Let them eat Amazon — Consistent Inconsistencies with Ontario’s Third Lockdown
What was the name of the sci-fi novel where it was against the law to go to the store and buy books, but people could still go to the store and buy drugs and alcohol? I’m drawing a blank. Oh yeah, that’s because it’s not a sci-fi book, it’s Ontario during the third lockdown.
Want to go spend money? Support a local business? You better first make sure that it’s considered essential. Now what exactly does essential mean? Essential essentially means things that are necessary. What is necessary? Well, that depends on who you ask. For some of the people in Ontario, a wheelchair is necessary each day to get from place to place, for other people in the province it’s not.
What is considered essential to one person isn’t always considered essential to a different person. To a body builder, a juicy ribeye may be essential to their diet, to a vegan that same steak is essentially murder on a plate. To you, a Scream mask may be all that is essential for making a good Halloween costume, for Prime Minister Trudeau it’s brown face paint. All of us have different necessities.
Have you ever received a free shirt and when you looked at the tag it said one size fits all? “What size is it?” you ask. The person passing them out shrugs and hands you a shirt that you immediately can tell is not your size just by the weight of it. It turns out that someone making these shirts decided that Medium is the size everyone wears. This is great news for the people who wear Medium, but the X-Small people who are swimming in them and the XXXL people who are using them as hand towels don’t seem as satisfied with the decision.
The research is in, after years of the top scientists and psychologists in the world working really hard on science and psychology stuff, they’ve determined that each person is unique. A 2009 study conducted by the University of Common Sense has determined that no two people are exactly the same — not even siamese twins, at least I don’t think they are. I know it may come as a big surprise to some of you — especially if your name is The Government — but we’re all different. Each and every one of us. Our genetic makeup has never existed in another being in the past and will only possibly exist in one in the future if Elon Musk gets bored of his rocket-ships and Bitcoin.
Despite the rainbow of people in the world, the government has decided that everything is either black or white. Not the best way to view society in the days of BLM.
Did you want to buy some craft supplies so that you could do something to keep yourself from turning into Jack from The Shining in your 350 square foot apartment? That’s not essential. Did you want to go buy some nice card stock paper with fun designs around the border that you can write your suicide note on? Not essential. Sorry mom, you’re getting a note on the back of an Amazon box. Did you want to buy a bag of weed and a bottle of wine to drown your sorrows in? Well that’s alright, we all obviously know that drugs and alcohol — those things the same people told us to say no to back in school — are essential. Just don’t think about buying any books or things that may improve your life. And I’m not saying this because I have a problem with drugs and alcohol, in fact, some of my best friends are drugs and alcohol. I merely am just trying to highlight the absurdity of it all.
Do you realize that it’s someone’s job in the government to determine what is considered essential and what’s not? Well it is, and they’re doing a terrible job at it.
“How do you feel about people being able to buy chicken breasts?” some government aide asks.
“Mmm… Tha’s kay,” this person responds and the aide puts a checkmark next to the words chicken breasts.
“How do you feel about people being able to buy frying pans to cook the chicken on?” the aide asks next.
“Fryin’ pans?” Mr. Government Official scoffs in disbelief. “We can’t let people be buyin’ fryin’ pantz! (he gets a bit of a speech impediment when he gets worked up — not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just necessary for me to point that out for the sake of dialogue) They gonna be spread’n the Covid if they out buyin’ ’em fryin’ pantz!” he screams.
“But Mr. Government Official,” the aide interjects, “aren’t the frying pans just a couple aisles over from the chicken breasts? With the people already in the same store? Why can’t they go to more aisles? Wouldn’t that actually space out the people more per square foot, especially if we limit how many of those people are permitted in the store in the first place?”
“Let ’em buy online,” the government official smiles mischievously.
“Let them eat cake,” Marie Antionette chimes in, and the Government Official, the aide, and Mrs. Antionette all share in an evil laugh.
Keep in mind that this person is getting paid to make decisions like this while you’ve been told it’s not safe for you to go to work.
Amazon is now officially Ontario’s “non-essential” item shop. They say it’s because they don’t want us going in places and spreading the virus, which makes sense in theory, but not so much in practice. According to the New York Times an Amazon warehouse typically has 600–800 employees working at the same time. All those employees touch all our stuff, then hand it to someone who packages it up in a box that’s four times too big for the item, then they pass that box to someone who dispatches it to a plane or a truck or carrier pigeon or something, then someone loads it up and the package travels somewhere — a freedom that packages currently have over humans, and then finally someone tosses it in a van and drives it to our home to throw at our door.
Maybe I just don’t get it, but It seems to me like a lot less people are involved in the act of buying a frying pan at the local shop — especially a frying pan that has already made the pollution-filled journey to end up on a shelf that it is currently collecting dust on.
Okay, so we can buy food, but just not things to cook it with.
“But you can still buy frying pantz online,” the government reassures us.
Okay, so we can’t buy the same thing if it’s down the street from us, but we can still buy it from a big warehouse that’s just in a different part of Ontario. That makes sense. Essentially what you’re telling us is that the people who are fortunate enough to have wifi and a credit card can still buy non-essential things if they want, but only from Amazon. You know, many classic non-essential items like cooking utensils or bath towels can be passed from a giant warehouse to our front door by a chain of people, but the people who don’t have wifi or credit cards, well they can eat raw chicken with their hands. Let them eat salmonella.
“There’s always curbside pickup,” the government points out.
Sure, from the stores that are offering it and for the people with cars and credit cards. If you can’t go through a drive-thru without a car, can you still do curb-side pick-up without one? Even if an employee can come out with my items and a debit terminal and pass them to me as we stand face to face, wouldn’t it actually be safer to just pay for them inside where the same employee is behind a shield of plexiglass?
Plus, curbside pickup is the equivalent to shopping that masturbation is to sex. It’s nice to know that we can scroll through pictures of frying pans online and maybe dream up the perfect one in our head, but it’s not the same as actually going in the store and seeing all 36 different voluptuous frying pans on display and being able to touch and feel them with our hands. Instead we have to describe the frying pan we’re hoping to get to a disinterested employee over the phone, who will then take that information and hopefully pick the right one out for us. It’s all the same fun that blind dating has but with shopping. “I said a 10 inch diameter, not radius!” you yell at no one as you remove the pan from the bag at home.
And you get employees dropping off bags to your car saying things like: “Here’s the pyjamas you asked for. We were out of the black ones you wanted so here’s some with pink unicorns on them instead. I hope they fit. If they don’t, oh well,” they shrug, “learn to sew.” At least it’s not like you don’t have the time to teach yourself how to do that now.
I remember back in the day when I was growing up, I used to be able to go to the store and buy a spatula, and then on the way home I’d pull up to a curb and some sketchy guy would come up to my car. “You got the stuff?” I’d ask. “Yeah, you got the money?” he’d ask back as he surreptitiously passed me a bag of weed and I handed over some crumpled bills from my jacket pocket. Now I can go and buy weed from a nice store where I pay tax on it, and on the way home pull up to some sketchy curb where a stranger comes up to my car and passes me a spatula on the down-low. The future is much different than I expected it to be.
Okay, so no spatulas or frying pans, but did you know that at least the garden centre is still open? If you’d like, you can head over to the nearest Walmart and pick yourself up an essential garden gnome, a real happy looking one to chase those pandemic blues away. If you’re a pregnant woman and for some surprise reason give birth earlier than expected, you can not go and buy clothes for your newborn child. Don’t even think about buying baby clothes, those aren’t essential lady, you should know that. Fortunately the garden centre is open for us so you can still go and wrap your baby up in a very fashionable burlap sack from the spring line.
This leaves a lot of gray areas in a black and white world. If the government has decided that edible things are essential but that something like underwear is not, well where does that leave edible underwear? I mean since underwear obviously falls into the non-essential category, because why would people need to buy new underwear? And since something edible falls into the essential category, are people still permitted to go and buy edible underwear so long as they’re eating them and not wearing them?
And remember last year when the government said: here’s $2000 a month on us, use it to get through these uncertain times, and you used it to try and get through those uncertain times? Then remember this year when your tax slips came in the mail and you opened the one from the government and it read: Remember all that money we gave you last year? Well, we kind of want some of it back. I know we said we were giving it to you and all since we told you you can’t work, but we’d like some of it back anyway. Sorry to break this news to you while you still can’t work. And you thought, that’s strange, why did you give me that much money if you wanted part of it back? That’s like grandma giving me $100 for my birthday in July and then asking for $20 of it back at Christmas. Why didn’t you just subtract the amount you wanted back and give me the difference to avoid this situation in the first place grandma?
But you ended up making your peace with it, realizing that you were grateful for the money that helped you and that you’ll just have to work extra hard this year to pay it back. Then you got a job! After months of not being called back to your old job because the place keeps opening up and closing down again due to lockdowns, you finally did the impossible and found a new job. Great news, now you can start working to try and pay the government back and reduce your debt.
The phone rings. It’s the manager of the new place and she’s telling you everything you need to start work on Monday. You’re so excited, financial-ish freedom here I come, you think to yourself as you hang up the phone. Immediately you get a sinking feeling in your stomach and your enthusiasm begins to wane. You just realized that you don’t have the tan khaki pants and the white shirts you need to start working there. What are you going to do? Obviously not go and buy clothes to go to work in, because everyone knows that those aren’t essential you big idiot. Get with the program.
So to recap: Everybody stay at home. None of you are different people who might require different things for the duration of this period of confinement. All of your differences are essentially inessential. Don’t buy things that aren’t edible or aren’t in the garden centre, unless of course you’re buying them from the one of the biggest companies in the world.
Amazon is struggling right now and really needs our help to keep them going. Please find it in your heart to make a purchase from their website so that Mr. Bezos can buy a private jet made of gold. If you spend $35 or more he will even ship your stuff to you for free. What a nice man. Mr. Bezos has grown tired of all his other private jets and would really like a new one. Gold is a very heavy metal that requires special thrusters to fly. It’s not fair that local business owners keep taking money away from Mr. Bezos to feed their greedy and hungry children with. It is essential that Amazon gets all the money you have left over after paying the government back and not essential that you might require more than raw food or gnomes while in isolation.
Have fun at home and try not to kill yourself — it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to do now that rope isn’t considered essential.
