The ghetto grocer does not usually shop in supermarkets—and that ought to tell you something about supermarkets. The conversation everywhere I go is about the increased costs of goods and services and the lack of increase in or the actual reduction in wages.

Retail food operators, being at the ass-end of the economy, have been trying desperately not to pass on increased costs to their customers for fear of having their customer base flee to a higher volume discount buyer such as Wal-Mart. So, to remain competitive, they have slashed wages and benefits, with the results that their own employees have become Wal-Mart’s customers; the only place they can shop where the staff makes less than they do.

Yesterday, as I left the market with my bottle of aloe juice, I ran into Miss Elsie, an older lady who was struggling with her bags. Miss Elsie lives near the store, a mere five-minute walk for me, ten minutes for her. I’ve carried her groceries home for her before and offered to do so again—hell, when she gets there she has two flights of stairs to ascend up the outside of the house to her third-story apartment. It must take her a half hour to ferry her bags up those stairs one at a time.

We stopped outside and she said, “I would call a cab but they take 15 minutes, and they are all foreigners and follow that GPS which takes them the wrong way sometimes and that costs. But mostly, I don’t want to wait, because I have frozen foods and they don’t always show up.”

Melvin, the parcel pick up clerk, nodded to an older black man in a ball cap sitting on the bench, who has taken over Mister Jesse’s hacking business since Mister Jesse got car-jacked, and said, “He’s a good man.”

The man tipped his hat to her as I eyed him up, something he took note of with a visible touch of discomfort.

Miss Elsie said, “How much?”

The hacker asked, “Where to?”

Miss Elsie answered, and then he said, “Five dollars.”

He then led us over to his nice 2012 economy car, a two-door, with a large trunk which he had clear for groceries. A few minutes later Mister Gerald, the hacker pulled over in front of Miss Elsie’s place and she gave him six dollars, “There you go baby. It usually costs me six and I have to wait, and tip the guy if I don’t want the dirty look, and you are American.”

I then quizzed Mister Gerald as to where he lived, where he worked, when he was available to drive, and otherwise vetted him for Miss Elsie. It turns out that he works second shift at a factory that has been cutting back and this is how he plans on paying for his car, by driving during the day for supermarket customers and not operating in the evenings like Mister Jesse did. Neither he nor Miss Elsie had a pen or paper, but I did. I took down his information and gave it to her as they discussed her weekly schedule. Mister Gerald mentioned that he would get cards made up soon. He had been hacking at the Stop, Shop and Save stores that just closed. I verified this by dropping some management names and it turned out he knew them. Those stores have closed. Maybe Wal-Mart is coming to Harm City.

As I carried Miss Elsie’s groceries up her 32 stairs she was feeling like she had hit the secure post-feministic lone nesting lottery, “You know Mister Gerald is such a nice gentleman. Thank you so much. I’ll tell you what, when that goddamned African drove me to work the other day I about had a heart attack. He was doing fifty-sixty down side-streets at five a.m. in the dark!”

She then looked up at me with some concern and disparaged my appearance, “You know, for a guy who looks like he runs a racist gang, you are quite a gentleman yourself. It’s a shame though, that beard puts fifteen years on you.”

Off into the ghetto I went, looking to have a beer with a night-skinned babe in some hole-in-the-wall bar, quite pleased that Miss Elsie, self-described former ‘wild-child of the sixties’ disapproved of my beard of ethno-might, and also, that a baby boomer chick who once bought into all of the rampant feminist ‘trust the government before you trust a man’ bullshit decided to trust two men she knew with selecting an unlicensed driver for her, instead of trusting to the government’s licensed African drivers.

Where I live most licensed businesses that are closely overseen by the State and Municipal authorities, such as liquor stores and cab and sedan services, have been taken over and staffed by Middle Easterners, Africans, Indians, and Eastern Europeans. Their prices are generally higher than the indigenous concerns they replaced. My policy now, is to spend my money at and recommend the unlicensed American businesses that have been springing up to serve the people who do not want to pay the additional 10-30% that the government licensed foreign businesses charge [which in all fairness just represents them passing on the cost of State fees, with their start-up licensing fees actually representing an infusion of foreign money into our centralized communist economy].

People like Mister Gerald and Mister Jesse [who got wiped out by a combination of criminal carjackers and the Baltimore City Police Department] and their impoverished customers like Miss Elsie [who does janitorial work in the mornings], represent a guerilla economy which is bound to be a growing concern.

Support your local gypsy cabbie, and look to your friends and neighbors for security rather than to the police, and you will be doing a small part in thwarting the cancerous growth of the global bazaar that is coming into full bloom under the Capitalist Caliphate.

The reader might note that most of the participants in this guerilla economy, who I have encountered, are over fifty, many over sixty.