Ah, the glory days of America. Yesterday, the local market was out of eggs and bananas. There were long lines at too few staffed checkouts. There's a homeless encampment in the mall's parking area. This is in Silicon Valley.
Sounds like a combination of (a) panic-buying of commodities that people heard were in short supply, similar to the Great Toilet Paper Incident, and (b) local government that doesn't do anything about homeless encampments in mall parking lots. Over in my part of America, and as far as I can tell most parts of America, things go on as usual but with higher prices for some foods.
The only solace I find as Americans crumble into poverty and wage slavery is that there is no real better alternative in the world today. The entire world’s glory days are behind it, every place is getting shitty. Everything is expensive and few people are thriving. The future looks joyless and barely survivable.
To me the explanation for why everything got shitty all at once is obvious: the global pandemic “synchronized” all nations and produced hardship everywhere simultaneously. Fragile systems in every country were strained.
By any possible metric people in the world today live better than in any point in history. Sure, last two years created a minor setback, but it will be forgotten in the next few years, when there will be another "everything is good and will grow forever" period in the cycle.
Some people have bought into the captalism "always bad" trope regurgitated over and over in r/antiwork on reddit. I just tune out when I hear "wage slavery"
