Do you get what you want? Or do you get what you need?

I bought a new tablecloth online last week. I ordered it from Kohl's and went to pick it up there.

Like many stores and restaurants these days, Kohl's has a new protocol for picking up merchandise. You can go in, as usual, to pick up stuff you ordered online. Or you can pull up to a specially-marked parking place and they will bring your item to you.

While I was waiting for them to bring me my item, I looked around the vast parking lot. Considering that it was the Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, there were very few cars, maybe 20 in a parking lot made for hundreds. There were very few people shopping at Kohl's Famous Footwear, Old Navy, and the other stores in that strip.

Heck, I didn't even really need to be there. I didn't need a new tablecloth. Our old one looks tatty, but who's going to comment on it? It's not like we're having lots of company. 

Living in the midst of a pandemic really gets a person to think about what they actually need--versus what you might want. 

As you might guess, retail sales have plummeted during this pandemic. People are still buying food and household essentials (laundry detergent, and that kind of thing I guess?) but not much of anything else. Sales at big box stores (Kohl's? certainly Target) were down 20.8% in April and sales in clothing and accessory stores were down a whopping 77.8%!

Now I haven't seen any naked people running about outside (yet), so apparently, new clothing is not yet a "need" here at this point. It's more of a "want." 

I am beginning to wonder, however, if the kind of economic setup we have here in the U.S. could survive if people just bought only what they needed. It might be better for us, and our planet, if we did that, but probably we'd need a different economic system than late capitalism.

Can I put in a request for an economic system where people would not essentially get a pay cut if they go back to work after getting unemployment compensation during the pandemic?

In the meantime, I had hoped that this blog post would bring some good news regarding the coronavirus in Iowa. Last week, we had a couple of days where there were few deaths so I was starting to feel a bit optimistic. But alas. Cases and deaths have not yet peaked. Saturday, May 23, we had the highest number of deaths in one day, yet: 25.  So we're not quite at our peak yet. Maybe soon!

Here's what it looks like:

Active cases of Covid-19 in Iowa

Yeesh, still going up up up

Again, despite the upward trend of those graphs, Governor Reynolds has continued opening up Iowa (was it ever "closed"? not really). Now pretty much everything is open except for theaters, senior citizen facilities, and indoor playgrounds. 

But if that Kohl's parking lot is any indication, maybe not all Iowans are ready to get what they "want." They're just sticking with what they need.