Pop has always had a predictive streak. Wasn't it on Forever Changes' "A House Is Not a Motel" that Art Lee declared "The news today will be the movies for tomorrow"? Back in 1961, Mad magazine, in a piece called "Tomorrow's Parents," correctly envisioned the jellyrolled JDs of the day giving birth to the yuppies of the '80s.

Lately, I've been noticing the ingenious ways corporations have of reducing their overhead by coercing us--the paying-consumer clods--into doing their work for them.

F'rinstance, if you're young enough you might not know that, until the early '70s, all gas stations were "full serve." That's when Chevron, Exxon and the rest introduced, then rapidly expanded the use of self-serve (gradually eliminating full), as a means of hiring fewer attendants. We've been pumping our own ever since.

If you're old enough, you can remember when real humans in actual "customer service" departments took your calls of complaint and query. To eliminate those jobs, businesses got automated systems, allowing you to ask and answer your own questions amid the tangled vines of the phone-mail tree.

Add in the furniture stores that reduce their warehouse staff and eliminate delivery crews by offering ready-to-assemble merchandise, and you get the picture.

Lord Richard Buckley got it first, 45 years ago. On Feb. 12, 1959, onstage at Hollywood's Ivar burlesque house, he scorned the "greedheads" in a routine called, simply, "Supermarket." With great humor and compassion he lays out the origins and eternal workings of the con. In the way-back days, you'd hand the local grocer your shopping list, and he'd pull the items from the shelves and put them in a bag for you. But then, Buckley explains with great snapping fingers, effects and expostulations, the supermarket arrives, and you, the jolly shopper, are only too happy to run the wheeled wire cart up and down the aisles, frantically foraging for yourself.

"But it's all right!" he says, "because, in the beginning, you're getting very low, low, low prices," so you don't mind the labor. Then the years go by, the super's the only game in town, and the prices climb and climb...

"...and you're still pushin' the mutha cart!"

-G.S.

Keep the faith, baby: See the essay on his Lordship, "Hipster Saint," in our TALK TALK chapter. "Supermarket" appears on the out-of-print LP, Lord Buckley In Concert (Demon Verbals, U.K.)