Random Access Memories

Lately something has really been annoying me.

I recently went to a concert, and was frisked when I came in.

Not for weapons, they didn’t care about my pocket knife.
Nor for electronics, they let me in with my digital camera, cellphone and hotspot.
Not for misc strangeness either, as I was wearing a chainmail shirt and belt and they let me in with those.
Or the charging cables, earplugs, medicine, coins tricks…

What they were looking for, was food. And they went through all of my little belt pouches to find it. In the end I was forced to throw away the two energy bars that I carried around.

Because, or course, they wanted me to buy their very overpriced food.

The concert was already expensive, 70$ per ticket.

But they wanted to make me destroy 5$ of my property to get in. (I walked from home, 20 minutes, I couldn’t just “put them in the car”. And they had already scanned me in.)

That irks me. Why do we allow businesses to have such strong controls over things? Do we seriously give up that much of our rights to what we do with our property?

It’s pathetic that we allow profit in such wasteful ways.