“There are two kinds of people in the world,” a very old joke runs, “Those who divide the human world into ‘two kinds of people’ and those who don’t.” So let’s say that one continuum of people runs on the axes, Those who like a lot of stimulation — all sorts of stimulation, not just of “the naughty bits” — and those who don’t.

         Correlating with this, I infer, is that there are people who like sensory clutter, and those who don’t.

         There is also here, as most places, the cycles of Fashion — I capitalize the name of the god — and the turn of the Great Wheel as baroque becomes rococo and Victorian clutter moves into the Arts and Craft-sy and then on toward the restraint of the more streamlined forms of the “moderne.”

         Right now, in America, we’re in a period favoring high-stimulation and downtown-Tokyo-style commercial clutter.

         And I for one am being driven up the freaking walls.

         Several years back, I complained to an executive at Kroger’s that the “point-of-sale” aisle-clutter was esthetically displeasing and made Kroger’s look downscale, which I thought would be a problem for them, image-wise. What concerned me, however, was that clutter is dangerous.

         We’d once had an emergency evacuation in my local Kroger’s store, and it went well. I suspected strongly that such an evacuation nowadays would not go well. A former Kroger’s executive who’d tried to get a wheelchair through a Kroger’s told me that rapid evacuation would go very, very poorly for anyone in a wheelchair: it takes time to get through a bloody maze.

         Which is, of course, the point: As much as Kroger’s and Kroger’s corporate siblings want to move us through check-out as quickly as possible, even more they want us moving slowly enough while shopping to make a few additional impulse buys.

         Sometimes, though, the commercial concerns are more subtle.

         I got to watch the various stages of the remodeling of a “bistro” in Oxford, Ohio. Since I had somewhat recently remodeling my own little house, I was interested in the decisions the bistro owners made.

         All the decisions relevant for sound worked to make the place noisier.

         Interesting. Especially interesting since the remodeling was done shortly after the period in which the local bars generally — college town “hook-up” bars, not just the sports bars — put in sets of TV sets and turned up the volume on just about everything except the TV sets.

         The upshot of what happened in the bars was that conversation was made difficult verging on impossible, and one might infer (and this one did infer) that that, too, was a point: “Buy booze and hook up, kids; don’t take up your time and our space with seduction,” or, to be less cynical and/or more general, with seduction or any other form of communication requiring words.

         The bistro attracted an older crowd, but the young set the styles — and drink more booze — and so the bistro moved toward a noisier ambiance. (“OK, old farts: talk some place where we’re not trying to move product.”)

         There is some hope for bars and bistros: Well-organized old people — Go AARP! — may soon be one of the few demographics around with money to spend; so there’s that and the likelihood that the continuing fiscal crises may finally get marijuana legalized.

         Old stoners like it quiet, and if the dope is strong enough, a flickering scented candle can provide fascinating stimulation for an hour or more.

         (Yeah, I inhaled — and later learned Rasta cuisine, which is a much better THC delivery system.)

         For my local Ralph’s — that’s Kroger’s in the US West — there’s no hope until either Fashion changes or there’s a fire and a fair number of people die who didn’t have to because it too so long to evacuate through the clutter.