In which I realize something about my generation. We distrust success.

Dear Starbucks,

Back when you were the new guy, we were super into you. We drank your coffee by the gallon. We drove out of our way to stop at your new stores on our way to work.

Then time passed, and you became this giant behemoth with stores on every single goddamned corner in the nation, and we dropped you like you were hot.

You had gone and done the unacceptable: you’d made it. You’d quit being our little local NW business-that-could, and become everybody’s damned coffee shop. You slut!

Now we avoid you because you’re no longer exclusive and hip and we go to local coffee shops instead. We talk shit about you whenever we see your green logo on a quaint downtown Main Street USA because your coffee ain’t like it used to be, back in the day when our love was new.

Well, being that all these truths are self-evident, I just wanted to let you know that I have a friend who recently started working for you and she’s changed my attitude. She overflows with enthusiasm when she talks about your corporate culture and your desire to give back with your ethical sourcing, environmental stewardship, and community involvement.

It occurs to me that you’re actually big enough to make a difference, if you really want to. The fact that you’ve over-saturated your market is our fault as much as yours: we threw money at you for twenty years. What were you supposed to do? Ignore it?

Keep up the good work. Be a good behemoth. I’m proud of you.

Warm regards,
Mush

I shopped at Walmarts because I was young and poor and they were cheap. Then they took over the world and now I loathe and hate Walmart. Same for Starbucks, Body Shop, and even Amazon.

Some of these businesses still get my money because they’re either really good at what they do or they’re the most convenient, but I no longer feel any kind of real emotional loyalty to them, like I did when they were little and new.

As soon as a business reaches a certain level of success, I quit trusting it.

Remember when Amazon deleted books off of people’s Kindles without warning, how outraged we were? Remember when they re-indexed their database and removed GBLT material from easy view, how offended we were? If a small company had made such a blunder, we would have accepted an apology with a grin. “Shit happens,” we’d have said, and kept supporting them. But when a big company does something like that we suddenly all put our conspiracy hats on.

Well, sometimes. Other times we just ignore it and keep shopping there. We know, for instance, that Walmart is a community-killer, but we keep shopping there because we’re brainwashed to think that it’s both cheaper and more convenient (which it isn’t if a store has been open for more than four years). We know, for instance, that Blockbuster censors the films they carry¹, but we keep going there too.

We just don’t like it.

What size does a company have to be to earn our disdain? Why is huge success a target of such dislike? Where did I even get this attitude? If I inventory my opinons, I really do loathe big businesses, even if they’re big because I selected them and gave them money for years. Why do I like underdogs? Where did this attitude actually come from?

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¹ Googling this assertion these days comes up with a bunch of carefully-worded spin most likely seeded by Blockbuster itself saying that Blockbuster doesn’t censor films. Well of course they don’t literally censor films, they’re a rental place and not editors. But they do refuse to carry titles until the studios or distributors censor them to the organization’s Christian preferences (for this reason, I have never been a Blockbuster patron) and they got away with it because they were the largest rental channel in the nation for so long and had the clout to make such demands. Now they’re seedy little brick-and-mortars where they still exist at all, so I really don’t care if they demand censored films.