Almost everybody is familiar with the demographic marketing phrase: "the key 18 to 54 age group." As if every human being over or under that age range is somehow less valuable. Well, they are actually--at least to corporate America. The first half of that age group is supposedly when young adults form the brand loyalties and shopping habits that they will retain for a lifetime, while the latter half are in their prime earning (read: consumption) years. This is why marketing for most products other than dietary fiber supplements, incontinence garments and mobility scooters are slick, flashy and heavy on the "coolness" factor. Given a choice between possibly offending older consumers versus cementing brand loyalty of the 18 to 54'ers, most companies figure that while granny may indignantly chuck a slipper at the screen, she's unlikely to change her 50-year love of a particular breakfast cereal brand as a result.
All of this is a long winded way of explaining why Walmart shocked a lot of people when it came out strongly against the Arkansas religious "freedom" measure that was very similar to Indiana's. It was one thing for Apple to condemn the Indiana law--Apple presumably has lots of gay and lesbian customers and the bigoted old white fuckers who support these shitty discriminatory laws aren't likely to ever understand how a smartphone works, let alone ever buy one. But the stereotype is that Walmart customers are exactly the kind of Fox News watching, assault rifle totin,' Jesus lovin' morons who would applaud a law like this. After all, to cite another common but probably not completely inaccurate stereotype, your average gay couple's tastes in home furnishings do not likely run to the kind of clapboard crap on display at Sam Walton's megastore hellholes--nor would they ever want to be caught dead wearing the sweatshop assembled, ill-fitting polyester dress shirts hanging on the clothing racks.
Walmart probably could have stayed quiet regarding the proposed Arkansas law. After all, no one was ASKING the company for its opinion. The fact that it chose to say something represents an obvious awareness that younger Americans, even those less financially well off, on average tend to be more socially tolerant than older ones. Young adults today are far more likely to have friends who are openly gay than their older cohorts. Walmart just found a free way to get the best advertising it could have in the form of news stories that will make little Brandi and Justin feel better about shopping there so they will hopefully develop a lifelong habit. After all, what are Bessie and Elmer going to do, stuck as they are on a fixed income and living in a trailer with no savings account, suddenly boycott Wally World in favor of Nieman Marcus?
So let's all get our warm and fuzzys about this shining example of good corporate citizenship without getting all wrapped up in the truth of the matter, which is that if they didn't think it would help improve their bottom line the greedy fuckers who own and run Walmart wouldn't have said jack shit. And let's not ponder the day when predatory megacorporations like America's biggest retailer have finally destroyed the livelihood of average Americans to the point where even most gay and lesbian couples have no choice but to shop there whether they like it or not.
Bonus: "Indiana wants me--but I can't go back there"
The travel and tourism industry has become such a scam these days. I’m so old I can remember a time when the advertised cost for say, an airline flight or a hotel room, was the actual price you paid and you didn’t get hit with hidden fees every time you turned around.
Due to my illness I hadn’t travelled much the past couple of years, so that might be why it felt like a bucket of cold water dumped had been over my head when I showed up at the airport—proud of myself for travelling lightly enough despite a fairly lengthy journey to be carrying just one large suitcase—only to be charged 25 bucks to check said suitcase. I’d have gladly paid that much more for the fare, but getting unexpectedly stuck in the ass like that on both of my flights really pissed me off.
That was bad enough, but what was even worse was not being informed ahead of time that I would be charged $45 a night to park my rental car at the hotel where I stayed after the cruise (oh, but I got a “great deal” on the room at Priceline!). I’d have told the good people at Hyatt to go fuck themselves on that little bit of highway robbery, ‘cept there wasn’t a public lot anywhere near the place. That particular outrage then got me wondering how these businesses get away with so obviously boning their customers in a country where it is normal for folks to BRAG about what a great deal they got on whatever particular crap it is they just bought, when I thought back to the passengers I was on the cruise with and it struck me: the top 10% in this country are literally partying like there is no tomorrow and it’s their loose wallets that are propping up the creaky American consumer economy.
As anyone whose has cruised in recent years well knows, when it comes to hiding extra charges nobody is better at it than the cruise ship lines. Want to drink any kind of alcoholic beverage during your time on board, or even have a bottle of water or a can of your favorite soft drink? Hotel prices for that, my friend. Want to go anywhere but the usually fairly ugly cruise ship dock at your exotic ports of call and ensure that you get back before the gangplank goes up and you get hopelessly stranded ashore? Oh, that’s another considerable extra charge. Want to generously tip the incredibly hardworking, underpaid staff who are stuck on board for six to eight months at a time? Oh, doesn’t matter if you want to tip them or not—that sizeable collective tip is automatically added daily to your on board account. If you want to give say, your stateroom steward something extra, that’s your call (actually, I was quite proud of myself as the company I booked the cruise with sent me a $500 on board credit, which enabled me since I cannot drink much these days to walk off the boat owing the cruise line just a bit over $11 more than my fare had been. Bet that pissed ‘em off).
But what was really amazing to watch was the relentless flogging of products. Not only did the ship have numerous shops selling “duty free” luxury goods (another scam I’ve never understood the attraction of), but just about every day there were “special” events featuring a different type of jewelry or other fashion accessory. And I know people were being suckered into buying the stuff because at dinner one night the wife of the doctor from Texas was flashing her brand new necklace, and a different night the husband of the couple from Montana was showing off his brand new “atomic” watch (I really have no idea and didn’t ask, was it powered by a tiny nuclear reactor?). What was really funny is that he freely admitted he had no idea how to even set the thing, and was glad that the clerk who sold it to him promised to adjust it to Montana time the night before the end of the cruise.
Even during the shore excursions we were encouraged to make sure we only shopped for jewelry at a cruise line approved jewelry store—ostensibly so we wouldn’t get ripped off by any surly, dark skinned third worlders—but in reality so the line would get its cut of the no doubt highly over inflated prices. And heck, if shopping really isn’t your thing, you could instead while away every night in the ship’s casino where, the activity newsletter reminded us daily, you could bet (and presumably lose) up to $3,000 nightly and have it charged to your on board account. Yep, if I weren’t the type who is perfectly content to park my ass on a deck chair with a good book to while way the lazy hours under the hot tropical sun I could have damn near bankrupted myself.
And after all, isn’t that what travel is REALLY supposed to be about? It isn’t about going to different places, seeing exotic sights, exposing oneself to different cultures and hearing different languages spoken. Nope, it’s all about doing the one thing you could just have easily stayed home and done—shopping. Because it isn’t enough to show off that flashy bit of jewelry to your friends back home—nope, you have just GOT to tell them all about how you bought it while floating somewhere off the coast of Costa Rica.
Yep, it’s people like this boatload of fat, old, pasty, mostly American baby boomers—not truly rich (or they’d have their own yacht) but upper middle class—who are still doing what their great “war president” instructed them to do to save their country after 9/11. Their portfolios were saved by the Wall Street bailouts, and now they're doing a great job of spending their kids’ inheritances. They're bucket listers merely crossing off one more item while frittering away a bit more of their accumulated wealth buying more shit they don’t need because they have completely forgotten (or never acknowledged) that they came of age during a brief moment in time when it looked like just maybe it was possible that their generation could lead the way as America turned its back on big business, war and empire and actually began to live up to its bullshit ideals.
Come on, people, smile at your brother. He just bought himself an atomic watch, whatever that is.
Bonus: "Good Lord, help us all...while we try to stay afloat. If you could Lord, send a boat"
So I’m back to freezing my rear end off after a few blissful weeks in the tropics. Or at least as long as it took my cruise ship to sail from Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. Seeing the canal was one item on my bucket list and yeah, yeah I know how environmentally damaging cruise ships are, but with my health condition there really wasn’t any other way for me to see it.
One thing to note about these giant cruise ships if you’ve never been on one. It is generally pretty easy to tell the difference between passengers (mostly older, fatter and white) and the crew (mostly younger, thinner and darker skinned). There are some exceptions to that rule: ship officers and the staff that greet you when boarding tend to be European born or even occasionally Aussie, Canadian or American. Some of the regular crew might also be European—but they are almost uniformly from former Soviet bloc countries, in other word the kind of people economically desperate enough to join their fellow Thais, Philippines and Chinese working six to eight months straight without a day off. And I mean without a day—these ships pull into their final port of call at 7:00 A.M., discharge 2,000 or more passengers, take on another load of 2,000 or more and are gone again within 12 hours. The profit margins for these boats are so slim that there is no other way the cruise lines can stay in business. But it must REALLY suck for the crews.
Anyway, for the most part I enjoyed my trip. Seeing the canal was as I said a lifelong dream, and some of the other ports of call in Colombia, Costa Rica and Nicaragua were fascinating if all too brief. I would have enjoyed the experience a lot more, however, were it not for having to spend so much time cooped up on board with my fellow passengers.
The very nature of cruising encourages you to get to know those you’ve embarked with. Unfortunately, the very length of this cruise (15 days) meant the passengers were overwhelmingly retirees as few working people can spare that kind of time all at once these days. That also meant the average age of those on board had to be about 70—in other words right in the wheelhouse of being the older half of the baby boomer generation and, worse still, though there were some Canadians, Europeans and Aussie passengers they were mostly AMERICAN baby boomers.
Let me paint you a gruesome picture—imagine a crowd of mostly pasty white, overweight Septuagenarians in bathing attire, some who had to tip the scales at twice to three times healthy body weight for their height (I had to dodge around a lot of “mobility” scooters as well). Now imagine being stuck among that same crowd for two weeks straight. I wouldn’t have even minded the sight of them so much as much as that talking to them revealed that many had as much blubber clogging the space between their ears as they did around their midsections.
One fine morning I was lounging in one of the hot tubs after a vigorous weightlifting workout in the ship’s (largely underutilized) gym when a particularly ugly old specimen climbed in and caused a large amount of water to slosh out over the sides. Dude seemed nice enough at first, and when I described my recent cancer battle said all of the right supportive things. Then he found out I was from the DC area and his brow furrowed. I’ll never forget his reaction: “Of course,” he said, “I’m a true rebel…I’m a proud member of the modern American Tea Party.” Yeah, a true rebel…one no doubt sucking down social security and Medicare benefits as fast he can, and one whose already horribly overtaxed heart would no doubt explode if he ever heard a shot fired in anger. Nevertheless, I was polite. I didn’t laugh right in his pudgy face.
It’s also standard on cruise ships to be seated for dinner each night at a large table with two to three other couples. Again, the people at my table were nice enough (and actually among the slimmer passengers on the boat), but whoo boy what a group of reactionaries. There was the 70s-ish orthopedist from Texas and his much younger Philippine second wife (a rare breakage of the ship’s demographics) who was quite impressed upon hearing about my cancer battle but who just couldn’t resist saying he hopes Ted Cruz runs for president. Probably not coincidentally, he also admitted to not ever reading any books beyond medical journals.
More disappointing was the naturalized couple from Chile who said they had fled their homeland for the states 40 years ago. Intrigued, I asked for details only to be horrified that it was the election of the “monster” Allende who had caused their flight and how grateful they were that Pinochet had “fixed” their country. Though I noted to myself that the Pinochet regime’s torture and murder of thousands of their “monstrous” countrymen weren’t enough to cause them to return from America—
which they claim to love because of all the “glorious opportunities" it offers people.
The nicest couple was actually the pair from Montana. For the most part I enjoyed talking to them—except the one occasion when the Vietnam vet husband went on an extended rant about Jane Fonda. One evening, he and the doctor were comparing the number of foreign countries they have visited in their lifetimes (85 versus 61). But here’s the sad part. Chalking up those numbers seemed to be merely a matter of bragging rights. Anytime I tried to bring up any deeper subject about any of the countries they mentioned having seen they could not have been less interested. So much for the idea that international travel—which so few Americans do anyway—would broaden their perspectives and make them more empathetic towards other nations and cultures.
After 15 days I was more than ready to flee the boat, even if it meant returning to an American homeland I had been desperate to get away from in the first place. I guess the rule is that if you want to get as far away from America as you can you also need to get as far away as you can from Americans. With a few exceptions. The one delightful and meaningful conversation I had during the cruise was with a retiree from USAID. There’s nothing like immersing oneself in third world poverty for much of one's career to give one a deeper perspective about the way the world really is.
So now I’m back, for better or worse. Oh, and if anyone gives a damn, in the wake of the cruise my “number of foreign countries visited” count is now up to 31.
Bonus: Okay, I'll admit Bill probably HATED this song
If there is one major retail outfit that defines the Thanksgiving holiday for many Americans, it would have to be Macy's. For nine decades, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade has been a staple of the holiday with its amazing floats, legions of dancers and musicians and huge inflated balloons. But now, Macy's has come to define the Thanksgiving of 21st century America--one in which rampant corporate greed and mindless zombie consumerism has gotten completely out of control:
Macy's recently announced that it will be opening its stores at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving as opposed to 8 p.m. last year, further cutting into its employees' holiday.
According to USA Today, Macy's is trying to get a head start on the Black Friday weekend, and said the earlier hours are "in response to the significant, sustained customer interest in last year's opening on Thanksgiving."
When I last wrote about this issue back in 2011, the big controversy was that retail stores were pushing their Black Friday openings into late Thanksgiving night, specifically to 11:00 P.M. that evening. At the time I wrote a prediction that reading it now startles even me:
And if the economy continues to get worse, no doubt next year the big box stores will be open at 8:00 on Thanksgiving, or 6:00. Or hell, why not just open them at noon? That way you can take your Thanksgiving dinner with you in a picnic basket to eat while you are waiting in line. That's a win-win if I've ever heard one.
Heck, as it turned out I was only off by two years. And while it would be a stretch to say the economy has gotten worse since 2011, AT BEST it has been running in place, especially for most of those in the working and middle classes.
So what is Macy's official justification for this move? For that, I will take you back to the original article:
However, The Wall Street Journal reported last year that "retail spending over Thanksgiving weekend dropped for the first time in at least seven years" even though "retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Macy's Inc. kicked off sales earlier on Thanksgiving Day."
See there's the problem. It wasn't that cash-strapped consumers just don't have as much money to throw away frivolously around the holidays anymore. Nope, the problem was that the stores just weren't open long enough to accommodate all the buyers. That's management "logic" for you in 21st century America. Not surprising, when they are paying money for advice from the likes of this fucking moron:
"Consumers have started to accept that shopping on Thanksgiving is a growing habit," Steve Osburn, director of the management consulting firm Kurt Salmon, told USA Today. "With consumer acceptance comes more people shopping."
Well, obviously not if sales are DECLINING despite the stores being open longer.
Even more despicable is how Macy's is trying to defend itself against charges that it is ruining its employees' Thanksgiving holiday:
Macy's says that most of its work shifts for Thanksgiving Day have been filled voluntarily by employees.
Even if that's true, it's pretty damn sad because what it really means is that the employees in question need the money so badly that they can't even afford to take one Thursday off.
As for the citizensconsumers idiots who will be voluntarily leaving their families on Thanksgiving night just so they can go get into rugby scrums over toaster ovens and stand for hours in long lines under cheap fluorescent lighting to save a few bucks buying shit they don't need because some smarmy commercial campaign bored its oh-so-clever message into their tiny pea brains: fuck them all. I hope all that cheaply made shit breaks before they even get it home from the store.
Bah humbug.
Bonus: "This was an important place in their lives"
This past Sunday night I did something that was quite rare for me—I went along with the crowd and participated in the same activity as probably the greatest percentage of my fellow countrymen were at that particular moment. Specifically, I watched the Season 3 premier of everybody’s favorite zombie splatterfest, The Walking Dead. Amazingly, not only was it the highest rated cable teevee show, EVAH, but it even beat out the ratings of all three major networks during its time slot, to include an NFL game being broadcast on NBC.
I say amazingly because although I myself have been a bit a of a zombie aficionado ever since the first time I caught the original George Romero classic, Dawn of the Dead, on VHS back when I was in college, I never would have expected the zombie genre to (ahem) rise up and become anything more than fodder for B-movies and short story horror anthologies. It is one thing for a guy like me who grew up a horror fiction geek to (double ahem) eat this stuff up, but when my wife tells me as she did yesterday that most of her girlfriends were discussing the show on Facebook I feel safe in assuming that we are witnessing the emergence of a genuine cultural phenomenon.
If you haven’t yet watched the show, the one thing that cannot be said is that it’s a sanitized version of a zombie apocalypse. There are plenty of gruesome close ups of guts and gore of the type that not too long ago were restricted to R-rated movies. Sunday night’s premier was in fact one of the more violent episodes, climaxing with an in your face shot of one of the living survivors having his leg gruesomely amputated with a hatchet in an attempt to save him from the virus that causes the dead to rise.
Oh sure, you can gripe about some of the tiny details that the show gets wrong like, for example, the living survivors’ seemingly magical ability to execute perfect zombie head shots with their sidearms without ever missing, even at a distance and while running. Ever done a headshot drill at the firing range? I have, and let me tell you it isn’t easy to do even at close range while stationary, not under duress and with the target not rushing towards you determined to rip your guts out. Another quibble is how cavalier the survivors are about getting zombie gore all over them while fighting with swords and blunt weapons, even though the contamination of one little scratch on their skin could be a potential death sentence in that situation. And don’t get me started about Herschel’s “magic shotgun” in the last episode of Season 2. I know the man is a Christian and all, but the number of rounds that came out of that thing without reloading puts the old “loaves and the fishes” story to shame.
Nevertheless, these are mere quibbles. I came here to praise or at least analyze The Walking Dead, not to (ahem again) bury it. Take it from me, the show is worth your time if you are into good zombie stories, or if you just want to scratch your head for awhile and try to figure out just what the heck is going on with our culture.
We’re a nation that has become so good at lying to itself that most people are unable to recognize what the truth even is anymore. The Hologram of the American media spends 24/7 blowing sunshine up the skirts of the masses in an effort to convince them that everything is hunky-dory and that they should get their fat asses out to the mall and consume, consume, consume. Nearly everything in our popular culture, from “reality” television shows, to American Idol-ized music, to endless superhero action movies and dimwitted romantic comedies, to trashy “young adult” novels, are not only relentlessly aimed at the lowest common denominator, but almost completely crowd out any works of artistic quality with the seemingly specific aim of desensitizing those portions of the brain that engage in critical thinking and decision making.
The underlying message is quite simple: work, work, work so you can spend, spend, spend and we will all live in a more prosperous tomorrow with even more electronic gadgets to ruin our attention spans and keep us fat, dumb and if not happy at least not out rioting in the streets demanding change. And if you can’t afford it right now, the banksters will keep right on lending you the money so you can have your instant gratification while being tied by your debts even tighter to a system that is slowly destroying your health, your security and your future. Not that you’ll ever notice, because you are too busy worrying about the supposedly fierce rivalry between the utterly vacuous Mariah Carey and the even more vacuous Nicki Minaj, and if you start feeling depressed about all of this there are plenty of pills we can dope you up with to help you accept your lot in this disposable society.
Yet despite this gargantuan effort to anesthetize the masses, end of the world and dystopian visions have never been hotter as a form of mass entertainment. It all reached a crescendo this past year when The Hunger Games displaced Harry Potter and Twilight as the movie (and book series) the teenyboppers just HAD to see. Nowadays, there’s a version of the apocalypse for every audience and world view, from the Rapture fantasies of the Left Behind series to Colson Whitehead’s literary zombie novel for New Yorker readers, Zone One. And countless millions of people are no doubt holding their collective breath to see if the ancient Mayan doomsday prophecy comes true this December.
So why, in the face of all the propagandizing efforts to the contrary, have Americans become so obsessed with the end of the world? Could it be that many people sense deep down in their bones that we are teetering on the precipice of an epic civilization ending disaster even if they won’t consciously admit it? Perhaps so. You would have to have the emotional intelligence quotient of a slab of granite not to feel that SOMETHING has certainly gone wrong with our decadent and depraved society.
Interestingly, the marketers have caught on to the appeal of the apocalypse phenomenon. The Walking Dead premier itself had about six commercial breaks for all manner of useless products interrupting its one hour broadcast, which creates quite a jarring viewing experience especially since, as Romero recognized 33 years ago, zombies are the perfect metaphor for the mindless consumer. There was even a contest you could enter to win the brand spanking new Hyundai the living characters were driving during the episode. Nice to know that when the world ends, a Korean automobile plant will apparently be the only safe haven available anywhere in the world.
No doubt most people watching the show imagined themselves in the place of Rick and his plucky band of survivors, with no awareness that in the real world their behavior is much closer to the deadly horde, consuming all in their path in a desperate attempt to maintain their unsustainable lifestyles. The only difference is that there is not an elite group of puppet masters in the form of the oligarchs controlling the actions of the undead. All in all, I don’t know what is worse, that we so easily buy into a predatory system that is slowly killing us, or that we do so to enrich the very jackals who manipulate us into going along with it. But hey, on next week's show, Rick and the gang will surely finish clearing out that prison, and then maybe they at least will “safe,” if only for a little while.
Hey, guess what? America's most predatory retailer, purveyor of mountains of cheap shit from China, scourge of the small businesses everywhere, creator of more ugly ass suburban blight than any other, turned 50 years old this week. So to help celebrate this monumental milestone on America's road to perdition, here is Gawker with a blistering rant from a very happy FORMER Walmart employee:
Well, I'm finally done... I am so glad I will never have to work that god forsaken third shift nightmare of a job at Wal Mart again. I just couldn't take it anymore...I just couldn't waste one more second of my life in that soulless corporate hellhole. There's only one way to go from now on and that's up. I've already been at the bottom of the shit pile...horrible hours, pathetic wages, idiotic ignorant knuckle dragging customers, and asshole incompetent managers. Gonna miss that 10 percent discount though haha
And every time I remember some new injustice perpetrated by this greedy unholy corporate behemoth Im gonna post it on Facebook until I purge its poison out of my soul..one year, eight months, two days and thirty two seconds of my life I can't get back working as a corporate whore for the devil LOL
Who in God's name expects people to work EVERY weekend and EVERY holiday because the managers are too damn lazy and uncaring to rotate the schedule..."Well we'll just make everybody on third shift work every weekend to eliminate the hassle of changing the schedule every week" Sad but true...stupid assholes
And you MUST work 12 hours on Black Friday..Which in the greedy corporate soulless world of Wal Mart starts THURSDAY Thanksgiving DAY at 7 p.m. Screw your families and holiday dinner, people..there's MONEY to make.
Oh but Wal mart employees have off Christmas Day"...oh excuse me I didn't know Christmas Day ended at 10 p.m.
How do they plan where they put there stores? It probably goes something like this:
Let's take a crew of desperate people looking for work in a shitty economy in a depressed area, build a big boxy ugly store and sell cheap merchandise manufactured in China and from other poor nations with a child labor force and sell the crap for cheaper than other stores because we dont' pay our employees a livable wage or adequate benefits and they're pretty much disposable if they complain.
And we don't have time to train them properly and we don't have enough people to stock the crap we sell... so simple things like ROTATING STOCK and disposing of damaged or tainted merchandise so people don't get sick goes by the wayside. If our customers get expired produce and meat and dairy products or broken merchandise and stuff that has had chemicals leaked on them...well BUYER BEWARE!!
And if any of our employees gets injured we bully them into not filing a claim and if they do we fire them.
And if they reports unsafe work practices to OSHA we lie our asses off when the investigators show up and pretend that we're "painting the bulletin boards" so we don't have to post the OSHA report for all employees to see as we are required to do so.
What our customers don't know would curdle their blood...pesticides stored on top of pet food, expired baby formula..mice feces in the bakery along with chewed bags of bread...mice with a carnivorous fondness for beef jerky, leaving their poop behind in the display box after chewing through the bags, and meanwhile customers are buying beef jerky from the SAME BOX!!
And by the way if you are buying HOLIDAY candy hate to tell you that's been sitting in our dirty warehouse/backroom since summer for MANY months! ENJOY!!! The mice sure did... Just dust off the feces, get rid of the chewed bags and sell them suckers!!!
If you're ever in our store when the late night bi-weekly cleaning of the meat department cases takes place you'll learn first hand what a rotting corpse probably smells like..it should be done more often but no one wants to do it and the managers don't really give a shit to enforce it...this filthy cesspole catch basin of liquid blood scum is lurking about six inches below that package of hamburger meat you're about to buy, Mr and Mrs. Customer. Bon Appetit!!
Incompetence and indifference trickles down from the top management and infects the average worker..for example the person who orders paper towels was on vacation one week so no one thought to order paper towels for the bathrooms...you know, the same bathrooms the employees, the people who handle the FOOD, use too.
So employees wash their hands and have to dry them on their dirty work clothes!!!!!! This went on at our store for a week until some upper management asshole FINALLY gave permission for some lower manger to pull paper towels off the shelves and stock the bathrooms. The issue at stake: Wal Mart would be LOSING money by doing that so they balked at it until workers complained.
Wal Mart is all about the almighty dollar, screw the customers and double screw the employees.
I like for example how employees are instructed FIRST to punch in a code if they are being are robbed which sends a call to the police. In fact, uou have to do it in order for the cash drawer to open...gee THAT won't make the guy with a gun in my face at all suspicious or jumpy when he seems me punching a bunch of buttons.
I don't know what your local store is like but where I worked, it was a mix of middle aged people (quite a few women) who have lost their jobs in the recession and took the job when this place opened because there are no real good jobs to be found in [my area], where the poverty rate is high; there were also young people many of them in college or right out of college who couldn't find work elsewhere.
Yeah we had our share of a "lowlife flunkies" but most of them are the customers who make our lives even more hellish. The people I worked with were mostly poor to middle class people who work hard for very little pay and a lot of abuse.
When a coworker left Wal Mart, it felt to me like it must feel when you're prison, when a longtime fellow inmate is released. You feel happy for them but you wish it was you.
And now, a little reminder of WHY America is going down the tubes, here is a reader comment from some asshole who call himself/herself DoctorOfStyle DEFENDING Walmart:
Boo fucking hoo. At least it is a job. I guess we should just raise taxes on the "rich" a little more so you can sit on your can. Maybe import a few more Mexicans to do the work you are too good to do.
Continuing on with my observations from my recent trip abroad, I wanted to say a few words about the city where we spent most of our time: Bangkok, Thailand. If you want to know what the near term future of urbanized humanity looks like, I humbly suggest you'll find no better model. One tour book referred to Bangkok as the "Blade Runner City," and that description isn't too far from the truth. One night we had dinner in an open air restaurant perched on the 54th floor of local hotel (yes, really) and the view of the seemingly endless stretches of skyscrapers and their flashing neon lights was simply breathtaking. Moving down to ground level, however, quickly brings to mind the title of globalization apologist Tom Friedman's book: hot, flat and crowded.
The most striking thing about Bangkok is how massive wealth and abject poverty exist literally shoulder to shoulder throughout the city. Luxury high rise condo towers will actually have multilevel hovels buit right up against their sides. Take a walk on the crowded streets and you'll pass through countless open air markets selling everything from fresh foodstuffs to cheaply made manufactured good produced in nearby sweatshop factories. But if you keep walking until you reach the famous Sukhumvit Road, you'll find a seemingly never ending stretch of gigantic indoor shopping malls selling every luxury good imaginable in over-air conditioned comfort. Indeed, it is hardly unusual to have to step around a beat up looking female beggar holding her badly malnourished child as you venture to buy that Kate Spade designer hand bag that costs more money than the poor woman will see in a year.
The old part of the city is particularly spectacular, with its many Buddhist temples and various historic shrines and monuments. The Thai people are generally very welcoming and friendly, though you always have to be on your guard that the friendly tuk-tuk driver promising to take you to a particular tourist site for the equivalent of a few dollars isn't instead intending to detour you to his brother-in-law's jewelry store or tailor shop. After a couple of days immersed in the city's intoxicating rush, I began to see why many farang (as the Thais refer to all those of European ancestry) fall in love with the place even if the omnipresent year round heat and humidity would be a deal breaker for me.
Then there is the traffic. The picture above is one I took of a typical midday backup at a traffic light on a Bangkok surface street. To say that Bangkok is a city where the quality of life would be vastly improved if it had a lot fewer cars is an understatement. During the day, cars choke every street, alley and avenue, making even short vehicular trips a time consuming adventure and forcing pedestrians to be constantly on their guard lest they get run over and left for dead in a city where there is no ambulance service and going to the hospital means paying at the time of treatment. It is not unusual to see motorbikes actually driving along a crowded sidewalk, weaving around pedestrians in order to gain a slight advantage over the rest of the traffic.
Walking around, I quickly learned that the key to safely crossing any street on foot, even at a designated cross walk, was to follow the locals, who seemed to have a sixth sense as to when they could defy the moving wall of steel and rubber without getting splayed out on the pavement. Making matters more unpleasant, the exhaust from all of those idling vehicles combines with the high amount of water vapor in the air to create a noxious mess that many Thais try to avoid by means of wearing surgical masks out in public.
The sad part is that Bangkok does have a more robust public transportation system than do most American cities. The key features are a subway system and a sky train, which are both clean and efficient to ride, even if extremely crowded at rush hour. Moreover, most denizens who work in Bangkok appear to live in the city itself rather than in soulless, far flung suburbs. It's a place that could and should be much more walkable than it is. Sadly, like those gigantic air conditioned meccas of consumerism along Sukhumvit Road, the Thais have apparently bought into the self-defeating American notion that owning an automobile equals success in life, even if it means they have to spend half of their waking lives sitting immobilized and choking on fumes.
The other thing I noticed is despite the fact that you can easily and quickly down an entire meal of various fruits, vegetables and cooked meats from market stalls and carts on just about any street corner, there was also a distressingly high number of American fast food outlets, particularly McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I guess many Thais must also equate eating that highly processed garbage with success, even though it is both healthier and cheaper to patronize the market stalls. Chalk it up as one more temporary victory for globalization that, like those massive traffic jams, will last only as long as the world's fossil fuel supplies hold out.
Bonus: "I'd let you watch...I would invite you...but the queens we use would not excite you"
First off, it must be pointed out just what a ridiculously bad deal gift cards are. By paying, say, $5 extra to purchase a $100 card, the buyer is basically handing free money right over to whatever company issued the card. So they were already not the smartest purchase a person could make, and if the State of New Jersey persists in its latest nefarious tax collection scheme, it's about to get a whole lot worse. Here is Huffington Post Money with the details:
Like many states on the hunt to fill in budget shortfalls, New Jersey is getting creative. The state is making a grab for its residents' gift cards.
If you live in New Jersey and wait more than two years to cash in on that Red Lobster gift card that your boss gave you, you'll be out of luck. Under a new state law, New Jersey will take control of funds on gift cards that have not been used for two years. The law could potentially translate into millions of dollars for the Garden State, which would hold the gift card money as "unclaimed funds." That means New Jersey will keep that money in state coffers rather than a consumer being able to access it through the card.
But gift card makers, unwilling to part with so much money in unredeemed funds, are fighting back, pulling out their wares from the state altogether. On Thursday, Blackhawk Network and InComm, the companies behind hundreds of major name-brand gift cards sold through thousands of vendors, said they are pulling their cards from New Jersey vendors starting on June 30 if not sooner. Earlier this week, American Express pulled its cards from New Jersey retailers.
The new law would make card sellers responsible for gathering from buyers certain personal information, such as a ZIP code. That information would then be used by New Jersey to collect the unused money on the cards into the state's unclaimed money fund 24 months after the last time these cards were used.
There are a couple of issues to consider here. First there is the invasion of privacy aspect of collecting customers' personal information. But that seems to be pretty much par for the course in America these days. Corporations and the government continually push the limits in that area, and as long as the vast majority of the public remains completely asleep at the switch about it, nothing is going to even put the brakes on that particular trend.
But more importantly, exactly what justification is there for this method of tax collection? It is so completely arbitrary as to have the appearance of out-and-out theft. Don't get me wrong, I am not an anti-tax reactionary. Government needs money to operate, and taxes are the price people pay for living in any society. But those taxes should be fairly and equitably assessed and there should at least be some articulable justification for them. This asshole move fails on both counts.
Heaven forbid that the Garden State might consider a more just and equitable tax to try and make up its budget shortfall, like maybe one on all of those financial sector scumbags who live in the state. Taxing a fucking asshole banker just for BEING a fucking asshole banker is every bit as arbitrary as confiscating people's gift card balances. And you know that one of the reasons this odious law passed is that millionaire bankers don't buy $100 Best Buy gift cards.
But wait, the state might argue, this action isn't REALLY theft because we have provided a fail safe:
Procrastinating residents could still obtain any remaining balances on the gift cards by contacting the state's unclaimed funds office.
Oh yes, that is just what I would want to do if my gift card balance got confiscated, wrestle with the state government's Orwellian bureaucracy trying to get my $100 back. How much do you want to bet that the office that would field calls about such inquiries will have the biggest nightmare of an automated telephone answering system ever installed in any government office? If you are ready to abandon all hope, please press 7.
But who is ultimately responsible for this abomination? Why, you are of course. And by "you," I mean the average dumbass American consumer:
Under federal law, gift cards must be usable for at least five years after purchase, though most do not have any expiration date. Consumer advocates have criticized gift cards because consumers often forget about them or leave balances unused.
Redemption rates are low for cards and as much as $41 billion in the United States went unspent on all gift cards from 2005 to 2011. In some cases, activation or dormancy fees can eat up small amounts of money left on cards. All these things have made them lucrative for card makers.
It kind of makes you wonder why stores even bother charging the $5 purchase fee in the first place, doesn't it? You would think that sales of the cards, and hence profitable unredeemed balances, would be even higher if they just gave them out for free.
What can you say about a society which is so wealthy yet addle-minded that its citizens can afford to piss $41 billion down the sewer for nothing? There are whole countries out there that don't have a GDP that large. To put that number in perspective, it equals over $100 for every man, woman and child in America. That means the average family of four has put over $400 onto unused gift cards and have just forgotten about them. No wonder so few people get upset and protest moves like one. It's not like they even noticed just how blatantly they were getting ripped off in the first place.
Perhaps no other single entity has done more to help destroy the average American's standard of living during the past 30 years than Walmart. The chain's maniacal insistance on lowering prices at the expense of everything else in order to increase the bottom line has made founder Sam Walton's heirs among the wealthiest people on the planet while destroying mom-and-pop businesses all across the country and helping to drive down wages in every market it has entered or touched.
It all was working out handsomely until high gasoline prices and the Great Recession hit, and distressed consumers found themselves at a breaking point in which many of them could no longer afford even Walmart prices. So what is America's most predatory retail chain going to do in response? Why, lower prices even further, of course. Here is AOL Daily Finance with the details:
Walmart has put out an APB for shoppers: "We have the lowest prices all the time. Period."
This week, the nation's biggest retailer detailed its $2 billion plan to "reinvest" in low prices, expressly in areas such as food and consumables, to drive more traffic to its 3,868 U.S. stores.
During a presentation at a CIBC World Markets conference, Duncan Mac Naughton, executive vice president and chief merchandising officer, also outlined Walmart's other key priorities: to add more nutritious and high-end food to stores, such as USDA Choice beef; rework its poorly performing clothing business; and enhance its appeal to ethnic minorities with more merchandise tailored to their tastes.
The first question I had upon reading that passage was to ask exactly what kind of horrifically bad beef Walmart is currently carrying ("pink slime" would be my guess), but the business reporter stenographer who wrote the story apparently didn't think to ask it.
The money passage, so to speak, was in the next part of the story.
Walmart's move to regain its status as the nation's bargain emporium comes in response to the rise of dollar stores, which won over large swathes of new shoppers during the recession. It's also a course correction aimed at remedying its own missteps.
Over the past three years, the retailer unleashed a bevy of promotions that muddled its original everyday-low-price message, Mac Naughton said. That led customers to begin to question whether they could still expect Walmart to have the lowest prices, he said. The promotions "fractured some of that trust," said Mac Naughton. "That's why we're so focused on consistent pricing now."
Making sure the price is right is crucial as the U.S. consumer "is still facing some significant headwinds," Mac Naughton said. Although the recession has been officially over for a few years now, 23 million Americans are still officially unemployed, gas prices are high and rising, and economic growth is anemic, he noted.
Right there you see a clueless corporate flack, touting a new policy to increase his company's profitability that is utterly self defeating. Sorry to break this to you, Mr. Mac Naughton, but Walmart has reached a breaking point in which putting any more price pressure on your suppliers is going to cause direct economic pain for the companies who supply your products, which will be passed along to their workforce, which will result in them having less cash flow to be able buy shit at your hideous stores. You and the other major vulture retail firms have finally managed to squeeze all of the excess wealth from the pockets of your beleaguered working class customers. They are tapped out...just like your awful business model. It's just too bad that they were so dimwitted as to have gone along with the program until it was too late.
Bonus: "Now cousin Clifford...he got the good land...right on the highway off of Airbase Road...looks like a Walmart...waiting to happen...I'm here to tell you it's a pot of gold"
I love the smell of Schadenfreude in the morning. Smells like...Walmart biting the dust. Here are the gory details from DailyFinance:
Walmart revolutionized consumers' lives for decades. It built a successful retail empire across the country, powered by its low prices.
Hold on for just a minute. Wally World built its successful retail empire by running mom and pop stores into the ground and destroying the social fabric of communities all over the country, not to mention perfecting the business model of using precious resources to have cheap shit built in China and shipped halfway around the world using more cheap resources. It changed people's lives all right, but hardly for the better. The company is a scourge upon the Earth, and when in finally goes belly up, I for one will be dancing upon its grave.
But anyway, please continue:
But Walmart has failed to keep up with the innovation, and now other companies are successfully changing consumers' behaviors in a way that is slowly killing the world's most famous retailer.
Want proof?
Look no further than its most recent quarterly earnings report. Although it marked its second full quarter of positive same-store sales growth (albeit a measly 1.5%) after nine consecutive quarters of declining same-store sales, overall earnings still declined 13%.
Bwahahahahahahaha. So their margins are getting squeezed. Excellent! Couldn't happen to a bigger or more deserving bunch of scumbags.
So if Wally World is in a funk, who is picking up the slack?
Amazon's low prices (thanks to its low overhead expenses and no sales tax in most states) and unbeatable selection (thanks to the acquisition of companies like Diapers.com and Zappos), combined with the convenience of online shopping, have attracted a growing fan base of customers -- stealing more and more customers away from Walmart.
Even Jeremy King, the chief technology officer of Walmart, admits Walmart.com is "playing a catch-up game" with Amazon. And yet it's pretty clear that any attempts to compete with Amazon online will be futile.
That's because Amazon's reach will only continue to expand as it builds out its Kindle platform. The ease of purchasing with just one click from virtually whatever device you choose (your computer, phone, Kindle, or even Apple's iPad) will continue to attract a growing number of consumers -- again, spelling bad news for Walmart.
And how about those not going online to shop?
On the physical front, the most revolutionary Walmart killer is Costco.
Costco, a members-only warehouse chain, targets a more affluent demographic than Walmart but similarly prides itself in offering heavily discounted items. Even though Walmart has a similar arm of its business, Costco is light years ahead of Walmart's Sam's Club.
Costco's charm permeates many levels.
Markups on products are heavily controlled. Items can never be sold for more than 15% of cost (whereas supermarkets will mark up items by 25%, and department stores mark items up by as much as 50%). This means consumers always know they'll find unbeatable bargains. And that keeps them coming back for the majority of their shopping needs.
Stores require little upkeep. They are bare bones in design, meaning they require less maintenance capital than its more posh (by comparison) competitors. Plus, Costco only stocks around 4,000 items. Walmart's stores, by contrast, often carry more than 100,000 different items, which constantly need shelf attention.
Shopping is easier. The smaller scope of products makes the purchase decision easier for customers. But it also generates higher sales volumes, which enables Costco to sell items quicker than they have to pay their suppliers for them -- and allows them to negotiate even lower deals with these suppliers.
Costco has a secret ingredient. The stores have an additional element that Walmart will likely never be able to replicate: the "treasure hunt." Costco constantly stocks shelves with new items available for just a short time. Customers return excited to see new offerings, and they often leave with items they hadn't intended to purchase.
Returns are never a problem. Even if shoppers later decide their impulse buys were unwise, Costco has the most consumer-friendly return policy out there, accepting returns on most products without a receipt and with an infinite timeframe.
Given all this, it's little surprise that Costco's retention rate for members hovers around 90%. This means that once a customer gets a taste for the savings -- and experience -- Costco offers, he or she will likely be a customer for life. Again, bad news for Walmart.
Ummm...there are a lot of words I might use to describe Costco, but saying it has fucking "charm" isn't one of them. The downside to this story is that Walmart's woes are not being caused by consumers finally wising up to the horrific societal costs of cut rate, cut throat retailers. In fact, all it really means is that the O.S. (Original Shark) is now getting devoured by two even more ruthless sharks. But nevertheless, it is fun to contemplate the possibility of Walmart's rapid demise and that soon all of its stores will look like the one in the picture above.
I really wish the outstandingly funny Louis CK would do more social commentary in his routines, because he is really good at it. In this clip he makes fun of lazy, complacent Americans and our "white people problems," speculating that we're not going to do so well when economic collapse hits.
Choice bit: "We're the fattest people in the world, and we have all this stuff. And we HATE it."
Enjoy!
Bonus Video: Juice News did a excellent rap report on the whole Kony 2012 controversy (otherwise known as white people for once actually worrying about black people in Africa problems). Too bad it was recorded before Jason Russell was detained Thursday after his rather bizarre public breakdown because then it would no doubt have been even funnier.
Since Super Sunday is the day in which tens of millions of people actually look FORWARD to seeing the latest inane and intelligence-insulting teevee commercials to spew forth from the reptilian minds of Madison Avenue hucksters, I thought this story would be appropriate. I rarely watch television and thus am not normally exposed to commercials for the latest awful products available in our mindless consumer economy. I thus don't have any way to judge how widely known the existence of the product advertised in the commercial linked below is. I'm not sure what represents the bigger indicator of the impending end of the empire: the fact that such an article of clothing as Forever Lazy even exists, that an oversized onesie is being marketed to alleged adult human beings or that the advertisement actually advocates it as appropriate attire to wear out in public.
The other thing the cracks me up about commercials like this is that the actors on the screen don't appear to be the kind of people who would ever be caught dead using such a product in real life. The perfectly symmetry would be to see someone wearing one of these while chowing down on one of those KFC Famous Bowls. Anyway, in case you are like me and had no idea that the American consumerism has hit yet another new low, here is the Forever Lazy in all of its appalling glory.
In yet another sign that consumers have less money to spend, there was a steep drop in tickets sales for movies this past year, as reported by the Atlantic Wire:
The numbers are in, and they show what studio execs likely feared and movie-goers likely suspected all along: Not a lot of people went to the movies this year. Box-office tracker Hollywood.com says that "an estimated 1.275 billion tickets sold" in 2011, a 4.8 percent decrease from 2010 making for "the smallest movie audience since 1995," reports the AP. A hodgepodge of reasons for the sour showing were cited in the AP and ABC News reports. Among them: Too many sequels, too many kids movies, too many distracting gadgets, the bad economy, high ticket prices, and, something being called an "'Avatar' hangover" from 2010.
Conspicuously absent from the list was the fact that most of the movies released in 2011 sucked balls.
As it turned out, Black Friday was not the most out-of-control display of mindless consumerism in America this year. That honor now goes to today, Black Friday Redux, and the accompanying violence and senseless behavior over the latest release of sneakers endorsed by a washed up has-been who hasn't played a game in nearly a decade. Here is BBC with the details:
There was disorder from California to Georgia as shoppers vied to buy a retro version of a classic Air Jordan model.
A new pair costs about $180 (£115), but they are already being listed on eBay for as much as $605.
The ugly scenes recalled the violence that broke out in the early 1990s on streets across America as the shoes became popular targets for thieves.
In the early hours of Friday, police used pepper spray on about 20 customers who started fighting at a mall in suburban Seattle, Washington state, as they waited in line to buy the black-and-white Air Jordan 11 Retro Concords.
Gunfire
One man was arrested for allegedly punching a police officer.
"He did not get his shoes. He went to jail," Officer Mike Murphy said.
He added: "It was not a nice, orderly group of shoppers. There were a lot of hostile and disorderly people."
In other disturbances:
At least four people were arrested after customers broke down a door at a store selling the shoes in Lithonia, Georgia
There was an attempted robbery on a victim who was mistakenly believed to have just bought the shoes in Stockton, California
About 100 shoppers forced their way into a shopping centre in Taylor, Michigan
A gunshot rang out as shoppers queued in Richmond, California, although no injures were reported
Disorder were also reported in Charlotte, North Carolina; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Omaha, Nebraska
How many of these people do you suppose were also putting themselves even deeper in debt just to buy a pair of these overpriced pieces of shit? What a sad, sick culture we live in. Frankly, when it finally collapses I won't miss it one damn bit.
“Going to the mall” has become such an accepted part of American culture that we tend to forget that the concept of large indoor shopping malls with dozens if not hundreds of stores and a gigantic surrounding parking lot is a relatively recent addition to the landscape. It was only in the late-1960s and early-1970s that the opening of large modern shopping malls really got underway—changing the face of American consumer habits in the process.
The first large regional mall I ever visited as a child was the Cherryvale Mall in Rockford, Illinois, which opened in the mid-1970s. It was a 30-mile drive for my family to visit, and by today’s standards would seem fairly quaint, but at the time I was blown away by how big it seemed and by how all of the stores seemed to go on forever. For a REALLY special treat, my dad would take the family to the Woodbridge Woodfield (see comments) Mall in suburban Chicago, a couple of hours drive from our home. At the time, Woodbridge Woodfield billed itself as the “largest shopping mall in the world,” and indeed it did dwarf Cherryvale, being well more than double in size. Going there, in my wonderment I always thought it must contain everything in the world anyone could ever possibly want to buy.
In those days, there were still relatively few large malls spread around the country. For most middle class families going to the mall was always a big deal, sort of like a mini-vacation. Back then, shopping on say Black Friday seemed fun, rather than the dreary slog it has become, fighting off thousands of overamped consumer drones whose minds have been dulled by many years of exposure to the ever-slicker and more vacuous media campaigns spewed forth by Madison Avenue hucksters.
Sadly, in our utterly disposable society, many of that first generation of shopping malls have fallen into disrepair, and have even been abandoned as newer and ever more dazzling shopping palaces have been built to take their place. This has been particularly the case in the Rust Belt states, where closing factories and declining wages have limited many families to shopping at Walmart and dollar stores, the often-overpriced shopping mall merchandize now well beyond their meager means.
This has all been a long-winded introduction to a story that appeared the other day in the Toledo Blade, about the impending closure of yet another former regional shopping hub built a couple of generations ago:
A team of Northwood city and Wood County officials inspected the Woodville Mall on Monday, and the myriad problems they found in the 42-year-old nearly vacant shopping complex made it likely they will seek a court order this week to close its main section.
"There is no firm decision yet," Brian Ballenger, Northwood law director, said after the group finished a two-hour inspection of the mall, which is at 3725 Williston Rd.
But Mr. Ballenger said the group probably will reach a decision Tuesday morning and could have the Wood County prosecutor's office seek an injunction later this week to have it shuttered.
That would affect 12 retailers operating inside the cavernous 778,000-square-foot mall, which was built in 1969 by the DeBartolo Corp. of Youngstown. After the inspection, a Northwood official handed out packets to the tenants listing vacant area sites where they could relocate.
Two anchor stores attached to the mall — The Andersons General Store and Sears, both of which have separate outside entrances and have taken care of their areas — would be unaffected.
When contacted, Woodville Mall's owner, real estate investor Mike Kohan of Little Neck, N.Y., said he could not speak at the time. Later, he could not be reached for comment and did not return phone calls.
So just how badly had the mall been allowed to deteriorate?
The inspection team consisted of Mr. Ballenger. Brad Espen, Wood County director of environmental health, and Michael Rudey, Wood County chief building inspector. A Northwood fire department official joined the group to examine the mall's fire sprinkler system, which is not functioning.
At the Fox Woodville Theater, Mr. Espen said they found fallen ceiling tiles, wet carpeting caused by the leaking roof, and no emergency lighting. The temperature inside the theater — and most of the mall — was 38 degrees. Employees had attempted to use space heaters to raise the temperature.
The group later entered a wing of the mall that had been cordoned off and ventured into a small vacant store. Inside they found fallen ceiling tiles, wet floors, mold, and the smell of mildew. Throughout the wing, the floor was buckled in many places, which Mr. Rudey said was caused by sporadic heat and cold underneath the floor.
In the backroom of a former Lane Bryant store, inspectors found a three-foot-wide hole in the ceiling and what appeared to be loose stone on the floor. The stone turned out to be portions of the roof that had caved in.
Throughout the mall the group found water-stained carpeting, warped and stained ceiling tiles, mold and mildew, and strategically placed buckets and trash cans to catch water from the leaking roof.
Nevertheless, the remaining tenants were stillmanaging to eek out a living and will be devastated if the mall closes:
Patrick Falgout, owner of Hobby Outfitters, one of the 12 tenants in the mall, said he was "kind of shocked" when he got the letter. He had already spent money having the roof above his store fixed and was using electric heat to keep his store warm.
Closing the mall would be a huge financial burden on him, he added. "It's been a rough four to five years for us. If I have to move, it's going to eat into my retirement savings," Mr. Falgout said.
Sue Grover, owner of the Sports Maniac sports memorabilia shop, said she and other tenants cannot afford to move elsewhere. "We knew nothing of this. If we had known this was happening, I'd have never ordered Christmas stock," she said.
Ms. Grover said she hopes the city and county will allow the mall to stay open through the holiday season. That might provide enough revenues to allow the merchants to move out of the mall.
"It's a good mall. The money's here. They just need somebody to take care of it," she added.
So sad and so typical of modern America—use it up, don’t take care of it and throw it away. There is more profit to be made by building something more flashy and trendy than by taking care of what we already have. It’s the same misguided thinking that caused so much of Obama’s Recovery Act money to be spent on building new roads rather than to repair the crumbling existing transportation infrastructure. The American consumer machine is like a shark. It needs to keep swimming forward and feeding or it will die. Someday in the not-too-distant future, it will face on a large scale the same fate that has now befallen the Woodville Mall of Northwood, Ohio.
It cannot be repeated enough that the biggest reason why mainstream liberalism is so completely ineffectual is because it sold its soul to corporate America a long time ago. Case in point is an article by Andrew Leonard that appeared this past weekend on Salon.com about the excesses of Black Friday. It starts off promisingly enough:
Here’s a Thanksgiving recipe guaranteed to deliver a nervous breakdown impervious to even the most bleeding-edge psychopharmaceutical wonder drug. Go to YouTube, search for “Black Friday commercials,” start watching, and then, once you’ve sated yourself on grown men screaming at Justin Bieber, remakes of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” and, most distressingly, the continuing adventures of the Crazy Target Lady, ask yourself this question:
What does it all mean?
I stared into this heart of retail panic darkness, and the more I clicked and pondered, the more confused — (mind-boggled? fascinated? flabbergasted?) — I became. The Crazy Target Lady, so proud of her OCD — obsessive Christmas disorder — is not funny. She’s scary. She’s why people trample each other to death. She is wrong.
There is a point in our culture beyond which camp and kitsch no longer make the least ironic sense, where consumerism loses its last mooring to civilization, where even seemingly legitimate protest devolves into farce. That point is Black Friday.
You're absolute right, Mr. Leonard. So clearly, the answer is to derail the crazy train of mindless American consumerism, right?
Let me be clear. I am not opposed to vigorous sprees of retail spending. For the sake of the U.S. economy, I would love to see a robust Christmas shopping season and I plan to do my part. I find the notion that we should “occupy Black Friday” and withhold our consumer dollars as a way of hitting back at the 1 percent just nutty. Voluntarily subtracting demand from the economy hurts us. A general consumer strike would result in more layoffs and pay cuts and bankruptcies and foreclosures. Sure, Wal-Mart would take a hit, but so would Wal-Mart employees.
I don't recall the last time I saw a writer so completely contradict himself with two successive paragraphs. You simply cannot assert that consumerism is losing its "last mooring to civilization" and then turn around and say you would love to see a "robust Christmas shopping season." That's called trying to have your cake and eat it, too.
What's most distressing is Leonard's utter inability to see that consumerism itself IS the problem, not just the Black Friday teevee ads that whip the more dimwitted members of our society into the kind of frenzy where they are willing to trample, assault, and pepper-spray one another in order to lay their hands on that deeply discounted video game. The teevee ads have become so diabolical because they reflect the fact that corporate America is desperately trying to prop up a zombie economic model that, thanks to peak oil and resource depletion, is already dead even if the body hasn't yet stopped twitching.
But the contradictions in the article don't end there. Almost immediately after proclaiming that he will be "doing his part" to fuel this insanity, Leonard goes on to write:
But there’s also a point where healthy consumerism becomes out-of-control marketing-driven commodity fetishism, and when we find ourselves checking our smartphones for last minute online deals while standing in line for a chain store opening at midnight on Thanksgiving, we are clearly too far gone. That’s insanity.
And corporate America knows this. The retail moguls are counting on it. They are outright encouraging it — and role-modeling the appropriate behavior for us. The Crazy Target Lady is not a joke. Watch her cannibalize her gingerbread man, or strategize her reverse psychology shopping techniques, or show off her shopping utility belt: You cannot avoid the dual conclusion that a) she is not a healthy woman, and b) she is America. She might be a lunatic, but it’s a culturally approved lunacy — the kind that keeps the American engine of capitalism all stoked up. The message that keeps getting blasted across my TV is that we should all be more like her — doing our patriotic duty to boost fourth-quarter retail sales. Sure, you can laugh at her. But then get in line and keep your credit card handy.
Yep, and you can stop kidding yourself because you are buying right into it too, asshole. It doesn't matter if you are too "hip" to be taken in by Target's crazy lady ads, or whether you wouldn't be caught dead standing in line outside a Walmart late on Thanksgiving evening, you are part of the problem. Depleting the planet's remaining resources to buy a bunch of useless shit you don't need to prop up the soulless, dehumanizing and climate-destroying American way of life is just as immoral whether you do it the day after Thanksgiving or you wait around until December 15th.
Even more hypocritical is Leonard's praise of the online petition against the early box retail store openings:
But, of course, the big story of this year’s Black Friday has been the welcome news that at least some subsection of the population of the United States has come to the realization that it’s time to step back from the brink. The budding protests against the decision by some of the country’s biggest retailers — Target, Macy’s, Best Buy, Kohl’s — to move the start of their Black Friday sales to midnight Thanksgiving, or even earlier, is laudable.
The nearly 200,000 signatures on part-time Target employee Anthony Hardwick’s petition to “Save Thanksgiving” is proof that both employees and customers of Target are beginning to see this endless race by retailers to one-up each other as dehumanizing and ridiculous. What does a Target employee forced to go to work at 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving have to give thanks for?
Gee, the public was so outraged about the Thanksgiving night openings that Black Friday sales INCREASED by around 7% this year. So fat lot of good those petitions did. Because you see, Mr. Leonard, all the petitions in the world don't mean a damn thing. The only way you can show your displeasure that will matter to the scumbags who run these chains is to WITHHOLD YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS from them altogether, NOT just on the day after Thanksgiving.
But no, you go ahead and "do your part" for the economy as you have pledged to do. Keep trying to have it both ways. Express dismay at how out of control things have gotten but don't ever consider changing your ways or that there might actually be a different and more sustainable way to do things. And maybe next year you can write some more drivel about how out-of-control Black Friday is so you and your oh-so-sensitive readership can feel better about yourselves by looking down your noses at those people who are taken in by the crazy lady ads. Because clearly, mindless consumerism only loses its last mooring to civilization when it is the dirty unwashed masses doing it rather than those above-it-all sophisticates who read Salon.com.
Bonus: in case you haven't been "lucky enough" to see them, one of the Crazy Target Lady ads
I’ve written here a number of times before about how the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) manipulates the official unemployment numbers; particularly with its “Birth-Death Model” that adds phantom jobs to most of the monthly job reports. And don’t get me started about the fact that the official unemployment percentage counts out “discouraged” workers who have dropped off the long-tern unemployment benefit rolls. Everyone who is paying attention knows that you can’t trust the government employment reports. That’s just a given.
Nevertheless, it is just as obvious that while the economy does not appear to be creating jobs, or at least not creating enough new jobs to keep up with population growth, the free fall in the employment numbers that we experienced in the latter half of 2008 and the first half of 2009 has halted at least temporarily. For this reason, those pundits who oppose the Occupy movement can get on the teevee and plausibly state for those not paying attention that the protesters should shut their mouths, take a shower and go get a job.
All of which begs the question, where are the new jobs that are being created coming from? It is hard to tell from looking at the BLS’s monthly reports. From glancing at the overall 2011 data, the biggest gains seem to be in the categories of Leisure and Hospitality; Professional and Business Services; and Education and Health Services. Note before we continue that, nebulous as those descriptions are, they don’t include people who actually MAKE things for a living.
So let me take a crack at this issue based solely upon the anecdotal evidence of what I see going on around me every day. And yes, I realize that the Washington D.C. area is atypical in having been spared the brunt of the Great Recession because of the insane levels of federal deficit spending. If you’ll bear with me for a moment, however, I think you’ll agree that these categories are probably typical of what is happening elsewhere as well.
Fast Food Restaurants: particularly the hip, new “upscale” fast food chains like Chipotle, Baja Fresh, California Tortilla, Chop’t, Five Guys and Pita Pit. Every new strip mall that gets built around here seems to include at least one of these franchises, and they also are springing up in places where other stores have closed. Also popular in our area these days are fancy cupcake bakeries, which I shit you not can charge up to five bucks for one lousy cupcake. No, I don’t get it, either.
Bank Branches: I reported a story awhile back about how some of the financially strapped big banks were closing some of their branches. But around here openings of new locations do not appear to have slowed down at all. Most incredibly, a couple of miles from my house a newly constructed TD Bank branch was built right next to a HALF EMPTY strip mall. Why they thought it was a good investment to build a whole new building when there was plenty of empty retail space right next door is beyond me.
Pharmacies: I swear, sometimes it seems as though were it not for CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid, there wouldn’t be any job growth at all. For years now, they’ve been building drug stores around here almost as quickly as they’ve been putting up new bank branches. It does seem like they will not be content until they have put one on every single street corner all across the land. Just who it is out there with such a burning need to be running into the drug store all the damn time is another question.
Dollar Stores: I’ve written before about my friend Joe, who was laid off from his retail manager’s job at the beginning of this year and was out of work for eight months before landing a gig at a newly constructed Dollar Tree location. I haven’t mentioned this to Joe, but dollar stores depress me even more than Walmart or Target do. They are the absolute nadir of the American shopping experience, selling discounted cheap, crappy goods from all over the world to customers often as downtrodden-looking as the merchandise. There is a real air of desperation about these places, as if everyone involved knows that they represent the last rung down on the ladder before utter destitution.
Box Stores: some big box chains like Lowes and Sears have fallen on hard times and have been closing stores recently, but plenty of others seem to be cropping up to take their place. What they all have in common is their complete dependence on relatively cheap oil, diesel and gasoline to bring in their products and well as their customers. The whole business model is likely only a few years from complete collapse, and yet they keep on building the damn things.
So what do all of those categories have in common? They are the kinds of places where even if an unemployed person is lucky enough to land a full time gig, they are not going to make enough money to afford to take out a mortgage and buy a house. And the collapsed housing market remains the key as to why the economy is not “recovering,” whatever the manipulated government statistics may say.
It’s bad enough that the mainstream media goes into orgasmic gyrations while hyping a manipulated and pathetic monthly jobs number like 90,000 jobs added. But it’s even worse when you consider that they make no effort whatsoever to determine the quality of those new jobs or how much they pay. It is all just more of the Lies We Tell Ourselves, and will continue to tell ourselves until one day a financial tsunami comes along and washes away the whole creaking edifice once and for all.
A recent poll conducted by Yahoo Finance shows that Americans are slowly waking up to the basic truths that I write about every day here at TDS:
A new survey by Yahoo! Finance shows Americans have a disturbing lack of hope and a frightening lack of retirement planning.
Among the highlights of the poll:
-- 41% of Americans say the 'American Dream' has been lost.
-- 37% of adults have NO retirement savings and 38% plan to live off Social Security.
-- 63% of Americans believe the economy is getting worse, including 72% of those over the age of 55.
These findings are consistent with broader trends The Daily Ticker has reported on in the past year: Despite macro data showing the economy has technically recovered from the 'Great Recession', the majority of Americans just aren't feeling it. Considering 49 million Americans are living in poverty, the "real" unemployment rate is 16% and millions of Americans are facing foreclosure, it's no wonder many believe the recession never ended.
Bad as that first number is, the second one is even more scary given how, as I have demonstrated here at TDS, Social Security is effectively bankrupt just as the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire in large numbers.
The poll goes on to show the flip side of these numbers:
-- 53% of Americans ages 18-34 still see America as the land of opportunity.
-- 45% of parents believe their kids will be better off than they are.
-- 68% of Americans say their currency financial situation is either "excellent" or "satisfactory."
Here too, the survey is consistent with trends we've reported on: In an era of rising income inequality, those doing well in America today are doing quite well, indeed.
Yep--most of those who still have their jobs remain completely in the dark about what so many of their fellow citizens are experiencing. They are the ones who stare uncomprehendingly at the Occupy protests and wonder what all of the fuss is about. Many will no doubt be lining up at midnight next Thursday so they can trample some of their fellow citizens trying to be the first to save 20% on the new flat screen teevee.
