Teaser for visibility:

Twenty years ago we used to mock the Communists for their dreary
"State Electrical Goods Store #12". Now we go to dreary category
killer stores like Home Depot, which make the old Russian
stuff look mom-and-pop size.

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It's so depressing to have seen what was going on and not having been able to do the slightest thing to stop it. Do the part-timers who work for corporate America have any class-based awareness these days? Do they understand who is screwing them, or do they blame "liberals"? (I know from personal experience that small businessmen still hate the government and blame all their problems on liberals.)

Anyone else feel like they have been talking to a brick wall for decades?

These days, the brick wall talks back. It says. Your topic does not acknowledge any Identity Politics concerns as to the big box work force; therefore it is racist. Your essay does not blame the Russians for having imposed the big box model on us; therefore, it is fake news and you are a communist sympathiser.

That's the progress that we've made in 20 years. Oh, and Radio Shack went bankrupt. No one deserved it more.

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State Stores (1997)

Twenty years ago we used to mock the Communists for their dreary
"State Electrical Goods Store #12". Now we go to dreary category
killer stores like Home Depot, which make the old Russian
stuff look mom-and-pop size. WalMart recently surpassed General
Motors as the biggest employer in the country. So in this great
individualist country, more and more people pick up a $9/hour,
part-time (because they make it hard to be full-time) paycheck
from these mega-merchandisers.

I feel sorry for the sales guys at these places, who say "I'm a
contractor, but business is bad. So I make a few bucks here and
try to pick up some jobs from customers." They don't get it: the
jobs are going to Home Depot's and Sears' and all the other mega-
stores' in-house operations. That's the point of everything-under-
one-roof. The home imporvement industry is being rationalized by
super stores the same way the medical industry is being rationalized
by HMOs. Small contractors have about the same chance to remain
independent as doctors. America - where the little guy is "dinner".

And the real irony is printed on the receipt every time you
go to one of these super stores of capitalism:

Home Depot #1203

Sound familiar? Sound like State Electrical Goods Store #12?

Actually, Radio Shack is now the State Electrical Goods Store.
"Comrade consumer, we must have your name, address, zip code,
telephone number, birth certificate, and income history before we
will accept your $2 of cash for that battery. It is all for the
greater efficiency of the capitalist system." Does Radio Shack
hire ex-KGB guards to man its stores? I cringe every time I have
to go there; and I _have to_ go because they are the only nearby
store with a large variety of exotic batteries.

Am I the only one who noticed that service in these places is
as bad as they used to complain about under the Communists?
In one Builder's Square, a salesman who was obviously drunk
told me not to waste his time asking a lot of dumb questions
if I didn't want to buy something. Then, on the way out, I got
into the "we must have your zip code" routine with an arrogant
teenage checkout punk. It was the last time I went there, but
my choices are limited. There is only one other hardware megastore
within 15 miles of my house.

The old joke they used to tell in the Soviet Union is now
true in America: "They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work."

I love how we _all_ benefit from this system :-). I benefit by
having my time wasted and my personal life entered in marketing
computers so that I can be bombarded with catalogs I won't read,
subsidized by bulk postage rates I didn't get to vote about. I
also benefit from the increased costs of all this marketing and
advertising by paying higher prices. And, I benefit by having
to drive to big malls, walk in from huge parking lots, wander
around in giant stores, and stand around in long lines, all to
find some $25 item that used to be available at a nearby mom-and-
pop for the outrageous mark-up of $30.

The whole system is as crooked as Milo Minderbinder's syndicate
in Catch-22, and that was over-the-top satire thirty years ago.

Apologists will point to competition among category killers, but
that is largely a momentary phenomenon or a stage-managed cartel.

In critical fields, like the military, intelligence, or rocketry,
the Russians made sure there were two or three "competing"
Design Bureaus, like MIG, Sukhoi (?), and Tupolev to keep things
from getting too corrupt. But survival in this system was
completely dependent on the political power of the bureaus.

We see the same thing today as the two biggest Office Supply
stores (Staples and Office Max) tried to "merge". They didn't
have enough political power. (Its such an insider thing, that
an ordinary "citizen consumer" like me would never get the
true story about why this particular deal was rejected, but
the Bell-Atlantic/NYNEX and McDonnell-Douglass/Boeing mergers
went through.) I guess that selling copier paper is not strategic
enough to need "international scale". I'm sure when the office
supply companies go global, they can get a national security
waiver for their merger.

I mean the whole point is to dismantle our regionally self-
sufficient economies so that no country can pull out of the
world capitalist community, isn't it? That's exactly the way
the Soviets held their empire together. They put all the
electronics factories in the Baltics, all the oil production
facilities in the Caspian, etc. Then, when things got bad and
provinces wanted to secede, the central planners said: "if you
secede, you will die because we have deliberately unbalanced
your economies. Only the central plan can coordinate your
economies."

Today we are told "only the global free market can coordinate
our economies". Today on the radio, I heard a city manager say:
"Baltimore is not just competing with Charleston, SC or
Jacksonville, FL; its competing with Osaka, Japan or Hamburg,
Germany." Excuse me, now something as basic as whether a city
of millions gets adequate money for infra-structure is no longer
in the hands of local citizens or the national govenment; it is
in the hands of "the global free market"? If that is true, then
all governments, national, state, and local are the dried bones
of a dead democracy. And they will be scattered by whatever
corporate carnivore comes stomping through their midst.

What, me cynical? Just because I read the editorial page of the
WSJ, the NYT, etc. the same way a Soviet citizen read Pravda?