Word: shopper
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...politics is more than ever a cold and complicated science, a bloodless war of expensive software and arcane marketing techniques. No longer can Democrats take for granted a solid blue-collar base or mass backing from minorities. The voter has become increasingly independent of party labels, a finicky comparison shopper among parties, candidates and issues. There are new techniques for wooing this voter, methods so far used most effectively by the Republicans. Don Dworak realizes this all too well. He was a Republican before switching parties earlier this year. For Democrats, even newly minted ones like Don Dworak, this...
Lady Luck is always a welcome guest, but in Maine she has been a little promiscuous. Sampson Supermarkets, a 31-store chain, last summer contracted for a promotion scheme: "Let's Go to the Races." Each Sampson shopper is given a playing card printed with the number of a race horse on whom the customer has automatically "bet." Every week, films of past thoroughbred races are shown on television, and Sampson customers holding numbers of a victorious horse win $1,000. The game is really a lottery: its sponsors know that of the 250,000 cards doled out weekly...
...head for the special "line on the left" are often pelted with insults-or worse. "Who told you to get pregnant now?" snapped a middle-aged woman last week as a young mother-to-be entered a butcher shop in downtown Warsaw. "Here comes the little cripple," muttered another shopper as a handicapped woman hobbled toward the counter. "She'll probably skip home when she gets around the corner...
Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of the whole maddening charade is that all the hours of queuing do not begin to satisfy the shopper's needs. In the first place, purchases are limited by a strict rationing system that allows the average Pole a monthly allotment of only 6½ Ibs. of meat, 2 Ibs. of sugar, 2 Ibs. of flour, 10 oz. of detergent, twelve packs of cigarettes and a pint of vodka. That, as a gray-haired Warsaw pensioner wryly notes, is "too little to live on and too much to die from...
Moreover, the shopper who hands his 2-in. by 3-in. ration coupon to a clerk is never sure whether even that meager allotment will be available. Many Poles never got their full share of meat last month. In spite of rationing, supplies of detergent and cigarettes have also fallen short of demand. Says one Warsaw woman: "I am 75, and I remember rationing under the Nazis. At least then you could be sure of getting what you had coupons...