The Bible Shelf
The other day I visited Aligro, a Swiss cash-and-carry supermarket.
If you have never been to one, imagine a place where everything is sold in quantities suggesting that you are either running a restaurant or preparing for the collapse of civilization.
Ten liters of ketchup.
Twenty kilograms of flour.
Coffee measured in units normally associated with industrial production.
I like these places. There is something refreshingly honest about them.
Nobody is pretending that you only need three paper napkins.
Then I noticed something unexpected.
A shelf of Bibles.
Not one Bible.
An entire shelf.
My first thought was not theological.
My first thought was practical.
Somebody must be behind this.
I assumed that the founders of the company was probably religious and had decided that a wholesaler should not merely nourish the body but also offer nourishment for the soul.
Fair enough.
It's their company.
They can sell whatever they like.
My second thought was that I should ask one of the employees whether the Bibles were sold by weight.
This seemed entirely reasonable given the surroundings.
Everything else in the store is sold by weight.
Why should scripture be different?
Then I looked at the employees.
There was a man behind one register who looked as though he had never laughed voluntarily in his life.
At the other register stood a woman who appeared to possess a functioning sense of humor.
I briefly considered asking her:
"Excuse me, are the Bibles sold by weight? How much for one hundred grams?"
But then another thought occurred to me.
What if the founders are religious?
What if many of the employees are religious?
What if I accidentally spend the next ten minutes explaining that I am not, in fact, mocking Christianity but merely trying to understand the wholesale pricing model for eternal salvation?
At that point I decided that silence was the safer option.
The joke remained entirely inside my head.
Unfortunately, that only made things worse.
Because once the idea had entered my mind, it started reproducing.
If the Bible is sold by weight, then surely the Old Testament must cost more than the New Testament.
The Old Testament is significantly heavier.
More pages.
More prophets.
More history.
Considerably more smiting.
The pricing should reflect this.
And what if somebody only needs a small amount?
Suppose I only require two hundred grams of Revelation.
Do I really have to buy the entire Bible?
Is there no smaller package available?
Can I purchase Job in family size?
Can church groups receive a quantity discount?
Do they have seasonal promotions?
Buy ten Bibles and receive a complimentary Psalms booklet?
By now I was constructing entire conversations.
"I'd like the New Testament."
"We only sell the complete canon."
"I'm on a low-carb spiritual diet."
Or:
"I'd like to return Revelation."
"Was there a printing defect?"
"No. It was simply more apocalypse than I needed."
The remarkable thing is that nobody else seemed remotely bothered by the shelf.
Customers walked past.
Employees walked past.
No one stopped.
No one stared.
No one appeared surprised that a wholesale supermarket selling industrial quantities of ketchup also happened to stock the Word of God.
And perhaps that is the most Swiss part of the entire story.
In many countries the Bible shelf would be a statement.
A controversy.
A political message.
A marketing strategy.
In Switzerland it is simply inventory.
There is flour.
There is coffee.
There is ketchup.
There are Bibles.
The universe remains in order.
I left without asking my question.
But I still think the woman at the register would have laughed.
The man definitely would not have.