Online Holiday Shopping Makes Racism Easy, Convenient
While shopping online, pretty white women are always pictured as available to help you. You are also depicted as a pretty white woman.
This Christmas season, online shopping is liberating middle-class consumers across the nation in record-setting numbers from the tyranny of foreign, probably-immigrant sales representatives at major retail outlets. “Thanks to the internet, I can buy all of my presents from pictures of white people,” said Katy Burch, a 48-year old homemaker from Calgary, AB. “The on-screen text is clear and informative, and you know why? Because it’s in goddamn English, that’s why.”
Many others agree with Burch, claiming that online shopping is the greatest invention since the drive-thru window, emancipating the relevant public from having to talk to non-white waiters or, even worse, cashiers. “It’s bad enough that you have to deal with these people on the phone,” said realtor Clayton Thistle, 52, referring to the numerous residents of southern Asia who have competently attempted to assist him with a variety of technical support requests despite his stubborn, self-righteous technological incompetence.
Added Thistle, “Hell, I don’t even bother trying to fix this stupid computer anymore – soon as I get one of them porno viruses, I just leave the damn thing on the curb and get my secretary to buy another one off the web. If I actually send her to the store they end up pressuring her to buy a bunch of crap I don’t need, probably has something to do with being a woman, or one of her ancestors. I told her to never not do anything on the internet again!”
In addition to buying the electronics themselves, many consumers claimed to turn to the internet to escape the arduous upsell process, which they say is made even more difficult by the inherent language and cultural barriers created by sales staff. “They say they don’t work on commission, but then they jibber-jabber at you for ten minutes about some warranty protection plan, and not only can you not understand the details of what they’re trying to tell you, they pretend to not understand what you’re saying when you tell them you don’t want it,” said retired mechanic Scott Lamothe, 61. “Now I just buy whatever I want on the computer, and all I have to do is click off a checkbox – I wish it was that easy with these guys, although they’d probably get the point if I drew a giant X on their faces in black permanent marker as soon as they started blathering at me. Not that I would do that, of course.”
In a work of complete fiction from electronicsmegawarehouse.com, a kindly old bank CEO helps you purchase a home stereo
Added Lamothe, “Look, I understand why these guys get in to selling electronics – everyone knows how good they are at math – but it’s frustrating, because you just know that they start speaking wing-wong to each other the moment you’re out of earshot: If it got my stupid hard drive setup any quicker I wish they’d just drop the facade and do it in front of me.”
Kathy Pryor, a Toronto resident who now does all of her purchasing online rather than leave her home and have to get in a taxicab, where the drivers are all brown people who never stop talking on their stupid cellphones, and you can’t even tell when they’re talking to you and when they’re talking to whoever they are probably couriering drugs for, even though the sign on the cab says that you are guaranteed a silent ride, said that she especially enjoys online shopping during the holidays. “Oh, it’s the right thing to do at Christmas, absolutely. They don’t even know what Christmas is. What do these people love? Elephants? Terrorism? God only knows if it’s even safe to walk to my mailbox to pick up what I ordered anymore.”
Added Pryor, “I don’t know who they’re hiring to do these jobs, but it should be people who are like me, except not me.”
Across the ocean, tensions ran similarly high amongst those discarded for the ease of the online experience, with complaints among foreign workers ranging from difficulty understanding their clients to the problems of remaining respectful while explaining to people that their USB devices are broken because they attempted to plug them into wall sockets. “I thank God every day that by the time my children are working here, most of the people calling them for help will be other Indians,” said Guptar Ravji, a 23-year old telephone sales support representative in Bombay. “It’s just too bad they’ll have to put up with so many sleazy, crooked Chinese people, too.”
