If you ever go out to a Walmart in the suburbs and just sit outside and watch what kind of people enter and leave, I guarantee you, you’ll see all the worst people this world has to offer.
Seriously, poor people are the worst.
Poor people aran’t the people who shop at Walmart in the suburbs. Fuck off.
Exactly what kind of suburbs are you talking about? Most American suburbs don’t look too much like Orange County. Though obviously not as impoverished as either the poorer regions of urban areas, nor certain areas that are perhaps too rural to be considered suburban (which don’t account for much of the population), I can only imagine that the majority of suburbs account for most of the lower-middle class demographics in the U.S. Maybe I am wrong, but I don’t think so. Maybe you would take issue with my referring to the lower-middle class as “poor”, and I would be okay to grant that.
I am not trying to make a Hillary Clintonian defense of Wal-Mart, but if I were to sit outside of various stores with the sole intention of making crass judgments about the demographics flowing through (which, admittedly, I do often do, though usually standing up), I would be much more inclined to determine that the consumers of wealthier establishments the worst people this world has to offer. Honestly, after spending a year working retail at South Coast Plaza, let me tell you…
People who have the economic mobility to live in the suburbs (except for the few suburbs that are effective white ghettos, which although they exist are comparatively rare) are people who have the economic privilege to make better consumer choices.
Stop making excuses for the petite bourgeois. They don’t shop at Wal-Mart because it’s their only option. They shop there because they don’t give a fuck.
They aren’t that rare (like, probably most non-coastal U.S. suburbs that are not adjacent to particularly affluent cities [and some that are] comprise on average pretty low-income demographics). And a pretty good percentage of people who do live in suburbs don’t enjoy an very steady economic mobility, but rather something more like a combination of desperation to reach certain societal ideals and a willingness to go into vast amounts of debt. They may be relatively bourgeois with respect to their quasi-realized material conditions, but not very often in the sense of actually owning the capital necessary to sustain the lifestyle of a healthy consumer who is not at least somewhat dependent on parasitic private institutions to meet basic needs. Now, it may largely be their fault for getting themselves into that position, but it is important to consider how consumer patterns may be traced to the privilege of education.
Obviously, plenty of people who regularly shop at Wal-Mart do it because they don’t give a fuck and are horrible consumers, but if we want to call people out for being shitty people across the board, I’m more inclined to look toward Nordstrom than Wal-Mart.
I also just think it’s funny that, within the very same dialectic, it’s almost invariable that when someone actually does call on members of this demographic support smaller economies, the immediate and almost unanimous response by far-too-many leftists is to assume that this is intended as a categorical imperative and therefore as an argument from privilege, which is always hilarious.
God, I really don’t intend to make myself out to be an apologist for any kind of consumerism. I just don’t appreciate it when leftists dole out scathing generalizations against demographics that really do contain a pretty heavy percentage of persons acting out of disenfranchisement, whether it be economic or a lack of education or whatever else.
