Two guys are making out in the lawn & garden, on top of an Adirondack. They appear to be in their mid-20s. One looks like a triathlete, and the other has enough sloppy sexiness that no one quite wonders what he’s doing there. A small crowd has gathered. Somebody’s covering the eyes of his kid (while simultaneously muttering to himself about how it’s a shame it ain’t two chicks, eh?), and somebody else is about to open a bag of Skinny Pop and share it with the woman next to her (who is automatically starting to twist the cap off the bottle of Miss Mary’s Bold and Spicy Bloody Mary Mix that is her entire grocery list). Two of the teenaged employees have stopped stocking shelves, and another is running to tell a manager, but the trouble is it’s Pride month. The carts are painted in promotional rainbows, and nobody quite likes the optics of breaking up any kind of love is love display, and so the manager’s on the phone with corporate, and somewhere a conference room has already assembled. Commerce moves that quickly these days, doesn’t it? Marketing VPs are all watching on closed circuit TV, and the assembled crowd has their phones out, livestreams in progress and to an audience that’s let’s call it very un-CC, and the conference room is now deep in heated discussion about the respective merits, as far as quarterly profits are concerned, of pissing off either “the gays or the Bible bangers,” as somebody too high up to bother with political correctness puts it, while an analyst is frantically inputting data into an algorithm that’s attempting to crunch sales figures based on ZIP code and religious affiliation, voting habits and sexual preferences (and, of course, all of this information is basically instantaneously accessible), and it turns out, he says, it’s 50-50 and pick your poison. Rainbow warriors (and Allies, someone points out) or Pentecostal snake-handlers, and the revenue hit is likely to be about equal and far from insignificant, and, meanwhile, on the screen, the triathlete still technically has his shirt on, but it’s kind of riding up above the navel, and the whole display is threatening to go full-on below-the-belt any second now when one of the spectators launches what looks like some kind of frozen Pepperidge Farm fruitcake from the far left of the frame. It appears to be coming down in slow motion. You can see the phones turn to try and catch its flight. It’s arcing straight for the triathlete’s head, and, in the store, the employees and managers (not to mention the rubber-necking customers) are a mix of giddy and horrified, but the conference room, by contrast, is filled with cautious optimism because, when it lands, there will probably be a riot. A brawl. A few busted cases of coconut water and maybe a couple of gallons of milk flooding the aisles, and sure, could be a half-dozen shoppers will scatter their way behind a shelving unit or possibly duck into a cramped dressing room (where maybe their own little love connection will form, and wouldn’t that be quite the story?), but trauma, they understand, has always had a way of creating consumption. A craving for the comfort of brightly packaged goods.