Thread by @gravislizard

so my fucking trip earlier to find tolerable house smells was absolutely the most discouraging thing and it actually left me partially dissociated. this isn't any kind of joke

i feel like reality isn't quite real now, because this entire category of things i believed i could get easily is not available and it's like it vanished without a trace

it's not JUST that I couldn't find rose smell anywhere. that's weird as fuck, but hey - someone at pier 1 told me a) it's kind of old-fashioned and people associate it with old women and b) it's seasonal and this isn't the season so- whatever

it's what I DID find that bothered me, namely, the same thing at every single store. and yes, capitalism is bad and tends to do this, but not to this degree

one of the first stores I went to was target, where i found not only that they had no potpourri and no rose scented candles, but actually it was like their entire "house trash" section, like all the knick-knacks that were their stock and trade, were just gone

i expected to find a bunch of porcelain owls and incense holders and wicker baskets. all gone. that entire thing just - evaporated. there's like an aisle of shabby chic picture frames and then one of scented candles and that's it.

i expected to find potpourri, and bundles of cinammon sticks in baggies, and other types of dead plants, and - just nothing. all gone. i couldn't even tell what had replaced it.

so then, the scents themselves. this is the crux of it.
it's not enough to say "all the candles smelled bad." they did, but that's so subjective. it goes further than that. i used to shop scented candles and even used to buy them, and they were Fucking Different

i'm not a total newbie to this - i know that scented candles have always been plagued with meaningless "Romantic Kiss at Pottingham Castle" names. but shit like "ocean breeze" used to be... idk, a LITTLE subtler?

it's obvious that the candles, wax and oils are all literally the same chemical blend, because you can get most scents in all forms. so here's the oils i found at pier 1

the smells here are amber musk, sunset citrus, ginger peach, citrus cilantro, island orchard

firstly, i swear every single one of these EXACT names is sold by every single candle, wax and oil manufacturer.

i went to
target
bed bath and beyond
michaels
pier 1 imports
and cost plus world market

every one of these stores had 3 brands, each providing the exact same set of scents *with these names* except cost plus

cost plus was the only one that had a selection. they had like easily 20 brands, but almost every single candle i smelled had the exact same acrid "laundry soap" scent except the vanilla and apple ones, which are always consistent but totally unnatural to me

*as I was examining the candles at cost plus* a guy next to me muttered "these all smell like urinal cakes" and left in disgust. So It's Not Just Me.

i was aghast. i went to six stores and smelled candles and oils from at least thirty "unique brands" and all of them had the exact same odor. do you see why i'm fucking dissociating

compared to the last time i did this a few years ago, there was one big difference, which is something i will refer to as Mandles

DON'T SHRIVEL YOUR PECKER, HUFF OUR STINK POTS. THEY SMELL EXACTLY LIKE THE ONES FOR GIRLS BUT WE LABELED THEM LIKE VICTORIAN SHAVING CREAM SO YOUR BALLS ARE SAFE

every store has a section of mandles now, which are unquestionably made in the same factory from the same shit but just look like a version of masculinity that was invented in 2004

the crux of it is this: this market has obviously been eaten by the same thing that's eaten every other market, which is simply that capitalism is failing. The retail market is collapsing, live, and the stores are desperately trying to hide it.

Stores are buying anything to fill the shelves, rearranging the shelves when necessary and padding out other departments to hide the fact that they are unable to find any products to sell.

When I go into stores now there's just less stuff, spread out more. I went into Pier 1 and 3/4 of the store was literally the same product repeated over and over and over. It didn't use to be like this. It wasn't like this the last time I was in one of these.

Stores are buying shit that doesn't fit their supposed market at all just to fill up the shelves. Everywhere sells USB chargers now, except I don't think they sell, I think they just sit there. That's the consistent theme I'm seeing.

When my first employer was starting to fail, we found out when they sent us a shipment of BAZIC brand office supplies, which is a literally fraudulent chinese brand. You may recognize it if you have been in a Fry's Electronics in the last four years.

Because Fry's did the same thing. A few years ago, two aisles in every store suddenly dematerialized and were replaced by laughably cheap notebooks with paper that tears, pencils that break, pens that stop writing and post-its that don't stick.

Just like my first job, Fry's was a fucking computer store, and now they have an entire aisle of cheap counterfeit perfume, two aisles of literally unusable office supplies, four aisles of As Seen On TV crap, and then - surprise surprise - they stopped restocking everything else.

That's just what happened to us. One day I was restocking resistors, transistors and LEDs, the next I was being told to hang up bags of thumbtacks with obvious mold lines. We never got a legitimate shipment of stock again at that store - neither did Fry's, obviously.

This is what I'm seeing everywhere at some level or another. Items appear that seem grossly out of place, and they don't sell. They just sit and gather dust. The retailers are just ordering them to fill up space because they can't get anything people want. I just don't know why.

remember when going to electronics stores was exciting? But now you go in and it's just empty hooks, dirty old unmaintained displays, sparse displays. nobody mans the camera counter at best buy because nobody ever, ever looks at the cameras.

i am terrified of what is happening here. i'll shit on materialist capitalism as much as the next person but /even so/ when I look around in the retail world now I feel this awful, sucking emptiness. i still have the instinct to go to stores but there's nothing to look at.

i still have this reflex from ten years ago, when i had a job and proper independence for the first time, and i would go to stores and window shop. just a few years ago I used to do that with my girlfriend on lazy saturdays.

we stopped going out on weekends to do that shit and never quite realized that it's because the stores are just empty now.

the country is being buried in an avalanche of the worst, cheapest shit imaginable. everything is just this now. an endless sea of cheap chromed plastic. and i mean that's the electronics market but... everything else is the same, i just can't illustrate it easily

everything is becoming this. everything is becoming four USB chargers from MAKUE, LANGLUI, BestTec and GreenPlus, and you turn around and turn back and it's four new computer-generated brand names and the mold lines are even more visible than before

we are losing our bread and our circuses and as much as we shouldn't have been depending on them to make us happy, fuck, they aren't being replaced with anything. just emptiness. grey, dull nothing.

i'm just rambling at this point because i'm scared shitless. i know it's just "retail goods" and a ton of them are luxuries but fuck, fuck, fuck, things are obviously, CLEARLY much much much much much worse than they've been in my life or my parents life

this is "just some candles" but it's also yet another thing that used to be an active, lively market and has been completely consumed by the langoliers when i wasn't looking, and yes, maybe we shouldn't be relying on corporations for everything but we were ABLE TO, once

it's just fucking creepy that a bunch of shit has just evaporated that was available for years and years and years. that's not good no matter how shitty that stuff might have been.

oh btw i finally found a rose scented candle at cost plus that actually has a legit scent. so there's that