The sound of suck is coming after your psyche. Whether you find it insipid or you're tasteless enough to feel the groove, we're all forced to hear the music played at retail establishments. More than an annoyance, music is a mind control tool employed by the grocery business. Typically, service industry corporations operate radio networks, punctuate their third-rate playlists with asinine promotions, and play the cacophony 24 hours a day.

Marketers' old school of thought was to play cheery music to induce feelings of well-being and thus increase customer spending. Playing fast music toward closing time to make us shop and work faster is an obsolescent yet famous trick. The old butcher knives have been supplanted by surreptitious scalpels. Newer research has shown the tempo and giddiness of music to be practically irrelevant. For example, Kroger now plays Simon & Garfunkel every day. People simply stay longer and spend more when music they like is being played.

Some sucker ambling along and whistling to the music is a common sight where I work. Question this: are you thinking what they want you to think when you go shopping? Ironically, when front end was rocked by my favorite Rolling Stones song, I was more likely to listen to Mick Jagger rather than to my customers.

Christmas is the most nauseating time of year as McDonald's takes the lead in offending sensibilities. My first December under the Arches was especially harrowing, as putrid renditions of Christmas favorites drove my coworkers and I to the brink of madness. Our survival instinct kicked in, inspiring one cashier to sing along with some creative revisions. His ballads of destroying the store and making lowlife customers suck on our vengeance gave the crew a desperately needed laugh.

Like automatons, we zealously heil the ubiquitous corporate beast. Rather than celebrating good will and generosity or the summertime birth of Christ, we hoggishly wallow in our self-imposed slavery to the corporate powers that be. These masters to which we have surrendered our minds and lives are the very con men who have shrewdly decreed that we be serenaded with ballads of holiday warmth and cheer in the hopes that our beleaguered credit card accounts succumb.

Human decency forgotten, my current employer commenced this year's noxious holiday onslaught on Nov. 10. I wonder if any customers heard me muttering obscenities. Shattered, but not broken, I brought a Walkman to work the following night.