Aunt Pols Place

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At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

Source

Archery x flower arranging

This was actually really fun!

Anyway, don’t forget I’m still raising money to test a bunch of things in a suit of armour:

For background, I'm a shop owner. I own a small brick and mortar (ok, plywood and LVL and weird fake brick, but whatever) yarn store in a suburban town. 

I keep getting emails from review sites, my point of sale system, random cold calls: "increase your sales!" "advertise in more markets!" "unchecked growth!" "people always need more!"

Okay, those last two were paraphrases, but the first two aren't.

And like. We're a small shop. I have a relatively large staff and it's still under ten people. Only two or three of us can actually get a package in the mail. Mostly we have to have a whole conversation with a customer who comes in. I don't want unchecked growth, I don't even want a ton of checked growth. I want steady sales with a stable number of regular customers who buy yarn when they have a new project, and a medium number (maybe 25%?) of new customers who are themselves a mix of people who will become regulars and one-off tourists who will think of us fondly when they go back home. I want a medium number of online sales, again a mix of regulars who know and like us (maybe some of those tourists!) and people who are frantically looking for one last skein to finish a project. 

Unchecked growth is BAD. It's unsustainable for us, the humans who actually package and sell the yarn, and it's unsustainable for the customers, who will soon be drowning in yarn that they don't have time to work with because they're too busy buying yarn, and it's unsustainable for the YARN MARKET since there are people who have a finite number of people hours each. Slow, small, steady growth that doesn't balloon out and create a problem for us later is my ideal.

I do understand that the many many MANY people who are trying to sell me advertising don't really care about this, they have been told that their job needs unchecked growth and that they need to keep making their sales numbers increase, despite the fact that that's wildly unsustainable for them, but.

Guys.

What if there was enough. Not too much, not too little, but enough. What would the world look like if we strove for "enough" rather than "more all the time"? Wouldn't that be nice?

I know that Tumblr doesn't think this is weird and radical, but maybe MAYBE one of the people who's got a horrible sales job at an unnamed review site will happen across this post and think "hmm, maybe it's not me, maybe she just really doesn't want any advertising."

I live in hope, I guess. Hope and a constant state of "no thank you we've got plenty."

"Even women’s clothing was restrictive. “Fifties clothes were like armor,” wrote Brett Harvey in the introduction to The Fifties: A Women’s Oral History. “Our ridiculously starched skirts and hobbling sheaths were a caricature of femininity. Our cinched waists and aggressively pointed breasts advertised our availability at the same time they warned of our impregnability.”

" Nursing and teaching were the only professions easily accessible to women. A woman’s role in life was to be married and raise children, and to start at an early age. She was supposed to find satisfaction in serving her husband and her children. If she had desires of her own—be they sexual, professional, or personal—she was expected to hold them in check, to wipe them out the same way she wiped germs from the kitchen counter or stains from the collars of her husband’s white dress shirts.

"To rebel against these restrictions was to invite scorn and humiliation. The unmarried life was seen as empty and joyless, and women living it were to be pitied. Women in the 1950s tended to marry as soon as they could. The median age of marriage for a woman in 1950 was 20.3. A decade earlier, the median age had been 21.5 (today it is 26.1). Why were young women of the 1950s in such a hurry to get hitched?

"With the war over and men returning home, single women had few options. They couldn’t compete with the men for jobs, and college, while potentially enlightening, only postponed the realization that career options for women were limited. “What’s college?” asked an ad for Gimbels department store. “That’s where girls who are above cooking and sewing go to meet a man so they can spend their lives cooking and sewing.”

"Another reason to marry: They wanted to have sex, and it was dangerous to do so out of wedlock. Condoms were sold in drug stores, but to get a diaphragm in most states required a doctor’s prescription, and most unmarried women were ashamed to ask."

--from "The Birth of the Pill," by Jonathan Eig, Chapter 2: A Short History of Sex

I'm not sure if the young people of any gender, any generation since, have had the social or emotional context to understand all of that.

And that's a good thing. The Pill, safe and legal abortion, no-fault divorce, and equality in education, employment, and banking have made a lot of difference in people's lives... where those things have been possible, which is to say mainly for straight white people with access, admittedly.