Whole shelves of merchandise will have accumulated a thick layer of dust...
I used to work in the warehouse for Big Lots, which is the same kind of thing except without groceries. So much dust on everything.
I mean, I think it's the same kind of thing. I've never been inside a Dollar General or a Big Lots.
The tough thing about saying "This is cheap crap, it breaks", is that a lot of stuff that isn't particularly cheap is also crap that breaks. I want to see a list of products where minimum-price ones, and 2x minimum-price ones, and 3x minimum-price ones, are all interchangeable because it's all a baffling campaign of price discrimination... and you have to get up to 5x or 10x minimum-price before there's really a difference.
*cough*earbuds*cough*
Ned wants to sell us Dr. Dre's headsets.
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It's a little disturbing to go to a dentist and hear the hygienist say "oh, interesting!" when your X-ray comes up on the screen.
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I seem to remember liking Big Lots when I was a kid. I think I found, like, old Star Wars toys there that were no longer being produced, or something like that that I would have been super-excited about when I was six or seven.
It's our impoverished future, heebs. Be respectful.
Late Capitalism: Taste the difference.
I believe the children are our impoverished future
Teach them well and lead them to a Dollar General
Show them all the plastic crap they will find insiiiiiiide....
I got great tweezers at a dollar store. For comparison, I bought another at CVS for $5 that sucked. CVS also shockingly had one for $24 (!) and it was not motorized or gold plated or anything.
But anyway, companies have been very straightforward about how they're changing their product lines to accommodate the new massively unequal economy. Instead of the "mass market" they have to both focus on how rich people can now buy more stuff than they used to, and create new cheaper products for the rest of us. Or just sell the stuff here that they've been selling all along in El Salvador.
10: Dude. The $20 tweezers are worth it. My heart belongs to Tweezerman. (Also, they (used to?) advertize in the Nation, with the copy being more or less "Hey! We're pinkos like you!")
From each according to his ability. To each according to his need to dig small bits of stuff out of his flesh.
(Also, they (used to?) advertize in the Nation, with the copy being more or less "Hey! We're pinkos like you!")
Knowing that The Nation readers would be unlikely to see their ads in The Weekly Standard.
"Socialism or barbarism!", they said. And after much careful thought we replied, "Barbarism, please."
I wrote
A small overpriced grocery section is usually near the front, which often carries the quick-sell and mildly damaged produce, bread, and cans from the local grocery store.
in the OP, but it isn't actually overpriced, I don't think. It's cheap.
"We're excited about impoverishing the future! Let's build!"
Well, we were excited.
You make it sound like the Action Park of retail.
I can almost remember the tune to the commercial from childhood.
There is a dollar store in CA-ville where everything is in fact a dollar. And somehow I forget that every time and end up feeling like Eva Gabor in my wonder.
The strip mall closest to my house has a dollar store, a food bank, and a liquor store. When I write that all out, it sounds more depressing than it really is.
This post reminds me that I wasn't sure what to make of this story.
De-Four, now a widow, came to America when she was 60. She turned 99 on July 20.
Before that birthday, her daughter Ruphina Allen, 74, had entered a contest at the Paramount store where her mother shops each Sunday after services at Our Lady of the Rosary.
"Celebrate Your 99th Birthday with a 99-Second Shopping Spree at 99 Cents Only Stores!"
For a person born of plenty, such an offer might not tempt.
To Emelia De-Four, it sounded grand.
Sweet human interest story, or weirdly othering and condescending? I'm inclined to say sweet (and I think the tone gets better as the article goes along) but it's close.
The only really bad part is that the liquor store keeps cheap port in the refrigerator.
I basically dislike all stores except the ones that sell beer or books. Or wine. Oh one other exception-- Ikea's fake rooms section is sort of relaxing in the same way that an airport is, if I'm not personally hurrying or seeking gate J-173.
Looking at the crap on the shelves often leaves me feeling like the goods offer threat rather than promise. Distressed pine shelving for hundreds of dollars? Huge glass containers from China packed with decorative rows of peppers and garlic? Lego star wars halloween mashup sets that cost more than an equal weight of steak? All of this stuff I would pay to avoid, and yet I see that others actually want it. It's this vivid sense of alienationation that makes shopping feel threatening.
Hardware stores are OK too.
I can almost remember the tune to the commercial from childhood.
"Dollar General, cuz you're so poor!
Dollar General, walk in the door!
Don't hide your face! Don't hock your cat!
At Dollar General get cheap crap stat!"
My neighborhood has so shockingly many 99 cent stores. I cannot tell a lie (right now): I found the one closest to my home fairly useful, but en masse they are terribly depressing.
20: Look at you living the high life in your fancy neighborhood, Mr. No Bail Bondsman or Check Cashing Pawn Shop.
26: It is a nice neighborhood. The retail is suffering because of new developments in surrounding neighborhoods.
Lego star wars halloween mashup sets that cost more than an equal weight of steak?
"Honey, you know I'm happy that you've found a toy that you'll play with month after month, but your haunted Jawa sandcrawler is starting to attract maggots."
9 made me laugh because least favorite song. That song is the three-99-cent-stores-on-one-block of music. You believe that children are our future? Well, given the direction that time moves and the fact of mortality and the absence of the singularity, yeah, it's hard to argue with you, there, Whitney Houston. How does having a sense of pride make it easier in a frequently demeaning world, a world in which really they can take away your dignity? What if the children aren't laughing? I HAVE QUESTIONS. I HATE THIS SONG.
29: what you're forgetting is that the Russians may well love their children, too.
You probably wonder exactly how many times the legend of the Phoenix talks about getting lucky.
Browsing tat stores had its fun when I was student and might plausibly buy some stuff from there, in the same way those awful airline magazine can be interesting. I still have a bowl and a chopping board from my student days that get regular use.
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of what? OF WHAT?!
Sweet dreams are made of this.
To 34.
I still have a bowl and a chopping board from my student days that get regular use.
You have to save some stories or nobody will pay for your autobiography.
I know! Sadly I haven't often been in tat stores, so that's all I got.
There's a show Friday with cover bands of Huey Lewis, Billy Joel, and the Police, who's in?
20: Our big strip mall has the following:
Liquor store
Taqueria
Chinese/Japanse buffet
Little Caesar's
Auto parts
Dollar store
Thrift store
Subway
Hair stylists
Laundromat
Hip Hop fashion store
Mall-within-a-mall of small Somali businesses
H&R Block
The only discordant notes are a real bank (Wells Fargo) and some bizarrely expensive condos that sit in the parking lot where the Burger King was before it burned down. I'm still annoyed that the hardware store is no longer there, but they weren't as customer service oriented as my regular hardware store, so maybe it's all for the best.
It would be even more bizarre if the expensive codes sat in the parking lot of a Burger King that hadn't burned down.
Expensive codes sit in coffee shops[*], Moby. Everyone knows that.
[*] Mostly in San Francisco.
(1.) The first time I went to a dollar store in upstate NY everything there cost a dollar. Some of it was underpriced, some was overpriced, and some was worth about a dollar. Now it's all crazy pricing.
(2.) Mehaz tweezers are better than Tweezerman, and Revlon actually has a higher quality one too.
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My current boss, whom I like a lot as a person, is driving me insane. I am seriously thinking about trying to get some sort of 32-hour per week stopgap job so that I can just get out of this crazy environment.
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Apparently, I can't spell "condo" reliably.
The idea that someone proposed and developed new land in order to install a new Dollar General is basically saying "We're excited about impoverishing the future! Let's build!"
You could pretty much track the progress of the recession in the UK by looking at the proportion of new retail lettings that were Poundland stores. At one point it was easily eight out of every ten.
children are our future
"Hey what's that sitting in my lap
Why it's the Next Generation."
(not her best song either)
George Soros earned lots of cheap plastic crap by betting against the Poundland.
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of what? OF WHAT?!
This is so exactly right.
Speaking of pounds, I'm disheartened to learn that the Animal Rescue League is basically the dog pound and not some secret organization of talking animals like in The Rescuers.
The fact that nobody is mentioning nail salons makes me wonder about your neighborhoods. Fast food hell sandwiching every dollar store. The autoparts shops have gone out of business. Not so many pawn shops.
Dentists and a couple dox in boxes, including dialysis clinics. And a fuckton of lawyers.
These are the ones with street ads. I know from experience that half a block in from the strip are the semi-pros. Podiatrists and chiropractors.
There's a nail salon right by my house, but it isn't in a strip mall.
The internet is telling me the concrete jungle is where dreams are made, oh.
There are also three tanning parlors in close range of my house. Two of them are newish.
Filling in some existing strip-mall space with a dollar store doesn't sound so terrible; it seems like the strip-mall equivalent of what land developers call "ground cover" - a cheap-to-install business that can run until there's some more profitable use for a parcel. Self-storage is the canonical example.
Actually building a new building for a dollar store, though, seems a bit off.
The river town by me has a Family Dollar and Dollar General within a few blocks of each other. They both went in to existing structures with amazing rapidity (it seemed like over a weekend, but was probably longer). I assume there are well-worked plans and maybe even specialized SWAT teams that do the makeover.
49: Bob wins at Authenticity Poker yet again!
But anyway, companies have been very straightforward about how they're changing their product lines to accommodate the new massively unequal economy. Instead of the "mass market" they have to both focus on how rich people can now buy more stuff than they used to, and create new cheaper products for the rest of us.
Along these lines, nothing makes me more terrified of the future than the occasional stories promoting insects as a new culinary fad, high in protein.
What, no Dollar Dialysis Clinics?
occasional stories promoting insects as a new culinary fad, high in protein.
When I was in college somebody on the debate team had an Inform promoting the idea of insect protein. He would end the speech by offering around a plate of "chocolate chirpies" (chocolate chip mealworm cookies). Honestly I could never figure out why they bothered people so much. I figured the mealworms have been roasted, so I couldn't see them being dangerous and why not . . . (not that I ate all of them but I did eat a cookie when offered)
58: No, but some leafy green insects would be nice.
You people buy your nails in salons? What, custom-distressed iron with extra-irregular heads? Are those even galvanized?
60: In the future, only the wealthy will be able to afford the high protein insects. The rest of us will have to make do with the high carb, high fat insects served by chain restaurants.
Along these lines, nothing makes me more terrified of the future than the occasional stories promoting insects as a new culinary fad, high in protein.
Why?
Real question: why have so many vaporizer stores opened all over town recently? They seem like the head shop market. Is this e-cigarettes? Synthetic pot? What are they selling?
63: You're right, I forgot about the more dire jellyfish and algae scenario.
23 alienationation
It's so alienating it's like being alienated by a nation of aliens.
62: In the future New York City mayor David Karp will introduce legislation limiting the size of deep-fried giant water beetles sold in convenience stores to three-quarters of a pound.
Not sure if its related to your vaporizer stores, but I heard that extracting and vaporizing pot essence is now a thing. Turning it into wax or something. Sounds gross.
68: Which will be viciously opposed as a nanny state overreach by those who really, really need to eat large servings of giant water beetles at a per-lb discounted rate.
63: You're right, I forgot about the more dire jellyfish and algae scenario.
There just seem to be an awful lot more cataclysmic and in some cases more pressing future scenarios than eating insects, especially as a fad. Global warming, fresh water shortages, peak oil and the end of affordable plastic, nuclear proliferation, Bob's class/civil war, to name a few.
nothing makes me more terrified of the future than the occasional stories promoting insects as a new culinary fad, high in protein.
DON'T KNOCK IT TILL YOU'VE TRIED IT.
but I heard that extracting and vaporizing pot essence is now a thing.
So like e-joints? Huh.
Not sure if its related to your vaporizer stores, but I heard that extracting and vaporizing pot essence is now a thing.
This makes me nostalgic for the olden days when freebasing was all the rage.
I've never seen a vaporizer store, but then I live in the city of the federal prosecutor who put Tommy Chong away.
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Unfoggedy Fun!
Yves Smith ...returned from vacation to find her fat cat stuck behind a bookcase. It's complicated, but an emergency! Commenters are helpful, and sometimes amusing. "Short the cat!"
My suggestions:
1) Duct tape
2) WD-40
3) Sorry, my dogs don't travel
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I'm with it! I'm hip! I ate tobacco-seasoned crickets once.
A friend of mine opened an online vaporizer store years ago. His business plan was to have cheap copies of the other, popular vaporizers made in China and sell them for slightly less. Dude made a mint, as far as I know, and is still one of the market leaders. Also, he owns a Sybian. That's not actually relevant, but crazy, right?
Also, he owns a Sybian.
Sybionese Liberation Army will get him soon enough.
71: My fear is that the promotion of the insectivore lifestyle is an attempt to ease our transition to the world brought about by the calamities you mention. I can't believe you made me standpipe that.
64: I assumed it was as pot paraphernalia. Recently I've been seeing a lot of telephone-pole ads for them around Oakland. Maybe someone started up a MLM scheme?
a cheap-to-install business that can run until there's some more profitable use for a parcel
There was a store that literally billed itself as a "pop-up store" for exactly that purpose. It was called Pouf! and has random textiles and other home furnishing crap. They advertised the fact that they were 4 months and gone.
Costco was selling hemp hearts which I think are kind of like bean sprouts or something, the bag said to sprinkle them on salad or oatmeal. According to the nutrition info it was fully 1/3 polyunsaturated fats (10g per 30g serving.)
The fact that nobody is mentioning nail salons makes me wonder about your neighborhoods.
Whenever I see the signs I think: Pierogi! Bigos!. Then I'm all disappointed.
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George Zimmerman in custody for threatening wife (who has filed for divorce) and her father with a piece of sidewalk a gun.
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"These assholes, they always get away"
Who would have figured that a guy who would shoot an unarmed teenager would have other issues?
He's also been stopped for speeding twice since his trial. Speaking of always getting away.
I don't know if I believe Ms. Zimmerman. She is, after all, a known perjurer.
But at least she's not a black teenager or anything like that.
So what does a new auto parts store say about a potential neighborhood, anyway? "We heard you like fixing your old cars"?
Oh, we've got plenty of nail salons around here. Most of them are next door to Mexican bakeries. Just not in the huge strip mall, which, now that I think about it, of course also includes a cell phone/minutes store and an Aldi. The Aldi being the ground floor of the expensive condos.
E-cigs are all over the place here, but mostly just sold out of existing tobacconists or convenience stores.
Also, we had THREE new auto parts stores open in the last 12 months within a mile of each other on the main drag. My theory is that everyone figures that a lot of the working class Mexican fellows who live around here are shade-tree mechanics, and that justified what would otherwise look like a ridiculously over-saturated market niche.
I think it's broader than that. Cars are staying on the road a quite a bit longer with the recession. The average car is over 11 years old. That means more parts.
I'm no longer driving around in a shitty 1994mobile, but rather in a snazzy 2006mobile. (I stared at the word "shnazzy" for a long, long time before realizing why it was misspelled.)
||Anybody know anything about the NYC Public Advocate candidates? I'm familiar with one of them, my longtime council member Leticia James. She started off great and energetic and by the end was your generic slightly sleazy Brooklyn Dem machine cog. I know nada about the others.>|
Oh good, Texas is under a pertussis alert. #firstworldproblems
I kind of regret making a hashtag joke, because I actually detest hashtag jokes.
I am sure all are relieved. I am wiping a tiny tear.
bob says: September 9, 2013 at 3:53 pmEveryone needs a good bar. At home I would recommend a 4-6 foot piece of "iron pipe", at least 1/2 an inch, 3/4 is better.
In the car, place a 2-3 foot piece of the same size and type. If you are ever stuck trying to change a tire and the stock wrench isn't long enough for good leverage (they never are) you slide the pipe over the wrench handle and have another 3-4 times the leverage.
Both can be had at home depot for less than $10 combined.
I got somethings like those.
Anyway, I walked outside and it is starting to rain but my bus was right there. #everythingcominguproses
I kind of regret making a hashtag joke because I actually detest hashtag jokes.
Also, your hashtag gets it more-or-less backwards. The interesting thing about whooping cough is that it is not a problem in any sensible First World jurisdiction.
As Wikipedia explains:
Pertussis is one of the leading causes of vaccine-preventable deaths world-wide. 90% of all cases occur in developing countries.
107 is nit-picky in a kind of tedious way, so it's a little bit embarrassing to acknowledge that I wrote it.
How does having a sense of pride make it easier in a frequently demeaning world, a world in which really they can take away your dignity?
I haven't read the whole thread, but Smearcase, what? I'll grant you that "the children are our future" is a tautology, and it's not clear what the relationship of the prologue is to the rest of the song, but this objection assumes that dignity inheres in others' treatment of you, instead of in you, because of your moral worth. We can call this argument a semantic one about the meaning of the word "dignity," but I think you'd lose an argument that Whitney's use of the term was invalid. To wit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dignity
I love that song. I love when it comes on when I'm running. Once, after interrupting intercourse in the middle because it didn't feel right emotionally I broke into that song in bed. True story.
It was an accident that I didn't sign the last comment, but I'll just let the thread guess. I bet you'll get it right. Off to class!
107 is nit-picky in a kind of tedious way, so it's a little bit embarrassing to acknowledge that I wrote it.
Don't be so hard on yourself for not getting the joke!
It's one thing to call Miami a Latin American city, but it seems a wee bit egotistical to call it the capital of Latin America.
109: I am now tempted to do the same thing while in bed with Buck, just to see the look on his face.
97: I'm voting for James because she's the WF party candidate. But I don't know anything else about her.
I thought you were tempted to call Buck the "Capital of Latin America" while in bed.
In the concrete jungle, things are made of there's nothing you can't do.
I thought she was nominating Shearer as the author of 109.
112: Nickname goes back as long as I can remember, though probably less used than "Gateway to Latin America".
**
sent from the Live Music Capital of the World. . .
109: I am now tempted to do the same thing while in bed with Buck, just to see the look on his face.
I'd say that you should, but I worry that would convince Buck that the blog is a bad influence (and I have a hard time imagining what cover story you could use to avoid implicating unfogged).
Goddamn you Heebie, my connection cut out in line or you'd never have pwned me there.
120: Since the chicken/crab fucking post, there's not much that could drop his sense of this place as a bad influence.
Yves Smith ...returned from vacation to find her fat cat stuck behind a bookcase
11 pounds does not a fat cat make. (20 lbs. Named "Fats.")
She could fake it-- not the in-person singing, but recount the story as if it had really happened. That is, she could fake it with the blog.
Also, I would have thought that the unusual verb "inheres" would be enough to identify the writer but no. Who runs?
Googling, "inheres" is used in the archives by (at least) Gonerill, nosflow, Standpipe, Tia, and Michael H Schneider. nosflow doesn't take classes anymore, and I don't really know anything about that Schneider guy.
So, anyway, clearly it's Gonerill.
I don't think Gonerill takes classes anymore, either.
nit-picky in a kind of tedious way
126: Weirdly, I think I am FB friends with that Schneider guy, but not because of the blog.
Further to Zimmerman, he claims after going to his wife's house, punching her father, and yelling from his car (where he had his gun although he never picked it up) that he was doing all that in a "defensive manner." Guess he's learned the magic words.
130.--Your link invites me to sign on to Yahoo, with its loathsome new logo. Is this because I haven't figured out my Flickr pool permissions?
133. Optima is a perfectly good typeface.
126. Right. The concluding True story. as a sentence should help to narrow it down.
I'm not dissing Optima, per se.
This sort of thinking, however--
Our purple is Pantone Violet C - a pantone that needs no number and no introduction ;)--is symptomatic of the whole.
Symptomatic of what? That Melissa Mayer likes to make bad jokes that are taken too seriously by people who obsess over typography?
136. Type is a lot more than the casual fashion that it has become since computer graphics became widespread.
http://woodtype.org/about/whatis
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOgIkxAfJsk
or
http://banglaharaph.blogspot.com/2008/07/bengali-fonts-designed-in-metafont.html
It's a terrible color for them: too dark, too indistinct. Meyer's description makes it sound like they chose the color specifically because it was the "basic color, by the system," when something more modulated would have been much, much better. The purple in their earlier logo was more distinctive.
Her whole essay about making the logo "in a long weekend :) whee!" whole thing is a manifesto of DIY hubris. The design community has gone predictably ballistic.
Still, the new logo is bad.
Ah. That makes sense. I actually thought Mayer was going for a neat little myth of logo creation rather than "how hard can this be?" DIY-ism. After all, it seems pretty improbable that a large internet company wouldn't hire professionals to test drive their logo. As a result, I didn't take any of her words as a description of what actually happened. It's clear that her description did not have the intended effect (and that the logo is definitely less distinct than the last).
It also says: "we believe some people live in this area that poor enough as to have no choice but buy all this really, really low-quality crap, so you should be scared".