Brick and Mortar Shopping for the Woke Generation

As more brick-and-mortar stores are filing for bankruptcy, desperate to keep their stores open, merchandise variety is dwindling, and shopping experiences become more and more unpleasant. 

Grocery stores could not keep their shelves stocked in 2020, in part due to food hoarding driven by ginned-up fear, government forced closures, and wholesalers and packing plants shuttering due to mandated closings and flu-infected employees.

Other stores had and are still having a hard time refilling their stock of desired clothing or cosmetic lines due to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the abject fear of associates showing up for work in such a virus-laden environment that was previously fine.

Restaurants still operational are struggling with the mandates of customers wearing masks from the door to the table as if the Corona virus knows precisely to infect those walking but not those sitting down. I wonder who and how they determined this arbitrary “fact.”

Cosmetics have dried up in storage during closures, the shelves are empty of certain brands, or are hard to find.  Women, who have nowhere to go further than their living room, trash dumpster, and the mailbox, have stopped wearing dressy clothes and makeup altogether as sweats and pajamas have become their daily wardrobe, and masks, which must be worn in all public places, conveniently cover facial pimples, imperfections, and smeared lipstick.

Some customers are so scared of dying that they have not shopped in person in a store the entire year since Drs. Faucci and Brix stepped on the White House podium and the world’s stage and announced the lockdown that destroyed a lot of the economic wealth and the prosperous markets of the west.

Other customers, who are willing to shop in person, are turned off by the draconian mask wearing rules, the closed dressing rooms, the absence of merchandise, and other “social distancing” measures that have destroyed the civilized world experience we have known our entire lives and the commerce that went with it.

Relatively soon, customers will be required to present their vaccination cards to shop for anything, including food, not to mention travel, going to a doctor, hospital, or anywhere out of their homes that have become virtual prisons.

Americans have moved to online shopping and boxed deliveries of food, drugs, clothes, and other necessities, enriching a few large companies in the process, and destroying the smaller businesses and the mom-and-pop stores. The only evidence, that people still shop for necessities, are large piles of boxes in front of most people’s front doors. Malls have become emptier as more small stores and a few large ones closed for good. What will happen to our Gross Domestic Product, which was 69% personal consumption in 2018, is not hard to imagine.

One of the first remarks immigrants hailing from tyrannical and socialist societies have made in the past fifty years, including this author, upon seeing the abundance in the west, was how much variety of merchandise and food was in the stores and how full, well-lighted, welcoming, and clean they were, and how excellent the service was. But that has changed drastically in 2020 and it is not likely to return as the globalist program promoted by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum called the “Great Reset” is well underway, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Great Reset | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

The current global Marxists are publicly and secretly cheering the destruction of western economies, particularly that of the United States, the last nation standing in the way of their globalist agenda. The politicians and billionaires in power will always live well no matter who oversees the country. The history of Marxist societies has been one of economic deprivation, wealth and economic theft, abject fear, starvation, and gulags.

Marxists who have passed away in the last century used to brag about the fact that they never worked a day in their lives, they were happy with “room and board and Marxist indoctrination.” They did not have to work or work hard at all because they stole what they needed or wanted from the producers in society whom they imprisoned, tortured, or killed. The proletariat they ruled over with an iron fist used to say, “we pretend to work and they [the Marxists], pretend to pay us.”

According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu, a shoe cobbler’s apprentice, who terrorized Romania for decades, was extremely proud that he never purchased anything for himself in a store. “In fact, it was not until October 1970 that Ceausescu, mainly under pressure from Elena [his wife], set foot in a department store for the first time.” He had accepted an invitation from the management at Macy’s in New York during an official visit. (Ion Mihai Pacepa, Red Horizons, 2018 ed., p. 77)

Pacepa also wrote that Nicolae and Elena traveled with their own food, sealed in special coolers watched by armed guards. A personal engineer protected their clothing and food from chemical, radioactive, and bacterial contamination.

During his famous visit to Macy’s in Herald Square, New York, Ceausescu genuinely believed that the largest department store at the time had been stocked with merchandise to the rafters for the benefit of his presidential visit and taken away as soon as he left the store.

Ceausescu, a delusional tyrant, repeated to anyone forced to listen to him that “my whole life has been devoted to the World Revolution of the Proletariat.” No matter that his terrorized citizens lived in abject destitution, fear, and hunger all the time while he, according to Pacepa, amassed a personal fortune of $400 million from his criminal Marxist enterprise of selling visas for Romanian Jews and Germans. (Red Horizons, p. 79)

Ceausescu opened the first and only department store in Bucharest and filled it with merchandise gathered from around the country. A few days after the grand opening, the shelves were virtually empty.  When foreign visitors were brought in, the store would close for a few days prior, it would be filled to the brim with merchandise, re-opened for the visitors, then the merchandise would disappear, and the shelves would be empty again as soon as the visitors left. Such was the “abundant” life of his proletarian citizens who lived from day to day on meager rations and stripped bones for soup which they obtained by standing in endless lines.

As I walk through our local brick and mortar Macy’s, still stocked with merchandise but reduced variety, I wonder how brainwashed by Marxists and delusional was the young Nicolae, to be so blind to free market capitalism and to believe that stores in America were stocked especially for his presidential visit.

But I see our young Americans being similarly brainwashed by schools so much against the capitalism in which they live, that they believe the freedom and wealth-robbing socialism as a better alternative for their imagined equity and social justice problems.

It boggles my mind to see the American National Anthem replaced in Prince William County, Virginia, by the recitation of the Equity Code, a Marxist creation by the woke revolutionaries. Perhaps Americans will wake up when their stores are empty, and the dear leader tells them how wonderful the wretched socialism and empty stores surrounding them are.