In the gleaming corridor of the fifty-first floor, the money can be made if you really want some more.
This is late I know, but, for the record: wingnuts fulminate about the War on, I shit you not, Black Friday. Seems some libruls somewhere said something bad about mindless consumerism, so obviously that can't stand. And apparently, there's something called "Small Business Saturday" where you're supposed to patronize small businesses, which apparently Obama said something positive about, so it's also necessary for them to take a day out of their busy schedule of praising small businesses to the heavens to explain how small businesses fucking suck and should all be destroyed. It really is all stimulus-response with these guys. No higher brain function.
I probably don't have to say that I absolutely fucking loath the very idea of this day. I try my best not to feel disgust for the mobs of humanity rioting for the opportunity to snag a two-dollar waffle iron--tell myself that they're only playing their proscribed role in a diseased society--but lord knows it's hard.
I have a friend who works in retail. He told me that his store opened at six on Friday, and they did not get as much business as they like, and this was because--or management determined that it was because--they didn't open early enough (I saw ads for places opening at midnight, or even the night before). So next year, they're gonna open in the middle of the night.
So to sum up: the Thanksgivings of retail workers will be ever-more ruined by their employers making them come in before the holiday's even over. The Thanksgivings of other people will be ever-more ruined as they are compelled to go along with this insidious bullshit. It's a pretty perfect example of the way late capitalism undermines anything that isn't strictly regimented according to the dictates of the market. Looked at in those terms, it's not just foolish and stressful to go shopping on Black Friday--it's actively immoral. Not that I blame people who do (well, I try not to anyway); they're just part of an immoral system. But if you're even a tiny bit self-aware about this stuff, you have no justification.
(And yeah, I could've used a quote from Flogging Molly's "Black Friday Rule" in that title there, but it just seemed too obvious. Same reason that the movie Drive does not feature the Cars song "Drive.")
I probably don't have to say that I absolutely fucking loath the very idea of this day. I try my best not to feel disgust for the mobs of humanity rioting for the opportunity to snag a two-dollar waffle iron--tell myself that they're only playing their proscribed role in a diseased society--but lord knows it's hard.
I have a friend who works in retail. He told me that his store opened at six on Friday, and they did not get as much business as they like, and this was because--or management determined that it was because--they didn't open early enough (I saw ads for places opening at midnight, or even the night before). So next year, they're gonna open in the middle of the night.
So to sum up: the Thanksgivings of retail workers will be ever-more ruined by their employers making them come in before the holiday's even over. The Thanksgivings of other people will be ever-more ruined as they are compelled to go along with this insidious bullshit. It's a pretty perfect example of the way late capitalism undermines anything that isn't strictly regimented according to the dictates of the market. Looked at in those terms, it's not just foolish and stressful to go shopping on Black Friday--it's actively immoral. Not that I blame people who do (well, I try not to anyway); they're just part of an immoral system. But if you're even a tiny bit self-aware about this stuff, you have no justification.
(And yeah, I could've used a quote from Flogging Molly's "Black Friday Rule" in that title there, but it just seemed too obvious. Same reason that the movie Drive does not feature the Cars song "Drive.")
posted by GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. at 9:41 PM
