Dwight Macdonald coined the term midcult, defining middle culture by its aspirations to universality. Midcult lay between avant-garde and schlock, broadly likable, smart enough to feel elevated, bland enough to not challenge your palate.

The customer is not an individual, but part of a unified front, and so it’s imperative that a company cede to their demands.

To be a service worker is to be in constant deference to Karens, yes. But in retail, a Karen can be anyone. Karen is a mindset born less of class, gender, or skin color than of the relationship between employee and customer, which is not unlike the relationship between product and customer.

His so-called attachment to objects seemed, more than anything, to be a problem of ontology. He couldn’t find the line between value and valuelessness, between want and need, between satiety and hunger, between thing and thing. To lift one object from the pile was to hoist the whole mess, every decision tugging a thousand more behind it.

Where my cousin saw waste as a form of excess—it was having something you didn’t need—my grandma saw waste as the act of a careless and unimaginative person.

I was asked again and again to prove my worth, the assumption being that I had it in vast quantities. Working retail is the exact opposite. You are presumed unspecial the moment you don a name tag, a smock, a novelty visor.

I’d learned this in high school when I’d looked for summer jobs only to find that summer jobs didn’t really exist anymore, because the people who fill them don’t really exist. If you have money, your summer job is pre-collegiate grooming rituals, all your unpaid internships and philanthropy. If you don’t have money, your summer job is the job you

we were not the kind of group who could comfortably sustain such blatant, undisguised togetherness. We needed a pretext. Costco was our play.

At first, it was fun, dictating how often a fake human could pee. But it quickly became tedious when I realized how much of living is dedicated to these mundane tasks, and how, if you are not programmed to do them almost without thinking, they consume you, and you again become a child.