Shiny, happy posters give curmudgeons sugar overload
By Beth Teitell
Tuesday, May 24, 2005

It's not bad enough that whenever a storefront goes empty these days some enormous out-of-town bank - or cellphone behemoth - rushes in.

Goodbye fruit store with the bananas sold out of boxes on the floor and the canteloupes sliced on the spot (the better to showcase their deliciousness). Hello Verizon Wireless! Or Cingular! Or Bank of America - or whatever.

But even worse than the antiseptic transaction modules themselves are their window ``displays.'' And by ``display,'' I mean the cheap-looking posters they all hang showing some smiling American - always smiling - enjoying her unlimited nights and weekends, or the fact that she's about to get $500 off closing costs on her new home. Whoopee!

Sometimes the happy ones are children, their young lives enhanced - somehow - by Sprint, or maybe Citizens Bank. Sometimes couples are the lucky ones. Look, there they are on a beach, waves crashing behind them, nature made even more majestic by the presence of a Cingular cellphone.

If only John Kerry [related, bio] could have tapped some of the bonhomie enjoyed by customers of the wireless and financial institutions he might have won.

And yet, all those posters of happy people leave me feeling depressed.

I mentioned this to a self-described (and also other-described) curmudgeon.

``You know what annoys me about all these happy people?'' she asked rhetorically.

``They're not just happy, they're perfect and happy. Good hair, good skin, casual-but-not-too clothes. And they're having fun, all the (expletive) time. On the phone, on the street, grinning their stupid heads off.

``I would buy a cellphone, really, if the shop had posters of sad people alone in the rain calling an emergency ride because they'd just been dumped by some (expletive) who was so unthinking that he wouldn't even drive them home. I would.

``I am basically crabby,'' she added (unneccessarily). And I suspect she's not alone.

``What's the opposite of schadenfreude, where you don't take pleasure at the downfall of others, but you suffer when others are happy? Schadenschmaltz?''

Now that's a window display I'd like to see.