Excess

We recently surprised our kids (last Friday) and instead of going to school, we went on a road trip to the Mall of America. We had a lot of fun but the thing that kept going through my head was "excess." The Mall itself is somewhat overwhelming in it's hugeness and it's repetitiveness (seriously, the same store three times in one mall?). It seems that everything is big in the States - at least compared to Canada.

We stopped in Grand Forks on our way home so Jobina could go to a Super Target. There were less then 100 people in this massive store and again it was overwhelming. I couldn't help but feel like it was all so excessive. The worst though was the restaurant we ate in. It was called Golden Coral or something like that and it was an all you can eat buffet restaurant. For $7 you could literally eat as much as you want. Now buffets are nothing new for me but the sheer number of dishes was mindboggling. So much food! And yet there were less then 10 patrons in the entire place. Unless they were hit with a late night rush 98% of that food was going to be thrown out. Such waste seemed unethical. We tried to not overdo it yet we all felt like we had overdone it by the time we left. We all agreed - never again.

To me this kind of excess feels kind of unethical. It saddens me that so much food can be wasted, that so much money is spent for so little gain. All that food could probably have fed a small African village for a week. What a waste. It actually saddens me. Thinking about this made me think though - the people who eat here are desensitized to the excessiveness - but what sort of things am I desensitized to when it comes to excess? Or is excess simply relative?