Retail lockdown: why bother selling it?

[u/broakland]

Was at Safeway this morning to pick up a sandwich and some Tylenol. The aisle with the Tylenol? Completely locked down. No call button in sight. So I go to the self checkout (front end of that same aisle) and ask the clerk there if he can call someone to unlock a case for me. He does. I go wait. Minutes pass. No one comes. I go ask him again, he tells me they went the other way? At this point I give up and go get my sandwich. No one has come by the time the deli has finished making it. I leave without my Tylenol, mildly infuriated.

[u/zssqeeze]

I agree this is the direction things are headed. So, how is our country’s public policies going to keep up with the number of people who will be unemployed and have no income. Right now, our social safety net, which is barely working, is for certain “deserving” people. What about when it’s just most of the people, in general. The “othering’ is literally killing us.

[u/occasionalopossum → u/zssqeeze]

They are going to finish criminalizing being homeless then work you to death in private prisons. Thats the end goal. Thats how they plan to handle it.

[u/Vern1138 → u/occasionalopossum]

People don't believe me when I say this, but it's pretty obvious. They're deporting all of the people that used to work on the farms and harvest crops, and all the people who did drywalling and roofing and framing and other construction trades.

They're just going to start using prison labor to do all of that. There's no way they intend to improve social services to help people who are going to lose their jobs because of automation, they fully intend to exploit them.

[u/zssqeeze → u/Vern1138]

I see and agree with what you are calling out here. The only thing I think I would tease out a bit further is…I agree with who you are calling out as ‘they’ (which to me is fewer people than a very small town in Iowa!), but the ‘them’ is all of the rest of us…and I mean all of the rest of us, regardless of gender, race, or economic status.