongs to a generation of The Entitled.

[Note 4: Like when your math teacher didn't notice you wrote 31.7 instead of 3.17 and gives you points you didn't deserve, which in fairness won't be revoked. But in fairness to whom? The other students who wrote down 3.17? The grand scheme of the world in which math answers are either right or wrong but never accidentally okayed by Higher Authorities in an unresolved loophole?]

See, here's the real crux of it: I felt entitled to accept free muffins as an act of cosmic generosity for the wrongs I had endured by losing ten minutes of my sunny, non-windy Saturday morning. I certainly was not about to multiply my grievances by handing over further minutes to be squandered as the second price was computed. But then... Walked home in the non-wind and sun. Felt a twinge of hesitancy too fickle to call "guilt." Pondered, I don't know, my place in the world and whether or not my actions* had a greater effect beyond this silly little morning.

[Note 5: But really inaction.]

In a perfect world, the store produces muffins, and I pay $2.40 for them. Of course, edging out my inadequately-formed-guilt comes the fact that they were sequestered to the sale rack. Meaning that they were unpurchased muffins rescued by yours truly, and it's possible nobody would have taken them at all, and they would have assumed their destiny as dumpster fodder. But if there's less trash in the world - because of all this, I'm convinced, has vast implications beyond the miniscule nature of four muffins - dumpsters will be less full, perhaps fewer will be needed, garbagemen will be laid off, and once again I've hindered the economy with my shoplifting.

After all, lifting unpurchased muffins (or any substance) from a shop is shoplifting. Good intentions really become a game of manipulation: I Am Entitled To These Muffins Thanks Be To Allah, And I Would Have Paid For Them If The Store Hadn't Sleighted Me In The First Place, And This Is Only Fair To Me As A Valued Customer. To assauge myself, I offered our visitor Mark a muffin this morning. Maybe if I only eat three of them, and thus gain less satisfaction, I will have deprived Star of $1.80. Maybe my charitable action redeems my previous inaction, and brings the muffins in question to people, not dumpsters, that hunger for them. Maybe it's time now for you to offer some input into this quandry. It's only fair.