In The Not Too Distant Future

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Grocery checkout clerk:  I’m sorry, sir, your sale has been declined.
Liberal:  What?  My card is declined? Fine, I’ll pay cash.
Clerk:  No sir, the card is fine.  But the manufacturer won’t allow us to sell certain items to you.  I’ll have to remove them from the conveyor and you can buy the remaining items.
Liberal:  That’s ridiculous.  How can the manufacturer refuse to sell to me?  I demand to see a manager.
Manager:  Sorry sir, you’re the latest in a long line of customers who are having this problem.  You see, the manufacturer is engaging in a reverse boycott against certain people.  We’re prohibited from selling their products to the people being boycotted.
Liberal:  They can’t do that! They can’t refuse to do business with me.  I have rights!
Manager: Actually, they can.  The law says they can’t refuse to do business with people for discriminatory reasons like not baking a cake for gays, but they can refuse to do business with Liberals the same way the Liberals are boycotting Trump hotels.   Discrimination against people in the opposite political party is perfectly legal and since Liberals started the trend, it’s catching on everywhere.  They probably got your name from a mailing list of Democrat contributors or MPR members.
Liberal:   But I didn’t donate to any of those things.
Manager:  No?  Maybe you signed an on-line petition?  Or maybe one of your family members or Facebook friends did so you’ve been flagged because of that?  It could be a secondary boycott, same as when Liberals refuse to buy from Ivanka’s business because of her Dad’s politics.
Liberal:  This is bull.  I demand you sell me my items.
Manager:  I can sell you everything that’s not on the boycott list.  Let’s see, you can have, well, actually, sir, I’m afraid everything on this conveyor is on one list or another.
Liberal:  How is that possible?  How many boycotts are there?
Manager:  Only a few, but companies like Nestle own many brands and those are the brands you’ve chosen, like, for instance, Coffee Mate, Kit-Kat, Perrier, Honey Nut Cheerios, Friskies cat food.  You’ve also got Land O Lakes milk and butter, those are on another list.  Oh, here, you can have the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, they aren’t boycotting people like you.
Liberal:  People like me!!  Fine, if that’s the way you feel, I’ll take my business elsewhere.
Half an hour later . . .
Whole Foods Clerk:  I’m sorry, sir, your sale has been declined.
Joe Doakes

There are companies I’d be happy to have boycott me.

Very, very publicly.

7 thoughts on “In The Not Too Distant Future

  1. Course this to happen the Federal Government would need to maintain a database of citizens’ political posture. And you would have to type in your FCPP # before every purchase. All numbers would begin with 666.

  2. DMA,

    Someone already has those donor/party affiliation lists. While researching companies that I was thinking of investing in, I found out who many of the officers and senior leadership were contributing to.

  3. I have mixed feelings about keeping political contributions public information.

    I can’t get over the CEO of Mozilla getting fired because he gave a $1000 to the “wrong” side of a marriage initiative in Ca.

  4. DMA – I think it’s less the Fed than all the business out there. Think of all the things your phone knows about you. Or the rewards card you scan. Or, your credit card. They don’t even need to know that you contributed. Just track Facebook/Twitter likes, I’m not saying I could do it – I’m just a knuckle dragger that gets to ferment stuff for a living. But, I have little doubt that all the data is out there, and that someone has already turned it into actionable information. Just need someone to make it happen.

  5. Reward Card: I used to have a Cub card. After about the 5th time I used it and got NOTHING I put it in a drawer and never looked at it again.

  6. The picture that comes to mind here is a black market in goods people want whose makers won’t sell them to them. Great way for a company to cut their own profits and create a new class of resellers (“straw buyers”) in the process.

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