Why, Big Y, Y?`

The grocery chain's descent into MAGA is really sad. Best Little Debby's displays ever.

I know that my fury is irrelevant in light of everything that happened today, and yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, etc., all pretty horrific, back to the day when he descended an escalator and began the process of pulling the nation into this black hole we’re in.

But in my defense here, my rant serves a larger purpose, addressing a bigger question about why crazy people market their products based on their craziness, which seems counterproductive? When the Dodge Ram dealer over in Red Hook started putting American flags on the pick-ups in an apparent bid to sell cars, I thought, logically, I think: Why, if you want to sell stuff, would you market your place promoting an ideology that some of your potential customers might find tacky, given the devaluation of the flag’s meaning since that escalator ride? Don’t you want to sell more cars? Why not just fly balloons? Lots of car dealerships fly balloons from their cars out on Rte 9, right?

Balloons are apolitical; “Honey, are those balloon-clusters on the cars in the Ford dealership super-colorful or what? Maybe I should pull in and let a man who combs his hair forward, wearing a Burlington Coat Factory clearance-rack jacket, himself desperate, at this salesmanship juncture, to save his own life, sell me a car?”

Obviously, the Ram dealership doesn’t expect patriots to pull in at the spur of the moment to lay down $150,000 on a 2024 Ram TRX; they’re just confident that you and their mutual love of the flag will lure you in to selling you a ‘17 Durango with 227,000 miles on it whose universal joint will start leaking a week from Tuesday.

(There’s an irony here, given that Rams are manufactured by Stellantis, N.V., headquartered in Hoofddorp, Netherlands, which also designs and markets Alfas, Citroens, Fiats, Maseratis, Opels and Peugots. Prospective 2024 Ram TRX buyers would buy it whether the flag was America, Paraguay, Uruguay, or any ‘guay, for that matter.)

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But so anyway, speaking of weird but also evil marketing, in Great Barrington, MA, there’s a Big Y supermarket. The Y has 84 stores in Massachusetts and Connecticut. It’s huge in those two Democratic states. When we first started going to ours, it had a large sign above the main entrance about being proud that it was American-owned, but whatever. Not a deal-breaker; I like America as much the next guy, and it was the only place I’ve ever been in that stocked Little Debby’s Unicorn bars in season, though I never figured out what the season was.

But the most impressive deal at our Y, before we gave them up last week, was the custom-cake section.

wherein you could order a celebratory cake from the three-ring binder that is cooler than any plastic diner menu ever, or order a custom one for the party after the 8-and-under soccer team wins its league, with blue cursive frosting spelling, “The Bluebirds Rock!”

Then one day the large Big Y flag on the large pole in front of the large store was at half-mast. Turned out it was for total right-wing weirdsmobile Charlie Kirk being killed. Questioned, a manager said that the whole chain was told to do it, company policy.

By now I was beginning to wonder whether I should continue to frequent the Y, what with Guido’s lying literally a few hundred feet away. Unlike the Y, Guido’s caters to the higher-end people in the The Berkshires, our region, where, 120 years or so ago, gilded-agers built “cottages” that were lots bigger than what we think of as cottages. because they thought Newport to be too gauche.

(This one now houses guests who pay for various treatments related to the word “spa,” dollars be damned.

(I have no idea what’s happening up there in this one, because I haven’t been invited.)

Guido’s is aiming for the second-home-owning “citiots” (i), the folk who don’t find it pretentious that when you drive into Great Barrington, where street musicians used to smoke weed while playing Arlo Guthrie songs (Alice’s restaurant was 10 miles north in Stockbridge), a sign announces that you’re entering a ”Cultural District” (ii)

At Guido’s entrance, its uber-high-end cheese department encourages you, before buying anything in the store, to toothpick-graze for free a half-dozen different cheeses from a half-dozen different countries, crackers and baguettes included, before then roaming the aisles to purchase an air-dried ribeye steak at $59.99 a pound or, in the kitchenware department, a cutting board whose cost suggests that it was made from rare hardwoods sourced from the jungles of Papua New Guinea.

I’m not putting Guido’s marketing strategy down. A reliable source told me that since they started giving away free samples of cheeses, they’ve sold a lot more cheese, so there you go. I myself have eaten a lot of free cheese at Guido’s before then way-overspending on chicken apple-cured sausage that turns out to not taste cured or apple-y in any way.

But at Guido’s, I never mind rounding up my dollar because their causes are always causes I seriously believe in. But then, I’m a libtard (iii) sucker for anything, so I’d give to Chilean sheep farmers hurting because the local grass is inedible because of an oil spill.

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But so anyway, sitting side by side, even sharing a piece of parking lot, Guido’s and the Y could have continued to wage a perfectly passive class-civil war, sort of like The Odd Couple, each happily not doing badly, revenue-wise because while Guido’s demographic is richer, there are a lot local people living in the dark folds of those same Berkshires, just not skiing on them, and they need olive-oil too, if not necessarily from Sardinia. They come from munition manufacturing, saw-milling, railroading and working the landz.

Then, Dick Cheney died, and the Y’s flag went half-mast again. Three days later, it was still down. A lady at the customer-service desk told me, not all that happily that I was asking, that it would stay lowered until Cheney’s actual funeral, which, it turned out was another two weeks away. It turned out to be 17 half-mast days mourning the guy best known for shooting pellets into the face of fellow quail hunter and Texas-Republican heavyweight Charlie Worthington, who suffered a heart attack caused by the proximity of a pellet to his heart (iii)

There was beginning to be too much smoke for no fire, right? So, it didn’t take a lot of clicks to discover that The Y and I.C.E have been partnered for a decade, when the chain volunteered to be “the first New England chain” to be part of I.C.E.’s “IMAGE” distinction. To have been accepted for the prestigious designation, they had to certify that (I quote)

a) “they’re hiring workers who are legally eligible to work in the United States (e.g., using E-Verify and audited Form I-9 reviews)”

and

b) “Reducing unauthorized employment and employment on the basis of fraudulent identity documents.”

So now, I’ve been posting these guys around the store. They tear down some of them, but I keep finding places they never thought of.

(i) local slang in my town for the people coming up from NYC carrying the invasive virus.

(ii) If your town has a theater and you can walk on its sidewalks to get to a minimum number of art galleries, Massachusetts will give you a sign certifying your commitment to Jacob’s Pillow’s summer dance festival and other culturosities.

(iii The previous sitting vice president who shot someone was Aaron Burr, with heavier consequences.

(iv) when I was spraypainting the word RESIST into a crosswalk one night, a man burst out of a restaurant and said, “Whatcha doin’, libtard?” I thought it was obvious.