Employees of Minelli’s Market have had it up to here with Agnes Abbott, the 83-year-old lady who keeps showing up to the store at 8:56PM– i.e., just four minutes before closing– and not leaving until well after 9:30.

The situation reached a breaking point last night when Mrs. Abbott outdid herself, showing up in the parking lot at a ballsy 8:58PM. Panic overtook the entire Minelli’s crew and– in a moment of pure desperation– the Manager-On-Duty just shut the lights off.

Moments later, Mrs. Abbott came wheeling into the store on her trusty electric wheelchair only to find herself enveloped in total darkness. Minelli’s employees did that thing where you try to run as fast as possible while also making as little noise as possible, clasping their hands over their mouths like white women in horror flicks and taking cover behind giant Ho Ho displays and cardboard cutouts of the Kool-Aid Man. 

Not a sound could be heard inside the market save that of Mrs. Abbott’s warbly vocal cords eking out the words, “Is anybody there?” accompanied by the whir of her wheelchair and the intermittent hiss of the two oxygen tanks hitched to the wheelchair’s backrest.

Several employees admitted to feeling bad for making an octogenarian widow with pulmonary fibrosis wheel her way up and down the aisles for eight and a half minutes. That being said, no one actually did anything about it because, well, as Dave the deli guy so effectively put it: “It be like that sometimes”.

The events of last night led to a call for a mandatory, all-hands-on-deck meeting this afternoon. The stated reason for said meeting was to try and come up with a solution to Minelli’s “Stage 4 Abbott Predicament”. Unfortunately, the meeting almost immediately devolved into an hour’s worth of bitching and moaning about Mrs. Abbott. Of the thousands of complaints thrown out there, the ones that resonated most were:

–No one’s reason for getting home an hour late should be because Mrs. Abbott had to fondle every avocado in the produce section.

-You think having to stand there and watch an old lady count pennies is bad? Try having to stand there and watch an old lady figure out how to use “the Apple pay thingy” her dear niece set up for her three weeks ago.

–It is impossible for 100% of all male Minelli’s employees between the ages of 19 and 36 to be the “spitting image” of your grandson. Sorry, that’s just not how phylogeny works.

As of this writing, the meeting is still in progress, with reports from inside indicating that employees have finally gotten around to exploring potential solutions. Those solutions appear to run the full gamut of possibilities, from leaving a polite-but-firm letter inside Mrs. Abbott’s mailbox to “Damn, I can’t believe Mrs. Abbott fell down those steps”.

The general consensus is that everyone is more or less aware that this whole ordeal is the very definition of modern America’s ever-increasing love affair with individualism and its ever-decreasing appreciation for the importance of Community and that all of this more or less leads to an alarming lack of fucks given for the people that came before us– but also that no one’s actually willing to do the kind of self-reflection and/or inner-work required to “be the change they want to see” because, well… it be like that sometimes.