Reader R sends in this gem: Atlas Shrugged plates on a SUV doing deliveries for Domino’s. I don’t think this is quite “going Galt”, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Reader Interactions
139Comments
Comments are closed.
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.
Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.
Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?
The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.
Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.
The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.
Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?
Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.
Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.
“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”
Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.
Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!
So many bastards, so little time.
Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.
Celebrate the fucking wins.
The lights are all blinking red.
Books are my comfort food!
I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.
Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.
The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.
Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.
It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.
I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.
You are here: Home / Like a Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac
Betty Cracker
Hilarious. I’m sure the gas bill on that Tahoe cuts into the pizza delivery profits considerably too.
Pogonip
I see a lot of conservative bumper stickers on old beat-up vehicles. Saw a lot of Rmoney signs on the postage-stamp yards of tiny houses in less-than-wealthy neighborhoods.
raven
That decal on the window looks like the artillery piece on the bridge of my dad’s WWII destroyer!
clone12
Ayn Rand would totally approve an SUV made with government bailout money.
raven
@Betty Cracker: With that hitch I’m thinking it’s daddy’s truck used for hauling the boat.
NotMax
Suppose that LUNYTOON was already taken.
NonyNony
@Betty Cracker:
He’s probably delivering pizza as a second job because he doesn’t make enough money to pay the bills. Had a relative that did that for a while – total rightwing nutjob libertarian, worked a day job as a bookkeeper and a night job delivering pizzas.
Gave up pizza delivery because it was costing him money – his pickup truck guzzled the gas, Domino’s paid their drivers shit, and people who order Domino’s in the Midwest apparently don’t tip for shit. Plus the job was significantly harder than he expected it to be – what with there being some actual physical labor involved when he wasn’t driving pizzas from store to door.
He’s still a right-wing libertarian nutjob. And he’s still a lousy tipper. Some folks just have no empathy.
MattF
I know MoDo gets mixed reviews here, but she called out Powell fior lying about WMD and shows her mean side to both ex-Vice Cheney and his spawn:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/02/opinion/maureen-dowd-is-that-the-iraq-drumbeat-from-cheney-co-again.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0
ETA: Also, again, FYWP for audio autoplay. Especially at work.
Elizabelle
Ah, the far right Republican utopia that has become North Carolina.
Someone south of the border is laughing his/her ass off right now.
Violet
Is that a North Carolina plate?
@Pogonip:
Would be guessing those cars were driven by and the houses were owned or lived in by white people.
Neech
@Violet: Yep.
Joe Bauers
I would guess that’s Dad’s truck, and kid’s borrowing it for work.
Eric U.
@Pogonip: I was driving up I95 back in 2007 and there was some guy that had managed to tie up the traffic with his beat up old car by cruising at the same speed as everyone he passed (logical inconsistency, I know, you had to be there). When I finally managed to get around him, it turns out he had a Giuliani bumper sticker, I think it was one of the very few I ever saw.
SuperHrefna
If Atlas Shrugs too hard he may drop the pizzas.
cmorenc
An “Atlshrgd” license plate on a Prius would definitely be a sign of cognitive dissonance in its owner.
SatanicPanic
He’s a maker, not a taker. Make me a fuckin pizza John Galt!
Violet
@Joe Bauers: Don’t know about that. One of my friends had to resort to delivery pizzas for Domino’s when money got tight. Their business wasn’t doing well and he had one kid and another on the way and he had to do something to pay the bills. Don’t think he had that fancy of a vehicle, though. Although he did have the kind of business where they hauled things so I think he drove a larger vehicle.
Sherparick
While contemplating the Roberts’ court steady march back to the Middle Ages and the Papacy of Boniface, I missed LGM’s “This Day in Labor History” on Monday. I have now read it and it made me even sadder. But I did find out that Ann Coulter is a chip off the old (insert appropriate noun) as her Dad, John Coulter, was one of managers of Phelps-Dodge when it broke the USWA strike at its copper mine in 1983. http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/06/day-labor-history-june-30-1983
Ken
@Eric U.: Probably a false-flag operation by one of Giuliani’s political enemies.
(Not that that shortens the list much…)
Tripper John, MC
@SuperHrefna: Atlas Shrugged…beneath the weight of Domino’s exclusive HeatWave bag.
NotMax
@Eric U.
That’s two. One on Rudy’s own car, fer sure.
The other 9998 slowly mouldering in a landfill somewhere, which is as it should be.
Rob in CT
Hell, the other day up here in Connecticut, ferchrissakes, I passed an old beater with a confederate flag bumper sticker with the words “Fighting Terrorism Since 1861!” on it. The sheer concentrated derp of that thing probably powered the car itself.
Violet
@Eric U.: The other day I saw a minivan at the grocery store that had a Romney/Ryan sticker and what looked like an even older Romney sticker on it–maybe from the primaries, maybe from 2008 primaries. There was also another sticker admonishing drivers to drive safe because of “our kids”. As I walked past the minivan I saw that its front bumper on the driver’s side was damaged from an accident and hanging off the vehicle so low that it almost touched the ground. Yes, minivan with front end damage–be sure to tell everyone else to drive safely because kids. Classic conservatism–tell everyone else how to live their lives but rules don’t apply to them.
The Moar You Know
Riddle me this: here in San Diego, every goddamn Prius I see has GOP stickers on it. It was crazy during 2012. WTF is that about?
Also, Gadsen flag on total POS junkers and jacked-up megatrucks. That I expected.
Rob in CT
@The Moar You Know:
Oh, that’s easy. “I got mine, fuck you.” That’s most likely just “lower my taxes” in bumpersticker format.
NotMax
@The Moar You Know
Convoy to Bohemian Grove?
Belafon
@The Moar You Know: There’s a Prius I see on my way home sometimes that has a bumper sticker that reads “Not a liberal.”
opiejeanne
There is a pickup I used to see all the time at Home Depot, with a bumper sticker that reads: “Thank God for snipers”, among others that are far worse. I can’t remember the others but that one is by far the mildest of the collection. I have wondered what this jerk looks like, have never spotted him with the truck but always worried that with those sentiments he sounds unstable and might be armed inside the store.
I didn’t see it for about a year, thought he’d moved on, but then noticed it last week at the grocery store. Made me shudder.
What makes people this angry with the world?
opiejeanne
@Belafon: There’s a lawnmower repair shop with a small billboard, advertising how much the owner despises Democrats, usually something derogatory about the Washington state governor or senators. The current one reads, “Archie Bunker was a liberal”.
Rob in CT
@opiejeanne:
They cannot rule, so they feel they must ruin (apologies to Lincoln).
JPL
@opiejeanne: I was parked near a beat up van that had all types of stickers, many of them having to do with guns and the others with god. I just stood there and laughed when the owner of said vehicle returned. haha
Elizabelle
@opiejeanne:
He was paroled after his domestic violence conviction. What I think.
JW
@NonyNony: “Some folks just have no empathy.” Huh. Should read: “Some folks just have no sense.”
Elizabelle
@opiejeanne:
Do Democrats not mow their own lawns? Methinks a lot do. (Although maybe with push mowers, not powered.)
Why as a business owner would you want to tick off potential customers? Do Republicans consequently service their mowers more?
brantl
Interesting that he’s delivering the second shittiest national pizza chain’s pizza, unless Poppa John’s is worse that this, and worse than Little Sneezers.
Trollhattan
In Soviet Russia, Galt Gulch come to you, bring
delicioussubadequate pizzaDavis X. Machina
@opiejeanne:We’ve got a nut like that, but he’s a shrewder businessman — he’s a gunsmith.
Amir Khalid
@opiejeanne:
Archie was well on the right for his times, but he had a moral compass that steered him clear of the nihilistic extreme. By today’s standards of “conservatism”, I suppose that does indeed make him a liberal.
Belafon
@Elizabelle: We had an oil change place whose sign read “Free peace prize with oil change.” I stopped going.
Davis X. Machina
@Rob in CT: This is my pet peeve. In a little Maine town where one male in 10 didn’t come back from the Civil War — not one in ten men of military age, one in ten males — there are waaaay too many Confederate battle flag decal-ed cars and trucks.
These aren’t tourists, either. At the high school, in the student lot, it’s especially distressing to see. Those boys — I assume it’s boys — are the same age as the boys who went South and died at Cold Harbor, or wherever.
Alex S.
Wasn’t Atlas Shrugged about trains?
Trollhattan
@Elizabelle:
Probably doesn’t fix push or electric mowers. Half-price on all two-stroke equipment!
Tokyokie
On the day that Katherine Harris certified the tainted Florida balloting for George W. Bush (it was a Sunday), Limbaugh did a special edition of his show. I stopped by a convenience store in a predominantly black neighborhood, where the white cash-register jockey, an overweight guy in his mid-30s, was blaring Limbaugh’s show. A lot of the customers gave him grief over it, and he would solemnly respond about what a great day it was for America. When I got to the front of the line, I just told him that were I his manager, I would have fired him on the spot for consciously and needlessly pissing off the customers.
Ever since, I’ve wondered how the Bush administration worked out for that guy, who couldn’t have been making much over minimum wage (especially if he was working Sundays) and whether he still considers that to have been a great day for America. But I never stopped in that store again.
Trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
Archie’s “redeeming” quality was not liking anybody–equal opportunity if you will. (Adapted from the Brit series “‘Till Death Do Us Part” btw.)
Trollhattan
@Tokyokie:
Am certain he volunteered for the Marines and proudly served four tours in Iraq.
Yeah, typed that with straight fingers.
Glocksman
@Elizabelle:
Around here it tends to be more subtle than outright political statements.
Usually a Christian fish sign or ‘Christian owned business’ sign lets everyone know just what type of individual owns that business.
IMHO, someone who uses Christianity to promote their business is more concerned about Mammon than Christ.
Roger Moore
@raven:
Something like that. It seems a reasonable bet that this is a teenager earning some spending money driving the parents’ SUV. It’s the parents who got the Randian personalized plates, not the moocher/looter child.
Trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Since I can’t read the state on that plate, what state(s) offers eight-digit plates? California represses us with a mere seven, altough we get pictographs atop the alphabet.
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
The Prius is now just a car, not a political statement. Also, too, they let you ride solo in the carpool lane, which is like crack to the conservative mind.
Glocksman
@brantl:
Papa John’s is better, but that’s not saying much.
Besides I refuse to patronize Papa John’s after their founder revealed just how much of an asshat he was during the healthcare reform debates.
Little Sleazers would do better to just smear tomato sauce over the corrugated box instead of that nearly indigestible ‘crust’ they use.
scav
Funny that it also can be read as ATLas SHould Really G0
Woodrowfan
“Go Galt in 30 minutes or less!” If it takes longer, it’;s still NOT free you parasite.
Woodrowfan
we have teaparty license plates in Virginia now. They’re a reliable “asshole” marker. At first they all seemed to be on big gas-guzzling trucks, now I see them on all sorts of cars, 75% or more with middle-aged or old white male drivers, but have twice seen one on a car with African_American drivers. Apparently very confused AA drivers…
Roger Moore
@Davis X. Machina:
I assume some of the Confederate paraphernalia outside the former Confederacy is from Southern families that moved north. They really are trying to preserve and show off their Southern heritage, but the only easy, obvious symbol for them to choose is an awful one. I think it might be helpful if somebody could come up with an obvious symbol for Southern heritage that showed off something more positive than participation in treason.
Trollhattan
@scav:
I vote “ATLlanta SHit Or GO” (home?)
Belafon
To John or any other FPer: This rotating tag is including a backslash, which I am assuming was meant to escape the apostrophe:
Copied straight from the top.
Glocksman
@Trollhattan:
That’s a North Carolina plate.
opiejeanne
@Elizabelle: I suspect it is mostly an appeal to the owners of the yard service companies in the area; mostly white guys with undocumented employees who talk (rant) out of the other side of their mouth about “them illegals”.
We mow our own, most of our neighbors do, but the wealthy SOB (I say that advisedly) across the street has a yard service. This is the Eastside, just outside Seattle, with a mix of Republicans and Democrats on my street, and you can just about figure out how everyone votes by their houses and cars.
There is a nice tool sharpening job that we will not be taking to that guy.
Elizabelle
Today in reader comments:
NYTimes magazine: Can the G.O.P. Be a Party of Ideas?
reader comment: Can “The Onion” be the “paper of record”?
scav
@Trollhattan: That ATL was bleeding into my consciousness too. There’s that tempting GD at the end so it would be all Nina Simone were it not for that frustrating middle.
Ben Cisco
More and more, it feels like I’m being surrounded by the crazy. And they’re growing some world-class crazy here.
Really pisses me off.
Here’s the thing – Charlotte isn’t that bad, particularly compared to areas north, east, and due south of my current location. But McCrony and his pack of rabid weasels are doing everything they can to screw this place up – although every now and then he feints at pushing back.
We’ve still got a chance to turn it around if we hit the polls (and I mean HARD) come November.
If we don’t all we’re gonna get is GOT.
Mike E
@Glocksman: You caught me!
Well, I’m guilty of deliverin’ those discs in Charlotte, 25 yrs ago. I did recently note a Galtian plate on an SUV or a Lexus or somesuch, but they were only delivering freedom on the vapors of dinosaurs as far as I could tell.
max
@Trollhattan: Since I can’t read the state on that plate, what state(s) offers eight-digit plates?
The state appears to be South Carolina, and they use six digit plates, it appears. That’s a photoshop job.
max
[‘I have seen a beat-up 4×4 spray-painted in camo, and the overlaid with anti-global/anti-Prius warming slogans. Yup. A Prius would not look anywhere near that terrible.’]
Elizabelle
@Woodrowfan:
We have a fool up the street who used to fly the Tea Party flag (officially, the Gadsden flag).
Mercifully, he took it down after the commie fire department showed up to put out a fire in his garage and save his house.
Now he contents himself with bumperstickers for libertarian candidates.
SatanicPanic
Then again, at least it’s not one of those Rollin’ Coal clowns
Roger Moore
@Glocksman:
That’s what I think every time I see that stupid “biblical investing” crap in the Noisemax feed. The only investing advice I can remember from my reading of the Bible is from Matthew 6:19-21: build up your treasure in heaven, not on earth.
Paul in KY
@max: IMO, plate is a North Carolina one. Can see the ‘First in Flight’ motto at top of plate.
Quicksand
Betcha that’s the franchise owner — forced to make the deliveries himself because of the way Obunglercare is squeezing him.
(But the margin pressure Dominos puts on its franchise holders? Well, that’s just good ol’ American freedom right there.)
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
I think they do a better job of reporting the truth than most of the SCLM.
opiejeanne
@Glocksman: I agree about the fish symbols on businesses and business cards. When I was young and naive (and still attended church regularly) I hired guys with those things exactly twice, and both times they did a crap job. After that I refused to hire anyone using Jesus to advertise their business. One of my friends from church, an architect, griped pretty heavily about dealing with them as clients: they would ask for a discount because they were Christians.
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, and they get there first.
NotMax
So what has TCM got lined up for the 4th of July?
The usual, expected run of fare, but with one movie which deserves a mention primarily because it is lesser known.
That would be The Devil’s Disciple (Friday, July 4, 6:30 p.m. Eastern).
Is it a great film? No. Is it a good film? A reluctant yes, as it could have and should have been so much better.
Even so, the combination of Laurence Olivier, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster is well worth a look, if for nothing else to watch them valiantly working their hearts out to rise above the paper-thin and (very) loosely adapted story of Revolutionary-era personages, clearly having much fun doing so. Lancaster is especially sly in shooting an occasional blink-and-you-miss-it sparkling sidelong glance at the camera in a “Can you believe this?” kind of way.
kc
Maybe the driver is really a supremely talented inventor and captain of industry who is depriving us of the fruits of his genius by delivering pizzas.
That will teach us.
Elizabelle
@Glocksman:
re Christian symbols on business premises:
they say “Run!”
Ben Cisco
@Glocksman: If Domino’s “pizza” is tire rims with anthrax, Johnny Schnatts’ sh*t is tire rims smothered in ebola.
kc
@Davis X. Machina:
That is repugnant.
cckids
@Elizabelle:
Here in S. NV, there is a small medical supply store whose owner/operator LOVES Sarah Palin, has pics & some of her nastiest, most Obama-bashing quotes framed & up around the register. A HUGE percentage of the people who frequent med supply stores are on Medicaid, or otherwise have expensive needs that they are paying for outside of insurance. WTF is she thinking?
I mean, we spend thousands a year that Medicaid won’t cover for our son, and through us, Medicaid spends many, many thousands on him, and NONE of it will ever go to her store, even though it is the most convenient for us. Why would I support someone who appears to hate me & mine?
Davis X. Machina
@Paul in KY: AFL-CIO used to have a nice “First in Flight. Last in Wages” bumper sticker to go with the Wright Bros. commemorative NC tag.
Violet
@Woodrowfan:
Those drivers could be caregivers who are driving the car owned by the person they’re caring for. Or a “Driving Miss Daisy” situation.
Trollhattan
@max:
With the North Carolina clue, I am lead to the following:
One suspects with eight characters, spelling skilz R challenged.
ETA Holy crap, they offer 152 plate designs.
Belafon
@max: It’s North Carolina, also given away by the “First in Flight” motto at the top.
Woodrowfan
@Violet: Maybe. That’s a possibility. In one case it was clearly a family coming back from church.
StringOnAStick
You know those stickers you can buy of a dad, mom, various kids and pets in order to graphically represent the composition of your nuclear family? I saw one grouping recently that had every human in the lineup grinning widely while holding an AR-15, and the only kids were girls. I guess I should be pleased that the cats weren’t also holding guns.
Anytime I see a business using the fish or whatever code/signifier, that’s a business that I refuse to ever, ever patronize. If these folks want to make it about tribes, then I refuse to spend money with theirs. I suppose I should call and thank them for making sure I’m aware of where to NOT spend my money.
JustRuss
@Glocksman:
Matter of taste, of course, but I disagree. Years ago, PJ’s came to our town and had a deal where you could buy a coupon book good for one free pizza and a bunch of half-offs, for about the price of a pizza. After I got my free pizza I tossed the book away, it was that bad. Seriously, I wouldn’t eat PJs if they gave it away. And that was before I learned about John’s politics. Dominoes and Caesar’s I don’t mind, they’re at least edible.
That PJ’s closed down after about 6 months. They just opened a new store in town this year. Hopefully won’t last long.
srv
Rob in CT
I was just thinking (finally, sadly this is pretty obvious) that this could be a teenager driving mommy/daddy’s car.
Woodrowfan
@Belafon: feh, as a Dayton, Ohio native I think they should change it to “First in Flight Only Because We had Soft, Windy Sand Dunes”
Elizabelle
@cckids:
Good for you for not shopping at Palinheaven.
You got to hit these weasels in their pocketbook, and even then your Palin admirer may not get it.
Violet
@Woodrowfan: There are probably some African American teabaggers. You occasionally see one or two at their gatherings. Probably ultra religious types.
Belafon
@opiejeanne: There’s a billboard I see on the way home that has “Jesus is the Answer” right at the top, and below that “Two miles to So-and-So RV” (I forget the name of the company). I guess the question was “How do I take care of my RV needs?”
Mike E
@Woodrowfan: Jesus levitated that contraption, it’s not called “The Bible Belt” for nuthin’, I’m just sayin’…
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore:
Another NYTimes reader comment:
Paul in KY
@Davis X. Machina: Like that bumper sticker!
NonyNony
@Glocksman:
Um, no. There was a day years ago when it was better than Domino’s, but that ship sailed a while back. When I’m at a party where someone buys it, I have definitely noticed a severe drop in quality from previous years that they are apparently trying to hide by ramping up the amount of sugar in their sauce. The sauce is too sweet, the ingredients are of lower quality than I remember, and in general the pizza is overall worse. Domino’s, on the other hand, is still as bad as it was in the early 90s but not nearly as bad as it was after they changed their formula in the late 90s when it became inedible to most carbon based life forms. You know – it got so bad they had to go on national TV with an ad campaign that said “we’re sorry for making such shitty pizza for this past decade. We’ve got a new recipe and we’ll try to do better”. Still terrible, but slightly better than Papa Johns these days (at least around here).
(I stopped buying from Papa Johns when whatshisface revealed himself to be a hateful incompetent idiot of an asshole. I mean I understand that most corporate CEOs are hateful assholes, but most of them don’t broadcast their idiocy quite so broadly as writing that to provide health care to your employees you would only need to raise your prices by $0.20 per order. I mean – that’s so goddamn petty Ebeneezer Scrooge would have told you you were being a tightwad and tell you to just raise your goddamn prices by a quarter and advertise the shit out of the fact that all of your employees have health care – instead of telling people that the next Typhoid Mary might be making their pizzas and you don’t give a damn about it.)
Paul in KY
@Woodrowfan: Read that when the Wrights were looking for a place to build/test their design, they looked at wind tables & saw that Kitty Hawk had some of the highest average winds. They didn’t realize (before they got there) that the 14 mph average was actually an ‘average’ of how the wind there is either non-existent or is blowing 30 mph.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
Because you care more about politics than business.
Glocksman
@JustRuss:
A matter of taste, and possibly the effects of a franchise owner taking liberties with the approved methods and ingredients.
Locally, IMHO PJ’s is a little better than Domino’s but not by very much.
The Little Sleazers are all of the ‘Hot & Ready for $5’ stores, and they are truly the worst pizzas I’ve ever had.
Of the national chains, Pizza Hut is the best, though the local Una Pizza and Pizza King beat the shit out of the national chains.
Trollhattan
@NonyNony:
Recall thinking when he proclaimed that price increase, “So?” That somebody would think such a teensy price bump was some sort of pivotal argument was equal parts humorous and repellant.
And don’t get me started on that Whole Foods asshole whinging in the WSJ….
Woodrowfan
@NonyNony: better to buy from a small local outfit. Usually better pizza too.
Mustang Bobby
I was once following a big SUV with a sticker that said something nasty about Socialism because, y’know who is one..and it had a specialty plate touting Florida State University, which is, of course, a public school.
The Pale Scot
@NonyNony:
I need could figure the economics on that, it’s akin to the underpants gnome’s business plan.
Once you include wear and tear on the car, you’re lucky to break even. And if you told your insurance company what you were doing, it’ll cost you hundreds a month above what you earn. And with all the cameras around now and days i can’t imagine my unlucky ass getting away with an accident when i’ve got that glowing dingy up top.
Really the car insurance, from what I know the companies actively overcharge to avoid giving individual coverage. Ya, we want to cover a driver hurrying from point to point trying to cut his time so as to make a dollar more an hour. That’s the kind of rational customer we want.
Tokyokie
@NotMax: As I recall, Alexander Mackendrick was hired by Lancaster’s production company, Hill-Hecht-Lancaster, to direct The Devil’s Disciple, but because of production delays, Olivier wasn’t immediately available, and production was pushed back. As HHL already had Mackendrick under contract, he was assigned instead to direct The Sweet Smell of Success, the best movie and best performance Lancaster ever made. After that wrapped up, the team moved on to The Devil’s Disciple, only Mackendrick was fired a month into production and Guy Hamilton (who’s best known for directing Goldfinger) was brought in to finish the job.
I just find it odd that the production over which the principles were mostly concerned is largely forgotten today, but the movie that resulted in part of scheduling conflicts is considered a classic.
NotMax
@
Here, at any rate, Pizza Hut has become 100% inedible and barely tolerable aroma-wise.
North Koreans would shun it. “Thanks, but we’ll stick with the bark and grass.”
Frankensteinbeck
@cckids:
That she enjoys hating people. Haven’t you ever met hateful people? It’s a drug, and they will make major sacrifices for a regular fix.
@Woodrowfan:
See above. For some people, being a mean shit is more important than protecting themselves and their own. This includes self-righteousness, and the black conservatives I’ve seen seem to enjoy being the coveted Black Friend who rose above being a lazy moocher to be almost as good as a white person.
Calouste
@Elizabelle:
After finding out that Eden Organic Foods was one of the plaintiffs in the Hobby Lobby related cases, I’m extending the “stay away” to any brands that have religious references. Maybe there will be a few brands with religious references that are actually not actually owned by bigots, but I’m not going to do the work for them to find out, religion was apparently important enough for them to pick that name.
Glocksman
@NotMax:
Locally the best cheap pizza is CiCi’s buffet.
Not the best, but OK for the $6 you pay.
The Pizza Hut buffet pizza is awful, but their Hawaiian BBQ is OK.
Not great, but not bad.
Years ago, we went to Branson to meet some family from California and I was looking forward to eating at all of the places that you normally wouldn’t see in southwestern Indiana, including a California Pizza Kitchen’s.
My relatives insisted we eat at fucking Shoney’s!
‘We don’t have those in California’.
Scratch
About bumper stickers, one time I saw one showing a picture of Dubya waving his hand and it was captioned, “Miss me yet?”
If I had had a Sharpie marker on me, I would have been highly tempted to write “No.”
SatanicPanic
@StringOnAStick: I saw one, but instead of people, it was just guns. My family= a collection of guns. That’s just sad.
Zoogz
I constantly pass by the house in Illinois whose owner got the highly coveted “JONGALT” plate for the state. Said owner also has a mint-condition Scout (IIRC) that has the license plate “RDRN STL”, and another vehicle that simply reads “DNCONIA” Took me a while to figure out what the heck the Rearden Steel plate was until I saw the John Galt reference… ahwell. Must…take…pictures…
Frankensteinbeck
@Trollhattan:
I worked for Papa Johns years back. He made his fortune by obsessively experimenting to make better pizza than the competition and paying his employees better so they’d produce higher quality work. Then he got rich and everything turned 180. The company became a Dilbertian nightmare of penny pinching labor cost calculations, regulations that could not be followed, and mission statements that reversed how you did everything once a month. He stopped issuing raises, basically ever, until minimum wage caught up with his once better-than-competitive pay scales. At the bottom rung of management, I got a box seat to watch how the whole management hierarchy above me was run solely on personality politics. District managers spent half their time schmoozing. Once you hit regional manager, schmoozing was your only job.
The perfect example of how Schnatter’s ego took over happened just before I left. He took about a dozen of his oldest, most successful stores and refurbished them in green marble, decorative bronze, new facades, the whole nine yards. It’s primarily a delivery business, so of course there was no affect on sales. Store staff didn’t get a penny in wage increases, and the amount managers were allowed to spend on labor was squeezed tighter than ever – but ‘ol Papa John was willing to throw away millions to build glorious temples to his own greatness.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Scratch: Someone at my former employer put a large poster of that up in the hall. When I walked past again, horns, moustache, and goatee had been added in black sharpie.
The grafitti artist is the only one I’m still in regular contact with….
Elizabelle
@Calouste:
Eden Organic Foods, you say?
Times have changed since Eve was in the garden. This company needs to keep up.
Trollhattan
@Frankensteinbeck:
Wow, depressing–take what made you successful and refudiate it with prejudice. Appreciate the view from inside.
xenos
@NotMax: The Devil’s Disciple is a relatively minor George Bernard Shaw play. I think they had it at Williamstown Summer Theater about ten years ago.
Trollhattan
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
The “Miss me yet?” poster demanded the photo of Dubya ducking the thrown shoe. That, I could get behind.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Sort of related, I saw a red recent model Mercedes ragtop, probably an E class. It know wasn’t an SLK AMG; I know what those look like as a friend has one. in any even, I notice it because the driver looked like an obnoxious dipweed. When he pulled out of the cross street in front of me, I knew my eyes did not lie. The tag was OBJCTVST. Sadly, I was not in a position to photograph it.
Frankensteinbeck
@Trollhattan:
It’s an ugly story. That was not a good time in my life. I couldn’t afford to quit. Instead I was fired.
You see, among those unfollowable regulations, if the money balance is off by even a penny at the end of the day, you have to recount and then – at 3am – call the district manager so you and they can do extra paperwork.
The money never balanced. Ever. Too many people handling the money. I don’t think it happened even once during the years I worked there, for any manager. Over time it would balance out, five bucks behind four days, twenty ahead one day. Needless to say, no manager was calling the district manager every single night at 3am. The instructions I got from my store manager was to keep any extras and use them to make up the losses, and if things got bad the manager would fill out the rest out of his/her pocket. As far as I know, every store did the same thing, although I can only state for absolute sure from our store.
One night the new – and much-disliked for being mean – district manager randomly checked the money logs for that night, found the small imbalance. I was the assistant manager on duty. My store manager proclaimed innocence and threw me to the wolves, of course. Not sure if I blame him. She fired me without a warning or review, which was against both the law and company policy, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.
ADDENDUM – PJs was also the only place I’ve heard ‘nigger’ used seriously and in person as an ethnic slur, when it was explained to me why one of the most competent assistant managers in the area would never get his own store. He was unacceptably black.
WereBear
Man, I hope that doesn’t happen to me. :)
The “becoming an a-hole” part, that is. The rest is just fine!
WereBear
@Frankensteinbeck: That sucks. It does explain why there are assistant managers in the chain of command.
Living well is the best revenge, no?
Glocksman
Same thing when I worked as a cook/manager/gofer at a locally owned buffet.
The owner wasn’t all that anal about a few dollars, but he eventually installed cameras after the register started consistently coming up short by $20-$40 every other night over a period of time.
It turned out that the thief was his 16 year old daughter. :)
Tokyokie
@Frankensteinbeck: The very fact that Schnatter insists on being in every one of his commercials was enough to convince me of his outsized ego. Yeah, it worked for Dave Thomas of Wendy’s, and maybe it was just an act, but he came across as likable and having a good sense of humor. Schnatter comes across as positively creepy, and that he doesn’t know that — and doesn’t have single adviser who will so inform him — smacks of ego, nothing more.
Kristin
I saw a bumper sticker recently that said something like, “I work so Democrats don’t have to.” It was on a pretty shitty car. Do they really think none of us work? Do they think I bought my brand new Acura with government assistance?
Frankensteinbeck
@Glocksman:
And theft did happen, but it was surprisingly rare and easy to spot. It would be much larger amounts and regularly negative, instead of bouncing around.
@Tokyokie:
Yeah, he did a tour to admire his beautiful new stores, and damn was he phony. Could not have been more obviously taking a road trip with his VP buddies and pretending that was work.
The whole Papa Johns experience was very formative to my opinions on MBA culture and why and how they’re assholes. Sure, they’re greedy, but greed is secondary. It’s about ego. Schnatter could have raised his pizza prices and nobody would notice. It happens all the time. But how DARE anyone tell him what to do. Spitting on people and being praised for it is one of the biggest ego rushes around.
I think they’re also insecure. Their jobs are the top level are so easy, they have to do something to pretend they’re important. Thus the constant reorganizations and mission statements and codswallop.
@Kristin:
Yes, they do. Self-righteousness and cruelty. The abuser knows that he has the moral high ground and everyone else deserves what he does to them.
They hear ‘47% don’t pay income taxes’ and think ‘47% of Americans don’t want to work and are living off my money.’ It makes them feel good.
g
Dominos. Figures.
nellcote
y’all should look into frozen pizza. They’ve improved a lot in the last couple of years.
Tokyokie
@g: I do not think it is coincidental that the rise of MBA culture roughly coincides with the stagnation of wages and the growth of income inequality. MBA culture is little more than maximizing “shareholder value” and only for the short term. Only by narrowing one’s focus and deliberately refusing to see the broader picture of one’s actions can most people who are not clinical sociopaths justify the misery they cause. (I first realized this while I was in law school — and it’s largely the reason I never sat for the bar exam — but I think such tendencies are even greater among MBAs.) When short-term economic gain becomes the only “good” one pursues, one necessarily must dispense with any other notion of morality to which one might have subscribed, and to the extent that such pursuits are incompatible with, say, Christianity, such religious indoctrination is set aside. (Back in law school, I remember having a discussion with the CPA who was pursuing his J.D. who was the president of the Christian Law Students Association and who planned to become a tax attorney. I asked him how, as a practicing Christian, he could justify spending his life working to shift the nation’s tax burden from the wealthy onto the poor. He could not grasp what I was saying.) Thus a Mitt Romney can accrue a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars through actions that not only fail to produce economic growth but actively undermine it by destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people, yet still consider himself to be morally superior to virtually everybody on the planet. Were his perspective broad, he could not do so.
But the gibberish I’ve heard from virtually every MBA I’ve encountered is a load of crap, like the incantations of a cultish priest speaking in tongues. Leveraging brand equity across a spectrum of markets, oooba gooba shazam. They’re all not merely completely useless, but positively detrimental, and I really wish FEMA would finish building those camps so we could send every last one of them there tomorrow.
Betty Cracker
@Glocksman:
Hahaha! I used to rob my dad blind when forced to work at the family salt mine during summer vacations as a teen. Of course, he didn’t deign to pay me, so I didn’t feel any guilt about it.
gelfling545
@Violet: My “favorite” (actually, I was horrified) bumper sticker was the “Abortion Kills Children” one on a car I was stuck behind for some time in which there were 3 children, all probably under 5 years of age, standing in the back seat looking out the rear window.
Violet
@Kristin:
Yes, of course they do. Especially if your skin isn’t white.
Calouste
@Frankensteinbeck:
I don’t think jobs at the top level are necessarily easy, it’s that there are very few, if any at all, personal consequences to making mistakes once you have reached that level. On the other hand of course, when you run a large pizza chain, all the real work growing the business has been done once you’re past the 100th or 200th store, and the rest is pretty much auto-pilot so the reorganizations and mission statements are there because there isn’t really that much important to do. (This does of course not apply to businesses that operate in a faster changing environment, where you can’t just sit on your arse or you end up like Blackberry.)
JustRuss
@Glocksman:
I don’t care who makes it, neither Hawaiian nor BBQ pizza is OK, and I don’t even want to contemplate the spawn of their unholy union.
Roger Moore
@Kristin:
I’m not sure they really think. That kind of thing is about making a statement, not about hewing closely to objective facts.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think the greed is more about ego than about actually wanting stuff. They want to prove they’re better than everyone else, and money is how they keep score. That’s why they keep demanding more money, even when they couldn’t spend what they have in a dozen lifetimes.
Talentless Hack
I read that “Like a Dickhead Sticker on a Cadillac.”
J R in WV
Pizza Hut crust is like stale saltine crackers with tomatoe sauce rubbed into it.
In Arizona in the winters, there are a lot of really big Dodge RAM trucks, and almost all of them had anti-Obama bumper stickers, pro Romney stickers, etc. And the only thing I could think about that was:
Of course, they couldn’t perform that great leap of logic, envision where their parts to keep their trucks on the road would come from without a company behind the trucks.
Hopeless dupes, all of them!
Mister Papercut
I feel like if the scenario in this photo didn’t exist, Charlie Pierce would have had to invent it.
jimbo2112
@NonyNony:
Speaking of rightwing nutjobs, I bet the Kochs are really shitty tippers.
Origami Isopod
@StringOnAStick: Would it have been somehow better if they’d been all boys?
steverinoCT
@Tokyokie:
Rather late to the party, but in Dave’s defense I read somewhere that he actually was just as he appeared in the commercials. Which is good to consider, that nice guys in charge do exist.