WINDBAG-19
Have you seen the movie Open Water? It’s a jaunty little romp about a couple who goes on a scuba diving vacation only to be left drifting at sea until they get eaten by sharks.
The only part I don’t like about it is the ending: I wanted them to float around until they died of dehydration, because that would be more closely analogous to the human condition in general. The whole shark attack thing added unnecessary spectacle to what would have been two preventable, tragically mundane deaths.
There’s a scene in the middle of the movie where the guy (we’ll call him “Mr. Open,” and his wife will be “Mrs. Water”) suddenly starts screaming at the top of his lungs and pounding his fists in the water in anger, and when he tires himself out, Mrs. Water dismissively says something to the effect of “Are you done?” (It has been thirteen years since I’ve seen the movie, so I’m a little rusty on the details, like the dialogue or the characters’ names.) It’s a great scene, because throwing a tantrum when your situation is catastrophically dire and you’re powerless to do anything is a worthless expense of energy that somehow feels biologically necessary on an animal level.
When Justine and I first adopted our dog Neko, we couldn’t take her home right away, because our landlord needed to amend our lease to allow us to have a dog in the first place. She was an elderly British biochemist with a number of patents to her name (the landlord, not the dog), but landlording was not her strong suit. After a few weeks of hemming and hawing about the lease amendments, she decided it was too difficult and told us the dog adoption was off. This was after Justine and I had spent the past month picking Neko up from the shelter every weekend and taking her on field trips, so we had grown pretty attached despite Neko not being “our” dog yet. She wasn’t even named Neko at this point.
The news that our landlord had reversed course hit like punch to my face’s gut, and Justine and I took turns expressing bouts of rage that our landlord was so unreasonable and persnickety. This was a situation we could control, insofar as we could leave and find a new dog-friendly apartment (albeit not one with landlords who aren’t a couple of warty toad testicles), but the lead-up to our big move reminded me of Mr. Open’s water tantrum in that sometimes screaming into a pillow is all you can do.
Since this COVID-19 business started, there have been a number of times I’ve wanted to throw a tantrum, but for whatever reason I’ve been able to keep my emotions in check. (It has occurred to me that I would most certainly have a sore throat after a good pillow scream, and that I would then be paranoid about having the virus for the next few days.) That’s not to say that I haven’t been pretty down the past couple weeks, but my down-ness has been more of the lethargic, depressive variety than the fiery tantrumy type.
Still, there’s a particular isolation that comes from feeling depressed about the same thing everyone is depressed about. Where it would make intuitive sense for everyone to come together over their shared depression, what happens more often is that people become indignant about being asked to console someone who is going through the exact same thing they are. I felt the same way after Trump was elected and I was depressed that half of the people in the country are racist morons. This pandemic is undoubtedly worse (although not necessarily distinct from Trump’s election), but the problem is the same — what are you supposed to do when you’re steeped in anger and sadness about your current situation, and no one cares because everyone is steeped in anger and sadness about their current situations?
A standard piece of advice for anyone dealing with grief is to focus on their work, but that has been… not great lately. I’ve been a professional office man for around 15 years now, and while I saw the Great Recession greatly recess the profits of the previous company I worked for, the way the economy has ground to a halt in the past couple weeks has blown away every frame of reference I could use. I’m reduced to using strained metaphors, since there’s no reasonable analogue in my or anyone’s past experience with economics. It’s like we were driving a car, and all of a sudden the seats turned in to flesh-eating piranhas, and it wasn’t a car but a vat of acid, and we weren’t driving but stabbing each other. Something like that.
In normal economic cycles, recessions reduce demand, because people don’t have money to spend. Right now, there’s still plenty of demand (despite skyrocketing unemployment), but there’s no supply of goods. You’re either looking at grocery store shelves picked clean, or fully stocked retail store shelves behind locked doors. By the time the supply issues go back to normal, the economic consequences of the piranha-vat-of-acid-stabbing-car will repress demand so much that the newly open retail stores will be as devoid of customers as they were when they were closed.
I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out how to put my company’s products in places where consumer demand can snap them up, but it has been tough. (Quick point of clarification: “my company” means the company I work for; it’s not my company.) The best option would normally be that eight-way dildo of a company, Amazon, but true to their identity as an eight-way dildo of a company, they’ve managed to find a way to fuck everyone within range during this crisis. (I tried to find an image of an eight-way dildo to put here, but I came up empty. You can probably imagine it, though.)
First, without warning, they restricted shipments to their fulfillment centers except for products that are vaguely categorized as “essential items.” Any non-essential items within their fulfillment centers already are unavailable for shipment until the end of April. In one fell swoop, Amazon froze the inventory of thousands of sellers, who are now going to go under because even if they could sell that inventory to someone, Amazon won’t give it back to them. You could try to take matters into your own hands and ship the products to Amazon customers yourself, but since Amazon’s algorithm prioritizes inventory within their fulfillment network, your self-fulfilled listings are going to be buried under the Amazon-fulfilled listings that Amazon isn’t fulfilling. In other words, if Amazon is going to refuse to ship inventory in their warehouses, they could at least have the decency to cede the listings on those products to sellers who can actually ship products. But nope… if Amazon won’t ship it, then you can’t either.
(Well, you can ship it, but it’s going to require the customer clicking through all the offers for that product and selecting yours, and as every Amazon seller knows, if you aren’t in the “buy box” at the top of the page, you might as well be in the piranha car.)
I work with a consulting agency that specializes in Amazon, and what I’ve heard from them is that the shock to consumer behavior right now has been so unexpected for Amazon that their algorithms can’t keep up. Just like the risk evaluation models used just prior to the financial crisis couldn’t account for what was happening in the market, Amazon is forced to wing it and make changes on the fly, which means giving no notice to any of their business partners, and giving no thought whatsoever about the collateral economic damage of any of their actions.
Of course, Amazon will always come out ahead, because they take a cut of everything that sells on their platform, regardless of any of the surrounding circumstances. You might think Amazon might consider giving sellers a break after holding their inventory hostage during an economic crisis when small businesses left and right are throwing in the towel, but then you don’t know Amazon very well now do you. They’re a company that exists to promote human misery and economic destruction. They have reframed consumer expectations around shipping, pricing, returns/refunds, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Their only goal is to make it impossible for other retailers to retain customers and in doing so absorb enough of the economy that… Well, there really isn’t an end goal — their only goal is to grow, expand, devour. BEZOS-19. Some of us can tag along like little symbiotic fish eating the algae that accumulates on their skin, but as the current situation shows, we’ll all eventually get picked off.
What I realized this week is that the business partners my company works with are grouped into ones who are only focused on the next 6-8 weeks, and ones who are looking past it. This could be due to cash flow issues that constitute an existential threat, or just a general myopia that bubbles up from the crippling uncertainty around where the hell anyone is going to be in 6-8 weeks. My feeling is that if the economy hasn’t started to open up again in 8 weeks, it’s almost not worth planning out contingency scenarios. The social breakdown that will accompany an economic shutdown of that scale will begin to overwhelm petty concerns like “selling products,” since I’ll be too busy putting bars on my windows and reinforcing my front door to keep roving bands of marauders from stealing my oats.
Look what the fuck happened in two motherfucking goddamn weeks. All it took was two weeks, and unemployment shot up so much it “flattened the curve” of any previous recession. It took two weeks to dismantle multiple generations of Reagan/Thatcher fiscal conservatism (which was always a farce anyway, but still) and embrace Keynesianism on a level the nation has never witnessed. Two weeks to undo a decade of economic recovery. Six more weeks of this we’re going to see Nancy Pelosi with a collection of gavels made from the arms of her enemies.
Justine and I had a date last night, and it was pretty good timing, because the week ended on a somewhat high note. My employer had been discussing 60-75% payroll cuts for the foreseeable future, and I was pretty down in the dumps about it, but then we settled on “only” 50%, and I felt like I had some breathing room. I told Justine that it was the first time since all this started that the worst-case scenario didn’t come to pass. Then the pile of discarded foreskins that comprises my landlords refused to reduce my rent (even by the $100 that they raised it starting April 1st), but as I don’t expect much from a pile of discarded foreskins in the first place, I wasn’t too upset about that. I put a plan in place with one of our big customers to jumpstart our business in June and keep it going through the second half of the year, so as long as the whole Pelosi-arm-gavel-piranha-car-oat-marauder scenario doesn’t come to pass, there are some pretty bright days ahead work-wise.
We shared some dessert wine we’ve been keeping around and played Trivial Pursuit, and I toasted by saying, “To us either getting through this together or getting the virus and dying side-by-side.” She laughed; it was a pretty good toast.