somewhat diminished exposure

being aged and working part time at "a retail giant" ( which is not sounding quite so "giant" per the last earnings report...however that is just an economists "tool" and so may be disregarded as an "external"...irrelevant to what this is about ) just to keep moving provides a few things besides pin money...observation for instance...coming from indistrial manufacturing i was suffering from a severe case of culture shock in the beginning...this has abated and been replaced, for the most part, by stunned disbelief at how tremendously inefficient and wasteful retail is...no fucking wonder they are in trouble...additionally it has been an education in the ways of manipulation they use to render the discretionary into the necessary...they will jump on any bandwagon if it could possibly mean even a few hundredths of a precentage point in market share gain...so they celebrate a lot of "months" and this month is LGBQT+ month if i am not mistaken ( and let me disclaim here that this is in no way an indictment or criticism of anyone's orientation...we are what we are...we may not understand...we need to live and let live...and that extends well beyond orientation ) and retailers are avidly persuing that market share...however...

when we compare the signage from last june...

with what i found today ( and the month is not over quite yet...this could change...i am wagering it will not ) we can clearly see the message, while still clear, is considerably muted...

one could be forgiven for surmising that the bud light blowback has tempered the vision of the admen and made executives nervoulsy leery of too explicit a disply of market niche pursuit...we will look around..we are not sanguine about finding anything quite as eyecatching as last year's graphics

living in end times

"All master-workmen in manufactures, especially such as belonged to ornament and the less necessary parts of the people's dress, clothes, and furniture for houses, such as riband-weavers and other weavers, gold and silver lace makers, and gold and silver wire drawers, sempstresses, milliners, shoemakers, hatmakers, and glovemakers; also upholsterers, joiners, cabinet-makers, looking-glass makers, and innumerable trades which depend upon such as these;—I say, the master-workmen in such stopped their work, dismissed their journeymen and workmen, and all their dependents." daniel defoe. a journal of the plague year.

do i believe this is the "end time"? no ( betting some do though ) however apple, nordstrom's kohl's, j c penney, neiman marcus, bergdorf goodman, sak's fifth avenue, macy's might...they are all retailers that have closed over covid-19...ostensibly for the safety of their customers and work forces...however i have to ask just how much shopping traffic they were experiencing prior to their closures and if a reverse cash flow ( read labor costs ) and "lackluster sales" had them hemorrhaging profits at an unacceptable level...one assumes their stock values had already taken a hit and revenue loss was the icing on the cake of closure...

the shoppers have fled elsewhere in what can only be termed as overreaction through media hysteria...the one thing that stands out is that the idea of "necessary" would seem to have shifted from cosmetics and new shoes to paper and cleaning products...perspective has changed and on surmises the retailers are 1) not happy about it and, 2) fervently hope it is a temporary shift in frame of reference...they certainly don't want their core consumerist worshipers to even begin to realize that shopping and material goods are not all they have been led to believe ( and shoppers do have doubts..."buyers remorse" sound familiar to anyone? )...if the shift becomes permanenet...

this kind of thing may continue and that would have a serious impact on the hegemons' wealth and that would make them very unhappy...a paradigm shift due to a virus would be something i would think, at least, possible...changing the hegemonic culture form inside is nearly impossible...the institutions are not monolithic but they are deeply ingrained and structured to resist change ( this, by the way , is why there is an electoral college...the framers were nothing if not of the elite..and no one inimical to their interests was going to hold the office of president )...they probably would not collapse of their own weight without an external shove to show how shaky they had become in the face of their denial of a multitude of realities ( climate change say ) and the diminishing returns of BAU ( have a shufti at joseph tainter's "the collapse of complex societies" for a primer on diminishing returns )...this could be the sort of shove that makes people reassess what they view as "necessary" and begin to question why they consume what they do...and find that it is mostly habit not need that drives it...along with the operant conditioning provided by the media..we could do without a lot of the stuff we have...but "the system" couldn't do without us wanting/buying/having it...i have no desire to see people expire of this virus...however they are...and no one..not even "the system" has any sort of clear idea where this is going...the president is no help...congress is considering throwing money at people to keep them consuming...i am laid off for two weeks ( see plague blog for my assessment of that ) so there is time to ponder what could happen..trying to ferret out reality from the news is a challenge that may take some thought.