The Corporatization of My Favorite Things

Corporations are the faceless entities that tell us what our health insurance will cover and spend their time endlessly buying and selling each other on the world’s stock markets. But these days, we all know how close these mindless drones are to our everyday lives. We pick up dinner at their fast food restaurants and purchase clothing at their retail outlets. Most, if not all, of us work for them. It’s become a cliché to complain about them. After all, what good does it do? They’re everywhere. And believe it or not, we’re the ones who asked for it.

The holy grail of the perfect “free market” economy, the beloved free enterprise system, is what we wanted. Be careful what you wish for. If you dislike being a nameless number in a faceless machine, earning money from the “man” so that you can put it right back into his pocket by purchasing the goods your neighbor helped create, you can thank yourself and the rest of us for the privilege. The dream was that people who were free to buy and sell according to the laws of supply and demand would do so, and that all would be right with the world. The problem with trying to recreate a dream within this imperfect world is that the people involved in it not only aren’t perfect themselves but also will take the quickest, easiest route to get whatever they want.

The first thing anyone in a position of power is going to do is cement that position. The second thing is improve upon that position. Both of those actions are most quickly and easily done by stepping on other people’s heads and taking what other people have. But you have to do it carefully. You have to make it look like you’re doing what’s best for the company you work for or the organization you head up. Easy enough, when you’re at the top.

We can’t really blame them. We’d do the same in their position. It’s the American dream: to rise to the top of the economic structure and then boss everyone else around with one hand in the cookie jar. Deny it if you want to, but you know deep down that you’re no different. That’s simply how we human beings are: flawed, imperfect, and selfish. It’s part of our survival instinct, the most powerful instinct of all.

The problem stems from the fact that we’re all like that, and that we all get a little jealous. Why should one person have all that power and money instead of me? Sometimes, he worked for it. But sometimes, it just seems like he lucked into it. Then we realize that he’s taking more than his fair share of the profits. Instant cause for rebellion. Certainly, no one would argue that anyone should get more than what they’re due. But the market is set up in such a way that there’s no method to tell what is someone’s fair share, and we’re the ones who set it up like that. We wanted the market to be free to do whatever it wanted and make as big a profit as it could. We thought that meant that we would be able to build our own capitalist dreams and live happily ever after. Instead, the big guys got bigger, and we got lost in the shuffle.

Now, some people are yearning for the days of the Mom ‘n’ Pop stores, the days when a new business had a few years to get on its feet before being crushed by the mega-corporations. Such small-town quaintness had its drawbacks, but at least you knew who you were dealing with, and everybody had a chance to give their dream a try. That wouldn’t work today. Small enterprises can’t support themselves. So what do they do? They farm themselves out to the big boys, wholesale or piecemeal. We can’t blame them. They can’t survive any other way since we buy all our food and clothes from the faceless machines that run our world. And we can’t afford to support the little guys since the faceless machines we work for pay us only enough to buy more of their own products.

Eventually, this won’t seem so bad. Eventually, things will get even worse or make a big change, and we’ll all look back on today as the “good old days.” In the meantime, we can watch the corporatization of our favorite things change the face of our world forever. It’s not just the new Walmarts moving into town or one big company buying another, sucking it dry, and reselling it. It’s the little things. The corporate sponsorships of school lunch items, the advertising spaces set aside within movies and video games, the way everything becomes more and more generic as it tries harder and harder to succeed at garnering enough attention to survive. Do we want everything to be the same as everything else? I hope so, because that’s what we’re getting.

No one would begrudge some start-up company the opportunity to make a little profit by partnering with a big corporation on a sales deal. After all, how else are they going to do it these days? But what that means in the long run is that everything becomes just like everything else. When the Dippy store has to buy and sell WeOwnEverything Corporation’s products, what happens to Dippy’s products? What happens to the customer’s options? They both disappear. Eventually Dippy becomes just another piece of the big machine, and the rest of us have to buy from the big boys whether we like it or not.

Humans are creatures of habit, so it’s no surprise that we’re most comfortable in a homogenous society, where everything is the same. There’s nothing to shock us, right? Well, almost nothing. And there’s nothing to confuse us, right? Except maybe that nagging doubt in the back of our minds about our lack of choices in this brave new world. We like to think that our freedom of choice is important to us, but the truth is, we willingly give it up every day. When you choose the same thing over and over, no matter how you rationalize it, you’re guaranteeing that tomorrow there won’t be any other choices.

There’s a lot of talk about the “fat cats” of corporate America, but we built those “cats,” and we built the machines that make them fatter. We did it because “capitalism is the fair way to run an economy” and because “it gives us choices about what to buy and what do with our lives” and because “corporations are efficient.” None of that is true, though. Capitalism is only as fair the people behind it. We’re losing choices and freedoms every day. And corporations are only efficient when it comes to making a profit, but they do so at the expense of everything else, from employee health and happiness to variety and uniqueness of product (not to mention quality). If the world were a game of Monopoly, this would all be a good thing. Profit is always good, right? What if it’s soulless, heartless, faceless, generic profit? Is it still good?