Thread by @gravislizard

I feel like making some kind of public statement about this: My family found out recently that our local grocery store is full of expired food. I don't mean to speak down to anyone, but stock rotation doesn't happen on its own and it's easy to forget this.

A few months ago I bought some yogurt. Almost ate it that night before I noticed it was weeks out of date. Next time I went, I checked, and a good quarter of what was in the cooler was days to weeks out of date.

I thought, okay, I'll double check the yogurt in the future. Then we got home with out of date milk last week, and last night I almost ate some cheese dip before realizing it was a *month out of datE*

I know why this is happening. We live in a poor neighborhood and our local grocery store is underfunded and chronically understaffed. I never see employees in the aisles; they're all at the registers, which always have 4-6 people in line at each one.

Checkouts always take precedence because people walk away and leave their purchases if lines are too long. Things are even worse because people here often have to use checks and benefits vouchers in languages they don't understand, so it's particularly bad in this neighborhood.

In a richer neighborhood, corporate would increase headcount. That doesn't happen when you aren't a high profile moneymaker, so they're not going to get extra staff. So nobody has any time to rotate stock, and it's not going to get better.

Here's how this will play out: Someone will get very sick. The board of health will get involved. Corporate will shrug and close the store rather than spend a penny to improve it. And then hundreds of people will simply not have a grocery store anymore.

Suddenly if you live in my neighborhood and your car breaks down, you don't get fresh food, because the next closest grocery store is an hour away by foot. You can't shop for an entire family and bring it back on the bus, either.

suddenly the primary source of meals for anyone who doesn't have a working car, gas, and an extra hour to burn getting to the store and back will be jack in the box and taco bell.

i will be unaffected because i'm white and have an okay job and can replace my car in fairly short order, and that's why this will happen with no fanfare and nobody will care

there's absolutely nothing i or anyone else can do to stop this, and that's ludicrous, but what else is there to do?

my knee jerk response is "peoples only source of food shouldn't be a for-profit business" but that immediately leads into "what about clothes? what about car repair for people with no other way to get to work? transit? medicine?" name something that should be gatekept by profit

at one point i realized (though this probably isn't quite right) that the concept of satire is to express how ridiculous an idea is by taking it to its logical conclusion. "what would it look like if there were no arbitrary limits placed on this way of thinking?"

people keep saying we're beyond satire. we've always been beyond satire, because since long before i was born, the absurd notions of capitalism have been taken to their logical ends. it is slightly more visible now.

a satire of capitalism would be a person starving while a man stands over them smiling, holding a loaf of bread and proclaiming that it's The Best Bread. that happens. that is real. that has been going on for ages.