as a retirement job ( and as a hedge against the greedy bastards in whoretown whom no one with any rational sense would trust not to take everything they can ) i am working for a "retail giant" that refers to itself as the "omnichannel retailer" in a decaying and slowly dying suburban mall...which just died a little deader on the last day of march when...
the local forever 21 closed its doors for the last time...
it looks rather empty in there as a bastion of "fast fashion" seems to have found the limit to the genre...should i be saddened by the death of a retailer...hardly...there are others...i work at one...and then there is the wealth of on-line shopping to take into consideration...and that is the crux of the issue...i have to consume to survive...and even if i refuse to make purchases from one particular vendor or another...either out of preference or some political or social issue ( dei for instance ) i am still making them somewhere else and so still supporting a corporate entity and as a function of that, capitalism which seems to be a source of many issues...embedded in the system and aggrandizing it though need and, on occasion, desire...framed as much by its needs ( we're here to help you help us ) as much as by any of my own even by working supporting it...work is as much about consumption as it is earning ( what am i "earning" for ? )...work demands food, fuel, transport, clothing, time and effort to sustain...how much of my consumption is geared towards "work"? do i work to sustain myself or do i sustain myself to work? and while we are talking costs let's look at some stemming from "fast fashion"...trendy cheap-assed clothes that are discared readily...where does all that end up?
well...ghana imports a lot of used cothing from the west...and, from what i have been reading, about 40% of it ends up in landfills and along the shoreline as unsaleable...so the environmental costs ( who knows what went on during the production of said clothing? i do not allthough i do hear of workers in california earning well below minimum wage affixing labels to garments...one presumes [however cannot prove ] sweat-shops all alnong the processes ) extend to various parts of the world, developed and un...who could rationally call any of this elements of a sustainable system?
