In today’s Daily Beast: “J. Crew Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection as Analysts Wonder Which Retain Behemoth Will be Next.” The article reports that Nieman Marcus and J.C. Penny are also looking rather wobbly, and I imagine the list of large retail businesses threatened by the COVID-19 Depression is very long.

I feel pity for the workers who are losing their jobs. I feel my usual contempt for the money people who will, of course, like Trump, make money out of bankruptcy.

I do find a symbolic significance in J. Crew’s failure. J. Crew and the bulk of commercial enterprises in the United States are built on our being manipulated into buying things we don’t need. Oh, we need clothing, of course, but when I visit a large mall I wonder how so many chain stores that sell practically identical clothing can survive. (A study of why the names of all these chains were chosen might tell us a lot about our culture.)

Of course, we could not afford to buy all these clothes if they were not imported from overseas where labor is cheap and we did not have credit cards. The abundance of cheap goods conceals the fact that our standard of living has been declining and our credit cards create an illusion of wealth that conceals the fact that we are most of us broke.