I got a new laptop for Christmas. I was pretty excited, as my old one is currently being used as an ugly paperweight. It can’t detect the BIOS, a memory chip is failing, and also the ‘i’, ‘k’, ‘l’, ‘m’ and ‘ keys don’t work – so it’s not terribly functional. I was hopeful that this new one would last for maybe more than a year, and so I went out to go get a laptop case for it to protect it from potential laptop-threatening bumps and bruises caused by my clumsy self.
But where to go? Should I go to Best Buy, which is far away from my house and marks up the prices on everything? Should I go to Target, just as far but probably cheaper? Or should I go to Walmart, which is closer and probably the cheapest but very much a Satanic conglomerate of evil and exploited workers and crushed local businesses and weird fluorescent lab lighting that makes me want to hurl the moment I walk into one of its stores?
I elected for Target, but then there was the question of whether or not Target is really that different from Walmart anyways, maybe not as wide-scale, with a few more donations to charities, and nicer looking store-fronts – but aren’t they basically the same company, except that they cater to a higher class of consumers? Are classist notions informing my choice? What about the extra gas that I consume on my way to Target? Am I simply contributing to our further dependence on gas and oil by doing this? What if I get there, and purchase the case, and it turns out to be the same product available at Walmart, from the same factory/sweatshop, and I’ve accomplished nothing but to reward a different company for the same exploitative practices?
What’s my alternative? Where in the hell am I going to get an organic, fair-trade laptop case anywhere near Wichita, KS? Do I even need a laptop case? Or should I just use a plastic sack, which happens to be non-biodegradable, requires the use of oil and petroleum to manufacture, and also is the number one cause of death of green sea turtles, who mistake the sacks for jellyfish, their favorite snack, and choke on them? And after contributing to global warming and destroying the sea turtles, after all that, would the plastic sack prevent me from knocking over my laptop and shattering it to unusable bits in one fell swoop and thus rendering obsolete the product of the hard labor of downtrodden Guatemalan workers who probably assembled that very laptop? Why can’t I be normal, and just happily consume products and further our dependence on foreign labor without a second thought? Why does dollar-voting have to be so damn difficult?
As it turned out, the end result was probably the same as if I’d never given it a second thought at all – I ended up using my purchasing power to buy a laptop case that was likely manufactured in some third world country sweat-shop, and along with it, some ibuprofen to deal with the headache resulting from trying to think through all of these things.
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