this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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The vast majority of people couldn't do anything about it. Those who could do something about it profited from it, and therefore did nothing.
Nobody had to shop at the place offering "the cheapest shit" while all the smaller businesses were forced out of the market. People literally had a choice to spend one extra dollar, or end up here.
If you fall for the rhetoric that money is everything then yeah alright... Nobody could do anything about it I guess.
Did they though? When wages have stagnated for decades? It's really easy as a middle or upper class person to say "what's a dollar here and there?", but as a poor person it's the difference between running out of money before payday or not. The long term cost of shopping at Walmart is greater than the short term savings, but poor people generally do not have the luxury of thinking about the long term.
Poor all my life prior till about three years ago. Like highschool dropout street addict poor. And still made it out to protests and food-not-bombs cookouts and other actions across the country. By the mid nineties when I was a late teen I could see what the Walmart and Starbucks were doing to my culture and I tried to do something about it.
Yeah. If spending my last dollar on ramen from the local corner store instead of 50 cents at the big box has ever been an option, I've taken it. Happily. I understand the economics of raising a family in suburbia is different than what I've experienced as a person but I also understand that if everyone swallows the capitalism pill without coughing on it we're all fuckin doomed. And you don't need to be a punk or a radical to have access to that information in this era. At all.