Devil-tinted big box retailer Target has one great competitor that keeps its executives awake at night. No, not Wal-Mart—Amazon. It's Amazon that is poised to become the amorphous online "big box" of the future, leaving today's big, concrete boxes in a perilous position. But Target has a plan to save itself: it will give all of its customers an AMAZING shopping experience.
World-beating crap purveyor Wal-Mart turns 50 years old this year. They can celebrate because they're the world's biggest retailer and destroyer of the American dream; we can celebrate because the store has abandoned its plans to build a store in NYC, for the moment. And everyone can celebrate with this nice, furious rant sent to us by a former Wal-Mart employee.
Sure, the thousands of truly creative people who, through vicious twists of fate and circumstance, find themselves working at ad agencies, where their creative impulses are channeled into Skittles and Old Spice and H&R Block and other equally vacuous enterprises, are suffering an awful and soul-deadening fate. But couldn't it be more soul-deadening? How about if we made them do this stuff all night?
Since we started covering Target's voracious anti-unionism and labor woes last year, former employees have described the company to us as "humiliating," "'pleasant' slavery," and "the sketchiest place I ever worked," among many other things. But—to our surprise—Target is also one of the "World's Most Ethical Companies."
Advertising is the industry that people who were not lucky enough to get actual "creative" jobs end up in. These people—creative people whose artistic or literary dreams did not work out, often due to economic forces far beyond their control—find themselves in a position in which they are obliged to use their creative talents for purely commercial ends. Selling soap, so to speak. This causes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance. These people therefore expend quite a bit of time and effort justifying the position they find themselves in, in life. (As do we all!) Having justified their position to themselves, they seek to bolster their justification by attracting others like themselves into their same field. The more creative artists who do advertising for a living, the more of a real, justifiable, creative career it must be. They therefore use their considerable creative talents to sell the field of advertising itself, to their peers.
Oh-oh, a new study of entry-level investment bankers finds the young masters of the universe afflicted with "insomnia, alcoholism, heart palpitations, eating disorders and an explosive temper." And that's the young ones. Why destroy yourself like that? There are lots of safer activities than investment banking.
Tucker Max, Chad-in-Chief of the Beer Division of the Pussyhound Brigade (Duke Chapter), is back with an astounding and incredible offer for all you losers out there who would do just about anything to achieve your life goal of licking Tucker Max's sneakers clean as he Googled "misogynist slurs" and then read off every single entry, at you. You could be Tucker Max's new research assistant. Doesn't that sound great? A great job? Bitch?
Bloomberg LP is an incredibly successful media company. It is famous for tight security, tyrannical, controlling editors, plush offices which act like a luxurious cage to ensure that employees never leave the building. It's a place built to engender paranoia. That's probably why employees feel the need to write their tips to us on company stationery, and mail them to us.
Earlier this week, New Yorkers were shaken and alarmed by a report that Starbucks could be closing some of its restrooms in the city, leaving us all with nowhere to urinate except in Roger Ailes' face. The company denied the report, but this is simply too important of a story to "take their word for it." Now, the New York Times is on the case!
Life as an American attorney these days is little more than a steady progression of more and more degrading news stories about the ever-declining status of your job, and, by extension, the rapid downward spiral of your worth as a human being. When we last checked in on the unfortunate underemployed would-be litigators, they were getting their own formerly outsourced jobs backsourced to them, at a fraction of the pay.
Don't pull that trigger just yet, suicidal chronically unemployed Americans: Mcdonald's is hiring 50,000 new workers right here in the USA, for positions ranging from cleaning grease traps to supervising the cleaning of grease traps to creating spreadsheets that rank the most cost-effective methods of cleaning grease traps. It's all part of a McDonald's effort to keep its grease traps clean. Along with its image!
