The Teamsters Union is making noises that they are going to strike against United Parcel Service (UPS). Well, they always do that before contract negotiations, although the Teamster leadership seems to be more aggressive than usual, so they might go through with it.
Unfortunately for them, there is a significant competitor of UPS that was an afterthought in 1997 (the last time the Teamsters went on strike against UPS), and that is Amazon. So a strike that eliminates...even for a week or two...one of Amazon's main transportation channels will push huge amounts of volume into their own transportation system, and UPS may not recover some of that volume.
But the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of workers and the significant delays that a strike will cause for manufacturing, distribution and retail across America pales in comparison to the unimaginable catastrophe of Jessica Ray not being able to get her favorite toilet paper delivered to her door!
UPS strike looms in a world grown reliant on everything delivered everywhere all the time
Living in New York City, working full time and without a car, Jessica Ray and her husband have come to rely on deliveries of food and just about everything else for their home. It has meant more free time on weekends with their young son, rather than standing in line for toilet paper or dragging heavy bags of dog food back to their apartment.
"I don't even know where to buy dog food," said Jessica Ray of the specialty food she buys for the familys aging dog.
"We finally reached a point where we finally feel pretty good about it," Ray said. "We can take a Saturday afternoon and do a fun family activity and not feel the burden of making everything work for the day-to-day functioning of our household."
This entitled, oblivious, spoiled little bitch has the temerity to whine about a very nice middle class life in a big city, in which she has the financial resources to pay other people to do a lot of the stuff that normal people do on their own without any thought that it was difficult or stressful or worthy of notice.
"It has the potential to be significantly impactful," Ray said. "My husband and I have invested a lot in figuring out how to remove the burden of just making sure we always have toilet paper."
The decades-long shift from a manufacturing-based economy to one that has a much greater percentage of service-based industry has conspired to lull people into what can only be a false sense of security...that someone else is going to take care of "it," whatever "it" may be.
But that attitude naturally devolves into the arrogance of superiority based on literally nothing at all. Jessica Ray sees herself as deserving of the service provided by more capable people, for no other reason than she has the financial resources to pay for those services, yet she sees that as a confirmation of some social hierarchy. She is a Houyhnhnm, and those hopefully anonymous drones who provide for everything in her life are the Yahoos.
As much as I despair of a breakdown in society, people like Rachel, and their obvious inability to manage even minor dislocations in their worlds, make the prospect of societal collapse rather amusing, if it takes a big bite out of her fat, entitled ass. Maybe her next job in the dystopian landscape of America 2.0 will be as a fluffer in a sex show, or if she doesn't lose some of that weight, maybe her lot in life will be as dinner for some roving band of ex-toilet-paper delivery folks!