Pirate's Cove

Biden voters in 2020: elect Joe and things will be great!

Biden voters 2021: stop buying stuff like food and clothes!

Stop Shopping

The supply chain, as you know, is having a bad time. That’s been true since the pandemic began. Shortages in consumer goods have persisted far beyond analysts’ initial expectations, then beyond their subsequent revisions. At the moment, for most types of goods, shelves aren’t exactly bare yet. For the relatively well-off Americans accustomed to the astonishing abundance of big-box retail and grocery stores and the near-instant gratification of online shopping, it’s more a matter of having to settle for your third-favorite brand of Greek yogurt or wait six weeks for back-ordered jeans. But what’s already a genuine crisis for people who work in the global supply chain could very well turn into one for all of us; the manufacturing and distribution of necessities such as food and medicine require many of the same resources as the consumer economy’s various conveniences and diversions.

When you dig down into the numbers of just how much people are purchasing, the way that the supply-chain crisis gets talked about starts to feel a little uncanny. As the holidays approach, many people have begun to worry that shortages will worsen, not just for kids’ toys and other popular gifts, but for holiday decorations, seasonal clothing, and even food—the things that make the end of the year special. Despite those concerns, few seem willing to acknowledge that the record amount of stuff being brought into the country isn’t merely disappearing off store shelves. We know where it’s going, and we know who’s buying it all up. They—and maybe you—could simply knock it off.

This is actually an attempt to say that the Biden economy is good, that there are products, it’s just you people are buying too much. Really? Where? Are people over-buying talapia at the supermarket, so there’s almost none for everyone else? Are people buying 3-4 cars each, leaving none for others? These are also the same people claiming that you need to buy your Christmas presents now, because it’ll be pretty bad in December.

I’m not proposing that you or anyone else boycott commerce on a conceptual level. That would be impossible, and it would ignore how human life in this country works. It would also be the sort of killjoy self-righteous proposal that doesn’t gain much traction. Shopping is fun—novelty and possibility are fun—and it’s often how people access the tools and materials to do things that bring them genuine comfort or joy, which everyone needs. But even a quick glance at America’s credit-card statements begins to explain the mess we’re in. A lot of people buy things for the sake of it, stuff they don’t need or even particularly want and in many cases won’t use, as a salve for boredom or anxiety or insecurity. On the whole, consumer expenditures, which encompass both necessity spending (rent, gas, groceries) and discretionary spending (whatever you ordered from an Instagram ad after three glasses of happy-hour wine last Friday), account for about 70 percent of the country’s economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that spending is not distributed equally. In a typical year, the most affluent 20 percent of people account for nearly 40 percent of the country’s consumer spending, and this wealthier group’s purchases are disproportionately discretionary.

If the economy was great, people would be able to do this at will (never minding that what people purchase is none of the business of The Atlantic or writer Amanda Mull), not be told to stop shopping.

It’s also whining at The Rich. Nothing unusual from Democrats, despite those same The Rich funding Democrat politicians.

As it stands, America’s central organizing principle is thoughtless consumption, acquiring things for yourself and letting everyone else pick over what you left behind on the shelves. You can decide you don’t like that. You can decide that people—your family, your friends, the people in your community, the port truckers and Amazon warehouse workers running themselves ragged—are more important to you than another box of miscellaneous stuff. You can take a bit of pressure, however tiny, off a system so overburdened that it threatens to grind everyone in it to dust. American shopping is a runaway train, gliding smooth and frictionless down the tracks toward God knows what over the horizon. Your brakes are small, but you can throw them whenever you want.

So, in order to get back to normal, you people have to just stop buying stuff. Because the #LetsGoBrandon economy is great!

Read: In Biden Economy, Democrats Say To Stop Shopping »