About The At-Your-Beck Felicity Conveyor by Dolly Gray Landon:

Meet the Dreadmillers: all-American nuclear family consisting of husband, wife, son & daughter. Justyce Dreadmiller, a neighborhood merchant who owns and runs an upscale grocery boutique in downtown Pimpleton Heights (an affluent suburb of the greater Pimpleton retropolitan area), represents the embodiment of the American dream, having pulled himself out of poverty by his own bootstraps towards an agreeable middle-class lifestyle supported by a comfortable income. He is the poster boy of upward mobility, a shining example of a career trajectory that both belies and affirms the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches myth insomuch as he has never sucked up to any wealthy benefactors but instead has taken pride in owing every ounce of his success to naught but his own sweat & grit. Following in his footsteps are his son & daughter, Eiden & Celine, both of whom have managed to gain acceptance into elite institutions of “higher earning” and have done their parents proud by proving themselves to be both enterprising & hard-working, winning the respect of their peers & mentors whilst making astonishing headway in their chosen areas of expertise. Although only fleeting mention is made of Mr. Dreadmiller’s wife, one can scarce help but draw the inference that she is a proud & happy homemaker who runs the family nucleus behind the scenes and is, unquestionably, its “Rock of Gibraltar,” the mainstay of the Dreadmiller tribe’s strength, resilience, and mystique.

Enter Ms. Yvette Cartier: a beautiful, young, rich & spoilt entitlement princess who lives off a lavish monthly stipend from her Great Uncle Weaser (a war-profiteering arms & oil contractor & wannabe Republican senator from the Deep South). All this free-flowing revenue has the bleak effect of inducing Ms. Cartier to miscount her blessings to the point of taking them for granted like the air she breathes. Due to her wayward indolence, propelled by insatiable greed & an unabashedly hedonistic lifestyle, she reveals herself to be a young lady of lax morals in dire need of some old-school penitential medicine. She makes the critical fumble of pilfering high-end cosmetics and love toys from the pharmaceutical section of Mr. Dreadmiller’s grocery boutique on a quotidian basis for upwards of two years until the threshold of Mr. Dreadmiller’s saint-like sufferance has reached its breaking point. This is when the grocer realizes he is unable to afford a must-have high-tech appliance called an “At-Your-Beck Felicity Conveyor,” which he considers to be an indispensable necessity for future-proofing his business & ensuring his continued customer satisfaction & loyalty. He knows from experience that “keeping up with the Joneses” is essential for the survival of his store amongst the cutthroat competition of many nearby mega-corporate supermarket bargain-basement discount chains.

Upon calculating a massive inventory loss from Ms. Cartier’s compulsive shoplifting sprees, Mr. Dreadmiller attributes it as the root cause of his having fallen short on funds that would enable him to pay for the Felicity Conveyor in cash without having to apply for extortionate high-interest loans to do so.

Although Mr. Dreadmiller and his family are unanimously beloved for their charitable acts of kindness & good works in the community, as well as for being beacons of positivity & protectors of local traditions, they are, at the same time, not the sort of people anyone in their right mind would ever want to mess with. Just because they’re nice doesn’t mean they’re stupid.

Ms. Cartier, who deludes herself into believing the world is her oyster, finds out the hard way that her kleptomaniacal misdoings at Mr. Dreadmiller’s expense have lit the proverbial “match in the powder barrel” and that she will have to face the music for having overstepped a certain mark.

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