all roads lead to amazon, unfortunately

How to get to new york, part ten

Thursday’s a great day. One of the best. Happy thursday! Here’s to it being a good one

WHOLE FOODS (or, in pursuit of some eggs, and possibly some strawberries)

One friday morning in late october i woke having dreamt of mossy seaside docks and impending doom.

I stumbled out to the street under the bleach white sky where the sleepy october sun had already reasserted itself over the redyellow fall foliage and, leaves on the sidewalk now, i began to wobble over to whole foods for a carton of eggs and maybe strawberries.

I had hashbrowns, breakfast sausages, sriracha,—all i needed really was the eggs. The binding agent. The glue. At least one. Maybe two. And maybe strawberries.

The sliding doors of the whole foods and the drone of the cameras and the bustle of carts and a number of wine moms in long swaying dresses, strollers,—oh so many strollers,—and industrious looking men chatting into headphones with short-cut hair and a business casual hand in one pocket, and there (finally!) in the back: under the sign of an excited child holding an hardboiled egg: the eggs neatly arranged in stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks. And some of them were broken as i looked through the first carton.

A sweaty looking large man with short hair greying at the edges of his head where the hair fades into skin approached me parusing the eggs from the deli window. He wore a whole foods polo different from those other shirts they had the checkout staff wear; something official about him for sure, he sort of walked with a limp but not enough to call it a limp. He approached, asked how my day was. Casual candor. Tense though.

I mumbled something something about eggs, needing eggs, ugh, and my stomach burbled loud and the large man in the polo’s eyes darkened, appearing to have his suspicions suddenly and irrevocably confirmed. He pointed at the eggs and said to me how, unfortunately, the eggs were for paying customers. I looked at him, baffled; i said, yeah, sure. He said, “no, i’m serious.”

Firing blanks, “like, i have a bank account. I have a card,” i said.

He scratched his shirt and said, after sizing me up and down, “are you employed?”

“Um well not at the moment,” i said. “I can show you my bank account. Here on second.”

“No, no, no, i don’t want to see your phone. See, Whole Foods wants you to be a productive member of society… Whole Foods wants to see you be a productive member of society… Hmm… And unfortunately our clientele here inside Whole Foods would prefer to be surrounded by people who are employed and well to do. They don’t like you slinking around like you are. We’ve surveyed, we’ve polled, and Whole Foods patrons don’t like slinking, overwhelmingly... There’s the facts… you have to understand that these are all very well to do people here and these eggs here are for paying customers… paying customers who are similarly well to do.”

“Understandable!” i said, attempting to placate, eyes wandering.

“Wonderful!” Whole Foods said, clasping his massive hands together. “There’s a seven-eleven around the corner if you’re in dire straights for your eggs… breakfast, right?… i promise the seven-eleven wouldn’t care a bit about your er lack of employment… and you could buy some cigarettes while you’re there… I can like, smell them on you unfortunately… Otherwise i would ask to see proof of employment for these eggs and er… What else?”

“Strawberries,” i half-said. Seven-eleven has neither, i thought grimly.

He reitered how i needed proof of employment for these eggs and he said this all very understandably so i felt that i couldn’t complain. He walked away in a brisk walk to the registers where he stood like Whole Foods himself would stand, and i kept watch over the self-checkout kiosks.

I found all of this flat-out ridiculous, to be completely honest. I moped around the store a bit longer, my stomach burbling loudly.

A tiny woman in massive square shades pushing a stroller had seen what happened near the eggs. She approached me, her wheels spinning, and said, “Here’s a tip, I was in the same boat as you. All you need is a stroller. If you have a stroller they go easier on you. Trust.”

“Oh huh,” i said, looking closer into the stroller. In the stroller i saw only a plastic baby doll all swaddled up in a pink and blue blanket. Not a real baby at all. Seeing this as sudden, gold-flashing opportunity to score some real points with the man in the Whole Foods polo, i said, loudly, “this baby is a fake!” I began gesticulating widely with my arms into the stroller. The woman’s eyes widened quickly and she sped away, disappeared behind wheels squeeling Wheee blazing flames almost, into the depths of the freezer section.

“You’re making a commotion now? Is that it?” The large man in the whole foods polo said, approaching, grey eyebrows furrowed together into one. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store.” He had a hand on his walkie.

I tried to give a speech i had just thought up, revised, rehearsed in my head about people faking families and how this whole system was rotten to the core, man, but my speech came out as a jumble of syllables and Whole Foods himself asked me yet again to leave the store so i left the store, walked home, still hungry, still needing an egg. And maybe some strawberries.

A half hour later i returned to the whole foods, clean shaven, wearing different clothes, a baseball cap. On the balls of my feet, sneaking-like but upstraight and with the best posture i could muster.

Just needed to get to the eggs to the strawberries to the self-check out. Self-checkout would never ask me for proof of employment. That i knew. Self-checkout didn’t care. Self-checkout still loved me.

But out of the corner of my eye, there he was again, Whole Foods himself, now stocking the fridges, looking my way occasionally but not taking too much of a notice of me parusing the eggs once again. But when i looked over a second time we made sudden eye contact,— his eyes bulged out of his head,—and he began to yell something i didn’t quite get, but i wasn’t about to stand around and consider his argument here,—so i grabbed the carton of eggs, grabbed the strawberries, and sprinted for the door.

The large man in the whole foods polo began yelling “ROBBERY” into his walkie but all i heard was “STRAWBERRY” and so i released the carton of strawberries and it hit the floor with a wet smack, strawberries exploding everywhere,—all i really needed was the eggs. Pushing pushing actual children in strollers and people pushing porcelain dolls squealed out of the way. Carts remained motionless around me. All the cameras in the whole foods turned Rtttt, following me from every conceivable angle as i ran down the escalator two steps at a time, the carton of eggs underneath one arm held like a football, and just before hitting the door a large man in a SECURITY uniform wrapped his arms around me in a loving, tight embrace,—a headlock if you will,—and he pulled me having gone limp in his arms downstairs, followed closely behind by the large man in the whole foods polo huffing and puffing to himself, sweat dripping, having suddenly snatched the carton of eggs out of my hands.

In the basement of the whole foods there stood a kid with a mustache and a camo truckers hat and he sat on twelve wood pallettes stacked, “kick his ass, marco,” he said as marco threw me into a chair. Flourscent lights buzzed overhead. Headache. Brr. Bleh. Massive freezers, virtually bank vaults.

The large man in the whole foods polo shook his head and handed me an ipad he had dug out of a desk drawer.

“What?” i asked. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“We won’t get the police involved.” he said, reassuringly. “But we’re going to find you a job. We’re gonna make you into a man, son.”

“aww shit,” i protested. And over the next two hours, my stomach hammering so hard i felt the up and down movement of it move up into my head. I sat there and applied to a couple jobs as the man, Whole Foods himself, auctioned me off to nearby grocery chains over the phone, “what a great resume he has, he went to a big ten school, potential managment material… eventually at least…”, eventually finding a bid for me from the Target superstore in the loop where i spent the next two and a half months working in the grocery.

TARGET (or, becoming a machine, call me iron man like the black sabbath song)

Songs would play on the loudspeakers while i piled small icey boxes into endlessly dark freezers filled with old peas; songs that had less to say than nothing at all would played overhead, looping over and over. And that’s the mandate, isn’t it? A flat and lifeless, eversmiling soundtrack dictated in accordance to the shareholder’s striving towards good, cheery vibes. Hey my name’s Target, it says. Look at my Pantone colors.

A lot droll hum overcame the sheer boredom of working in a Target in God’s year 2023: enshiitttttttttttification.

When i could, when i was checking the stock in the backrooms or in the freezer, i would listen to free episodes of trueanon—i think i worked through all of their free episodes in my time at target, in fact¹.

My expectation gradually turned more and more towards a pure, bored cynicism. Everyone working at Target was wonderful, everyone except those they chose as managers who would banter like all the rest but would occasionally hammer home to us, in a sorta football huddle, the continually shrinking bottom line and how we all needed to pick up the motherfucking pace. Of course they were themselves forced to overwork their underlings. Classic cycle of abuse, but with a smile and a vague put-on of “teamwork.”

I remember my first week there, the man who they had working the freezers, who would be in subzero temperature for close to a whole hour at a time to keep up the numbers, had a heart attack in the freezer. He had collapsed and picked himself up off the icey metal floors to somehow pull himself one foot at a time out of the freezer. All of this while his heart was exploding.

He survived and returned to work a month later. On his first day back we all met as the market team, in the concrete storeroom, and the managers awarded him employee of the month for his bravery.

Resignation. That was the feeling.

The man who had been checking the produce at this Target in the Loop for years and years by this point, whom i had once talked to about his degree in filmmaking, that which he gave up on, eventually, being too shy to break into the industry, whose conversation would always steer eventually towards the anime he watches,—otherwise he would become anxious and not know how to talk,—and who always smelled vaguely of saliva, stood out to me as emblematic of our lives having become so consumed by media. Don’t you too feel placed so firmly as a consumer? No no you cannot create, but you can consume.

All of this feels very cynical, but then again the best media america’s created over the past ten years has reeked of it. And for the most part that’s great! The best of it perfectly critiques the rich and powerful. Succession and Veep are both wonderful and fairly accurate critique, Bojack Horseman still holds up to me as perhaps the most underrated masterpiece of the 2010s,—most people over the age of 35 seem to mistrust animation.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say the cynicism rubs off on a person, though. All that surrounds us has the expectation of resignation. Everything we consume feels like a defeat. I find that when i notice this and sit with the feeling, my head clears like nothing else.

Here’s a journal entry from January, as i had accepted a serving job at a restaurant in lakeview which i might write a post about someday. I was finally escaping Target once and for all:

Today was my final day at Target. I haven’t seen Estelle (the woman who hired me, a 5’ 4” woman with a military haircut) since before I put my two weeks in when she went on vacation. She has been back since then, only our shifts just haven’t aligned,—I suppose too that she might be avoiding me.

I saw Dave (the head of the Market department) walking around and he gave me a stern look but said nothing at all. Chris (the bald older man who calls himself mr. Target and looks the part) seemed flustered today, and I think the managers in Market are flustered. All of their closing staff are quitting one after another, first me and then Isabelle, and soon enough Eddie and Francisco. I went down today for backup at the registers and Abby asked me if I would stay down there all night. I said no. She asked why. I had a lot of pulls to do upstairs. She said that that was fine. I said, ok well, in any case, I don’t want to stay down here. And she backed off. I went upstairs to listen to more podcast.

Abby is one of the two closing managers, the more ruthless one, she’s twenty years old and the only reason she has such a high position here at Target is because she snitched on someone making a union effort last year, gave the administration enough time to fire all three of the conspirators. She has dead eyes and one time a woman collapsed against the granola bars due to malnutrition,—Abby and about six security staff (including one security officer posing as a police officer who started talking shit to someone random who said “why’re you all standing around her, help her, you think she’s gonna be violent? why the hell do you have your hand on your gun like that?” and the security personel eventually chased them down the escalator, down to the first floor, down to the revolving doors saying loudly into his walkie “get his face, don’t let this guy into any target ever again” over and over again). All these people surrounded her, barely saying a word as she apologized and tried to make conversation with them. I remember very clearly the dead eyed, head-cocked-to-one-side look that Abby gave to the woman, saying nothing, like a velociraptor eyeing its prey, like a cat watching a mouse it had broken as the life came out of it.

Life could be an ocean of experience. It won’t be for many. Why is this? What binds our domecility to these corporations in such a way that our corporate jobs have become as much a shrine to “the economy” as traditional western marriage norms had once been such a repressive shrine to the patriarchy? At places like Target there’s a cultural feeling of things you can not talk about: namely, unionizing.

It’s remarkable how many changes a person goes through in a lifetime,—not here, though. It’s a mandate that personal growth in any way outside the ream of Target is to be shunned. I look around and the people who’ve been here for decades have remained more-or-less the same as when they had been onboarded. The Target brand has consumed them completely, has eaten their soul like the final monster from Evil Dead 2, that’s what happened, and now the brands have to mechanize us all to appease, shareholders,—whose demands will always increase,—to allow them to ride the stock up and up and up only to finally jump ship at its peak to another slot machine in the casino of the American economy; and for many, this fucked up machine’s already infected their livelihood to endlessly diminish their humanity in the workplace. And since they’ve made the workplace our homes away from homes with most of the third spaces in this country having rotted away with the pandemic, there’s really no escaping.

Our era is the first cyborg one. This is a cold fact but not the worst thing. The question facing us all is: how do we dictate our human part and how do we dictate our machine part?

Every corporate-, every nonprofit-, every public education-, every accounting-, every food service-, every retail-job under the american sun is begging and prodding us towards the machine side of our current era, capital itself has dug its hooks into us at the mouth and is actively dragging us, our limp numbed masses, into becoming machines, whether we like it or not, we’re goaded towards losing our humanity, losing our human feel.

That’s all to say that every road available to someone in their twenties today, it seems to me, to lead to eventually wage-slaving in an Amazon warehouse. Hold your bladder, i guess. Keep your hand out of the cardboard baler, i guess.

What do we have faith in? That conditions will get worse? That wages will remain the same for us or,—even more foolish a thought,—that they will go up? That the work structures in our lives are just how things are? That the global environment will deteriorate to a slow death, and nothing will be done about it? That universal healthcare will forever be out of our hands, unattainable? That we will only ever have two political parties in this country? Not one of them ever truly representing any interest outside the corporate mandate towards an ever unchanging laboratory for neoliberalism?

The idea in their heads is to force drudgery onto most people and by that way crush out any leisure time to develop consciousness. The aim is to make us anxious and overworked.

Who owns your sense of time?

Another journal entry, this one from december:

Work was alright as ever. It was a very easy day, thankfully, and I spent a lot of it talking to Eddie about all sorts of things while I did my pulls and pushes onto the floor. Him and Lucy, the other of the two closing managers besides Abby, had had a spat the other day, apparently, and she’s been rather stern at the Market staff since then: the liquor buzzer had gone off and he had been the only person on the floor to take the call, except he was backstocking in the freezer and there’s really no way to hear it over the sound of the overhead fans and the coolant shaking in the walls so he had missed the sound of the beeper on the handheld that Target rents out by the day to all its employees, and when emerged out to Lucy yelling at him about answering the liquor cabinet call Eddie responded by saying he didn’t appreciate being talked to in such a way way. Lucy flushed, went overtly deer-in-the-headlights and said nothing more.

The droning blue white lights overhead, the beeping of the freezer, the freezer temperatures for over a half hour, eyebrows frozen,—but you can’t slow down, no you aren’t allowed to slow down, the last thing you want today is to be scolded,—trying to listen to music in headphones in the breakroom with everyone else while the sound of the forever-on tv blasts at maximum volume. Whenever the employees spoke to one another someone from management would slide a tad closer eating yogurt in their seats.

You don’t say anything, though, because when you become jobless, you feel homeless. And why is that? You still have a home,—have they changed our locks? Is our home our workplace now? Is our workplace our home? The one person i know working at that target while i worked there who was considering an attempt at unionization, ~vanished~. She disappeared promptly after she had been making the rounds in quiet, asking about whether we would sign paperwork. Yes, yes of course! We said, excited And then she disappeared from the store. Nobody knew what had happened to her. If the management knew they didn’t let on about it.

One time the Target executive staff walked through the store, showed around the backrooms by my manager who called himself Mr. Target, and they all pointed and looked around the store in awe as if they had never been in the backrooms of a Target before despite their having worked for Target now for years, decades for some of them. The executive staff, in flannels and dresses, steered clear of the staff who all hunched and leered away quietly from the executive staff.

I thought to beg them, take me with youu, get me out of this hellhole, please. I said nothing of course.

AMAZONIFICATION (or, what will they do to us? DING DING what they did and are currently doing to the people of the congo they will do and are doing elsewhere)

Let’s be honest: i don’t care what your job is, whether you like it or not,—whether it will still satisfy you in twenty years like it does now is very much in doubt, it seems. A slow cascade is occurring, the entire job market has been in a steady slide towards the lifelessness you find in the amazon warehouse floor. We’re all going to amazon. We’re all already inside a warehouse.

With time every company will treat their customers like amazon does theirs, front-loading benefits, shipping, video, music, and at the same time every company will treat their employees like amazon does theirs, throw them into the meat grinder as gristle.

If this is a neofeudalism we’re trapped within, underneath a clutter of brand names, media franchises, and corporate conglomerates, then we’ve lost even more than we think, even more so than had we just simply gone back to the horrors of feudalism. Corporations are soulless as regents, it would seem. They’re so completely shackled to shareholders that the bottom margin has to go down, the fiscal profits have to increase; it’s something like a mandate, the only way to be allowed by market forces to succeed is to increasingly abuse into mechanical efficiency; these corporations are the reason as to why, as we’ve seen, hundreds of thousands have been laid off because these corporate goblins and ghouls have glimpsed the merest glimmer of a hope that generative AI could do the jobs of their underlings without all the pesky wages, benefits, or unionization efforts.

See, the thing is, we have the technology that might allow us to relax and enjoy lives more. There’s a cynical lie that human nature is terrible and we need to be trapped away in these oppressive structures, and this feeds into the fact of your life has become ever more stressful with time.

I think that it would be a damn shame to not at least consider a world beyond this one,—and i’m not talking about heaven, i’m talking about the future,—where we have overcame these shackles that so bind us and numb us into passivity. Do you still believe in the future? Have you ever?

But amazon is not most extreme example of where this road leads, i’m afraid. Those of us writing thinkpieces and sitting around in the United States tend to look at the third world from a place of distance, as if the problems they face there are a million miles away, a spectacle on the horizon, as if their problems are theirs and not ours,—but i’m very afraid that what’s been happening to the people in the congo these past couple decades, even moreso today, is much more pressing to us than many would like to think. The congonese people are experiencing the purest, most distilled form of this cybernetic capitalism that we also experience, that which has been slowly seeping into our everyday lives, to increase stress and to make us all feel very much homeless outside the shield of corporate ownership of our time. As we all drift towards amazon like small cosmic bodies orbiting that black hole at the center of the milky way: namely, what’s happening in the congo, what they’re doing to the people there.

Their struggle is also our struggle, don’t you forget it.

THE FUTURE (is it liberated? could it be?)

The attempt at making a digital pseudoreality for us all to live inside of, namely meta’s attempt at creating a metaverse, fell through dramatically. We can see that now. This was an attempt at a coverup. They’ve discovered that they can well make our living lives into something not so different, they can shove us into jobs that demand us to function as machines aimed towards peak efficiency, until they can do away with us entirely (this being the real goal of capital, to detatch itself from humanity completely while still ruling our every action). The metaverse was an attempt at normalizing this feeling completely. I believe that. It was intended as a passivity engine.

Imagine a future in which the metric by which we rate our economy isn’t just merely how many jobs we have in circulation, but rather how fulfilling said jobs are.

What else did we make automation for if not to live our lives with less stress? Was all this technological, industrial technology made soley to fill the pockets of increasingly few? That would be overly dour, i think.

There’s a feeling at the end of this piece, a guilty feeling, that things aren’t as bad as described. Maybe i’m overreacting. Who’s to say. You can say, sure sound off in the comments. The struggles of labor a hundred years ago were tremendously more stark, the fordism of the 20s was naked in its crimes against its labor force,—workers were dying at the hands of police in remarkable numbers! How is target nearly as bad? How is even amazon nearly as bad?

Amazon is that florescent ethereal ghost towards which every one of our jobs drifts. Why do we not believe this is as bad as it is? Certainly the struggles of the past are those of the past,—many many brave souls gave their lives to fighting the good fight and making the world better,—but why downplay our own struggles today? Because these are our struggles now, and if we resign ourselves to “not-so-bad/could-be-worse”, then we’ve resigned ourselves to giving up the struggle, we’ve resigned ourselves to a world getting worse. I’ve never felt worse than when i’ve resigned myself to such a thought. Free yourself from it. Question everything.

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacatable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.”

Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Alternative titles for this piece:

• a comforting & reassuring dream of absolute terror

• we’re all going to target

• we’re all already inside the world’s fair

• within this consented to prison we bow down to efficiency and brand names;

• i had a dream last night wherein multiple people met underneath a two-mile by two-mile boulder which had forever been elevated off of the ground enough that people could crawl underneath comfortably, only when i met these people at the boulder’s center, on all fours, all of us realized then and there, in dramatic fashion, that the boulder was gradually, ever so slowly, sinking to the earth,—no escape

• target sucks

• bleh, target!

• but amazon sucks even more

• but what’s happening to the congonese

• it’s even worse

• jeff bezos is and forever will be an ~on sight~ for me personally, and i will. always have things in my pocket to throw.

See you all next week!

xoxo,

brififififififififififififififififififififififififin

1. I also came up with the nugget of an idea for my grocer project while working at Target, and i would make up gertrude stein esque phrases for these little pieces of produce, like a tomato or a bag of beer nuts. This was around the time that midjourney appeared to me and i explored it a small bit for my first “portrait”, that of a beefsteak tomato. Here’s a one of the images:

“a tomato is a man with head on shoulders” was a line i felt fairly proud of while i was one time checking tomatoes for spots at 10am on a tuesday.