Wednesday 29 May 2002

Pic of the day: Not like these. (Screenshot from The Sims Hot Date.)

Unsexy shoppers

You have no idea how unsexy the women are who shop at REMA 1000.

For my foreign readers, REMA is the cheapest of the cheap daily goods stores (kinda like *mart in the US, I think, but I'm not sure) – mostly food but also stuff like light bulbs, soap and toilet paper. Originally 1000 products all together, thus the name REMA 1000. If I remember correctly. Anyway, I use to buy some food there for breakfast each workday, and sometimes in the lunch or when I go home too. And I can't help but notice how unsexy the women are who shop there.

I'll tell you how unsexy they are. They are so remarkably unremarkable that today, when there was an almost normal looking woman there for a change, I was so confused that I bought some food I did not need. (I later tried to eat it and have been feeling over-stuffed for the rest of the day. Meh.) Mind you, in the street a stone throw away walk the typical Kristiansand women, quite likely the sexiest in all of Norway. I blame the proximity to Denmark, but I guess also natural selection has taken its course without being blurred by several layers of protective clothing; the climate here is quite mild for much of the year. Anyway, the women outside are not the women inside. There is some filter at the door that keeps the sexy women from going in. (Quite possibly men too, but I am not a good judge of that.)

I've observed this peculiar fact for a long time now. It is really surprising how exact it is. And it has made me wonder. I notice that REMA also attracts a lot of darkly colored immigrants. These are known to earn less money than the average, and quite a bit so. (This is not only due to our racism, but also the fact that they are among the most recent wave of immigrants. The Balkanites and Mesopotamians are in much the same situation too.) So my tentative conclusion is that unsexy women don't earn nearly as much as the rest. But I don't know what is cause and what is effect.

I was meant to write a whole lot, but then I realized that I don't know a whole lot about it. Perhaps some of you know?