The Inherent Socioeconomic Unfairness of the Well-Endowed
By: Matthew Maniaci
Tags: Inequality, Billionaires, Satire, Economics, Humor

The Inherent Socioeconomic Unfairness of the Well-Endowed

Photo by Anton on Unsplash

So, I’m a man, and all men come in different shapes and sizes. Some men are tall, some are short. Some are chubby, and some are jacked. I’m fairly average in most ways except one: I have big hands.

As the owner of big hands, I require extra-large gloves. Generally speaking, standard gloves don’t fit me, and can actually constrict my fingers and get all pinchy and uncomfortable. So, extra-large gloves it is.

I tend to go through a lot of gloves in my typical year. Not as many as some, but enough that it’s more economical for me to buy gloves in packs of 36 to save money. However, being a man with big hands, it can be hard to find big gloves at affordable prices.

My preferred place to buy extra-large gloves is at Target. They have the best prices of any brick-and-mortar store that I go to. However, they are really bad at keeping my extra-large gloves in stock, so I sometimes find myself having to go without when I run out and they don’t have any available.

Recently, I tried to order them from Target’s online store, but they don’t ship extra-large gloves for some reason. So, my best bet is to try the store periodically to see if they’re in stock again. This is time-consuming and frustrating, so I generally give up after one or two tries.

The problem is, the other stores in my area have extra-large gloves at much higher prices than Target. A 36-pack of extra-large gloves runs me about $16 at Target but goes for around $28 at CVS or Walgreens. I haven’t even checked my local grocery stores or convenience stores, since I know both of them markup stuff like extra-large gloves significantly.

I guess I could try Walmart, but the only time I went to Walmart before COVID was when it was 3 in the morning and I didn’t have anything better to do. Besides, I’m a Card-Carrying Liberal™, so I try not to shop there anyway.

This leads me to today. After a third attempt to get extra-large gloves from Target without success, I was forced to consider my other options. I could order them from a smaller online retailer that specializes in gloves and other glove-related products, but they often have significant shipping costs on small orders, so any money I would save would be lost to shipping costs. I guess I could order some glove-related products to go with my extra-large gloves, but my glove-related activities haven’t really been that exotic lately, and I’m worried that if I do, all the fun accessories I get will just sit in their boxes unused.

That led me to Amazon. I checked the prices on extra-large gloves on Amazon, and sure enough, they were slightly cheaper than Target with that delicious one-day shipping with a Prime membership that they know we consumers love.

Now, I’m in a bit of a bind here. I’m getting dangerously low on extra-large gloves and I need more, but I am not a big fan of Amazon. Their business practices leave a lot to be desired, and the way they treat their employees makes the news more often than I’m comfortable with.

On the other hand, I’ve known a few people who worked at Amazon and actually enjoyed it, so what the fuck do I know? Plus, I have a Prime membership anyway, since they have some shows that I like on Prime Video, so I’m giving them money regardless, why not take advantage of free one-day shipping?

But then I’m facilitating those same unsavory business practices that I was just bemoaning and turning myself into a hypocrite. Plus, it’s just another dollar into Jeff Bezos’s pockets, and he’s kind of a jerk, and do I really want to give him more money just so I can have my extra-large gloves delivered to my door in a day?

But then, does it even matter? Like, Bezos is a multibillionaire, enough that he could give every single employee at Amazon $180,000 right now and still be a billionaire. Is the $15 and change that I spend on my extra-large gloves really going to make a difference in that fortune one way or another? People are buying more than ever online this year due to COVID, is my one purchase going to even matter in the grand scheme of things?

Even so, should there even be billionaires? Should Jeff Bezos deserve to profit off the backs of his workers to the point where he could literally give every American man, woman, child, and various people of other gender identities $500 right now and still be a billionaire? Is that even fair? Should the top 10% of Americans by wealth own 87.2% of stocks? Do we need to implement a wealth tax to prevent this kind of rampant late-stage capitalism that engenders deep socioeconomic divisions in a country already torn apart by race and politics, ravaged by a global pandemic, and so hopelessly divided that we managed to elect a reality show conman as the president who then proceeded to take a solid crack at dismantling American democracy as we know it and half the country still voted for him a second time?

So anyway, I bought my extra-large gloves on Amazon, and it turns out they’re on backorder and I won’t get them for a week, which sucks.