Pay up or take the bus 2737Yes. Those who doubt this should read "Nickel and Dimed' by Barbara Enrereich. (I probably spelled her last name wrong.) She's a journalist who decided to...
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM Published: September 22, 2005
ONE recent evening during rush hour on a Washington subway, Jose Rivas found himself cornered by a giant stroller, with no clear path of escape. "She saw us," Mr. Rivas, 33, said of the woman pushing the buggy. "She looked at us. She was basically like: 'You better find a way to get out. It's not my responsibility.' "
When he tried to step around her to reach the door, her look became a glare. The confrontation was like a battle, he said, and the weapon, a long, army-green-colored stroller.
Fair weather copsOn SR37, on a particular stretch between Bloomington & Martinsville, the IN State Police is always hard at 'work' ticketing people for speeding. It...
Christopher Peruzzi, 39, of Freehold, N.J., has also had to dodge baby strollers - especially those that are "double wide or triple long" - usually in stores, and he doesn't like it either. "They're blocking off products you want to get to," he said. "I find this particularly annoying in Barnes & Noble and Walden Books. I'm here to read. I'm not here for your kid to slam into me."
Pricey, supersize baby strollers like the Bugaboo and the Silver Cross - nicknamed Hummers - have been derided as symbols of yuppie extravagance. (They cost upward of about $700.) But some critics now say that size is not the only problem. What's worse, they say, is the way some parents use them to bulldoze their way through public places.
"I liken it to the SUV experience," said Elizabeth Khalil, 28, a lawyer in Washington. "It's just your mission to mow down everything in your sight because you can."
Critics - many of them people without children - rarely raise the issue with their friends who are parents. But they voice their complaints in conversations with one another and in online chat rooms. And many are beginning to suspect that the new big strollers are the latest fissure in a long-standing divide between parents and nonparents, a disagreement that usually goes unspoken, over who has made the right choice in life.
"These women have a child, and they're like, 'Look at me,' " said Ophira Eisenberg, 33, a stand-up comedian from the West Village who refers to oversize baby strollers as lawn mowers. "It's like this baby is more important than anything, and everyone should be bowing down because they created life."
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