GET YOUR HAPPY ON! - a meliorist worldview

This is something I have to get off my chest. It’s been bothering me for way too long. I lived in Dallas for five years. It’s a city that shouldn’t exist.

If it wasn’t for oil and air conditioning, Dallas wouldn’t exist. Seriously, it’s a gigantic shopping mall.  Don’t worry, I’m not crapping on Texas; I love Amarillo, Austin, Fort Worth, Lubbock, and San Antonio, but Dallas is disgusting. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more collagen injections and silicone implants than in Hollywood, and more strip clubs than in Las Vegas. It’s hard to tell the difference between the call girls and the trophy wives. It’s the city that shot JFK, and it should be no surprise that Dallas is the birthplace of “Needless Markup.”

Needless Markup is perhaps the worst store in the world. Their merchants sell gaudy and impractical goods at 200 to 500% the actual value. I can appreciate that they have a wide variety of unique and hard to find items, but doesn’t that ultimately translate as “Not Made by American Workers”? Do you really need a Faberge beer can cozy just because Jenna Hilton has the same one?

When an item has to travel thousands of miles in 10-inch thick Styrofoam containers just so that it will look fierce when held in your Gucci-manicured hands, I’d like you to ask yourself what kind of a message are you sending to future generations of consumer zombies? (“Labels. We need labels.” )

Foreign-made goods add millions of tons of carbon waste to the atmosphere when they are shipped here. Diamond hunters and precious metal miners fuel genocide and terrorism with their shady dealings. The American economy suffers when money is carelessly spent on frivolous and overpriced merchandise, when our dollars could be helping to feed families. When we rationalize our purchase with “I just had to have it!” are we doing right by our children and their children’s children? Dooming them to futures of debt slavery and landfills brimming with packaging waste?

I am convinced that no store in America is more responsible for the hyper-consumption in America than Needless Markup. They started it, but you can finish it — with your dollar votes. You have to participate in the market, right? You have to buy something if you want to eat, right? So, you might as well say something with your money.

Be good to yourselves and your pocketbooks, my friends. Buy American-made goods and American-grown produce from local shopkeepers and local farmers (not Wal-Mart!), and give back to your communities. We will all be much better off in the long run. Trust.

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