Anyone can walk into a hypermarket and assemble a whole American Life.
“Hypermarket”, though a new term to me, flamed into vernacular in the 1960s. Essentially, the “supermarket” is outmoded, and there’s something much grander. A hypermarket combines the department store with the supermarket in an attempt to satisfy the full complement of standard Americo sapiens desires, so that any average person might visit one store and become a completely satisfied repeat customer. These stores are designed so that you might never have to leave one, or its orbit, or a community entirely dependent on one.
Isn’t that fantastic? One place. You’ll never have to learn another location, another name. You walk in, buy literally everything you need, and go home. Food, clothes, books, renovation materials, a casket for grandma.
The tragedy of the present era is being overcome one corporate merger at a time. NO LONGER does the luckless consumer have to trudge from American Eagle to Kroger to Ikea to Home Depot to fill their lives with material and satisfaction. Soon, the hypermarket will have consumed them all and be entirely capable of satisfying every single need with any single visit.
Now there are still limiting factors. First, there’s the limit to how much people can carry. Feckless homo sapiens didn’t evolve enough arms or a strong enough back to deal with all the material now available to him, meaning the modern aspiring hypermarket isn’t limited in its possibilities so much as humans are presently limited in how much they can consume, the lazy bastards. Second, there’s a limit to how much a company can cram into its stores, uniting the struggles of both housing everything and making everything available to the average consumer for ready, impulsive access. Finally, the constraint of how many people physically have access to the hypermarket, or how many people live close enough to it to get to its doors, how the store is laid out to process the human traffic once it arrives, how many people can walk in and out the doors at once, how many people can throw their money at you as quickly as possible.
Wonderfully, these limiting factors have a single, easy, already-available solution!
The Ultramarket.
Face it, we’ve long outgrown the juvenile supermarket, the adolescent hypermarket, and are fully grown, pubey adults looking for a way to never leave our domiciles. The Ultramarket dominates a full market sector and every structure within it by providing warehousing, communication between vendors and consumers, and the transportation of goods in the cheapest, fastest, most-accessible manner possible. Within the good glory of the Ultramarket, we all might spend our days, and our hard-earned dosh, cheaply, happily, and efficiently.
Whereas teens once wished they might have lived in the mall or Walmart might once have been a small town’s social center, thanks to Amazon and an increasing cohort of e-commerce Ultramarts, ever more of us live within the warm embrace of a convenience the Walton family can only grasp at, thirsty and wondering.
We thrive under the guiding hand of a well-managed international marketplace lorded over by a benevolent Bezosian Barony. The Ultramarket is handily assisted by linked, semi-competitive institutions in incestuous relationships. We do not have to leave our houses to socialize, Facebook allows this. We do not have to leave our couch to locate anything thanks to Google. Facebook helpfully sells the bits of conversation and personal information we put on-site, commodifying our socialization to predict what we want and then supplying us with an avenue to purchase it through ads. Google sells our search and consumer habits. Soon, none of us never need experience need. The warm embrace of the well-managed market becomes a ceaseless supply of what it is predicted we will need, and our subscription to Amazon Prime at Civic level will see that our water and food arrives on time unprompted with a standard deduction from our CivCoin (CC) account, extracted monthly in the form of a helpful automated tax. The next level of membership comes with free shipping for objects listed on the non-standard register of needs.
23 and Me will sell Amazon our genetic information as Alexa picks up on our emotional state, and for a small, nominal fee we can have specialized vitamins delivered to our doors, remote-prescribed pharmaceuticals dispensed by our smart-fridge into our filtered water. Pennies on the ounce, of course, Amazon finally fought Big Pharma and whittled them down, making insurance obsolete, as well as most doctor visits, as a quick scan of biometrics and a stool sample taken from the SmartToilet™ give AmazonMD all the information necessary for a quick diagnosis accurate more often than human doctors. Music consumption habits will provide Bezos data on music trends and where the past says the future is going and, with a little help from omnipresent marketing, push DoomHop as the next genre of note, having 15 DoomHoppers lined up and prerecorded for the genre release, with each wave of artist releases staggered appropriately to keep a broad interest alive, staving off inundation while keeping AmazonArtists ahead of the curve. If ever there is a glut in the production of one thing, a thousand bloggers are paid 100 CivCoin (CC) to generate a body of ghostwritten material so 100,000 AI rewriters can reblog portions of the writing as organically-generated real-people interest in the overabundant object so prices won’t have to dip too low to move all that stock.
This ever-deepening embrace is a furtherance of the influence the standard corporation has over culture and personal autonomy. This influence remains with us every waking moment, stays to tuck us in at night and sets at play in our dreams.
- 04.28.2019
