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Her first task was concocting an abrasive cleaner—the secret ingredient was eggshells run through a blender—that she used to remove the rust stain.
“the affluent homeless,”
(Camping for “a week next to a tent of explosives . . . Am I nuts?” wrote one workamping widow who was preparing to take a fireworks job.)
two eggs and two buttermilk pancakes with bacon, sausage, or ham, plus a side of hash browns or home fries, all for only $2.70,
“The benefit to our workamping population being, for the most part, a little bit older is that you guys have put in a lifetime of work. You understand what work is. You put your mind to the work, and we know that it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint.
Beyond that, Amazon reaps federal tax credits—ranging from 25 to 40 percent of wages—for hiring disadvantaged workers in several categories, including aging recipients of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and anyone on food stamps.
As workers like David told their stories, the Amazon encampments began to seem more and more like microcosms of a national catastrophe.
a demographic that in recent years has grown with alarming speed: downwardly mobile older Americans.
Workers peaked at forty, he argued in a 1905 speech, then went downhill until they hit their sixties—at which point, he prankishly suggested, they might as well be chloroformed. These remarks came to be known as the “chloroform speech” and they provoked a national scandal.
In later versions, game designers paved over the poorhouse and put up a “free parking” space.
Long-haul truckers often accumulate more freebies than they need and gift their credits to fellow travelers in the checkout line.*
“low-budget, high-experience living” and “living on less and enjoying life more,”
“vanily.”
“Introverts Unite: We’re Here, We’re Uncomfortable, and We Want to Go Home,” she got smiles and nods of acknowledgment all day.
When summer temperatures exceeded 100 degrees inside the company’s Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, warehouse, managers wouldn’t open the loading bay doors for fear of theft. Instead, they hired paramedics to wait outside in ambulances, ready to extract heat-stricken employees on stretchers and in wheelchairs, the investigation found.
to make disposable people you have to have a disposable job.
Linda didn’t drink the Christmas Kool Aid, though—she felt less like an elf, more like a cog in the world’s largest vending machine, and the experience left her numb.
“This place is freaking crazy,” one shopper wrote online. “It’s like a college dorm room and an abandoned Kmart had a forbidden lovechild, painted it Pepto-Bismol pink, and gave it a phrase for a name.”
As the Baby Boomers replace them, we observe that they want more things to do or they get bored.”
After a lifetime of chasing the American Dream, they had come to the conclusion that it was all nothing but a big con.
“I had someone who was eighty-six in my department at one time,” she said. “We had a man in a wheelchair, who was capable of counting using the clicker, so they had him stationed at the water park.
I’m sure, but this sadness is an inevitable consequence of nomadic living. People come and go in your life. You don’t get to hang onto them forever.
Positive thinking, after all, is an all-American coping mechanism, practically a national pastime.
In America, if you don’t have an address, you’re not a real person.
(It’s sad—but not surprising—that teeth have become a status symbol in a country where more than one in three citizens lack dental coverage, which isn’t included with standard medical insurance.)
“the unbearable whiteness of vanning.”
So why was the crowd so white?
If you find yourself trapped in the middle of the woods without electricity, running water, or a car you would likely describe that situation as a “nightmare” or “a worst-case scenario like after a plane crash or something.” White people refer to it as “camping.”
Like the twentysomethings, we mostly gave off vibes of “tired” and “bored.”)
“Your car can stay here, but you can’t.”
I’d asked Iris, too. “Just find me dead in the desert,” was her reply. “Put rocks over me and let me go.”
possibly draw a police crackdown.
“The sharing economy—the step-on-the-backs-of-the-little-people economy—has arrived,”
Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts.
“It’s like a bank robber doing his last job in order to retire.”
where she celebrated her seventy-second birthday and cracked three ribs on the job.
