Liquor Store Paralysis, Part 1 : Welcome to Effonterre!
WELCOME TO EFFONTERRE, a post-industrial town in the climate haven of Upstate New York, home to trees, alcoholism, decaying factories and the Triplet Rivers mall. Effonterre was once the nation’s 3rd leading producer of steel, but not a soul would guess so looking at what the town has since deteriorated into. This little town would become plastered all-over social media and national television within a few short days.
The Triplet Rivers mall had been slowly dying since the financial crisis of ‘08, but it is still the hottest place to shop in a 50-mile radius. The decline was accelerated by The Decade of Pandemics. Sears, Macy’s, JCPenney, and most of the retail giants that are expected to be in every mall across the nation have vanished in the past decade.
Despite its lameness, it is still a hangout for bored families to take a stroll on the weekends, rarely buying anything and contributing to the economy, due to both their financial situations and that there is little of interest to the people in the remaining stores that were clinging on for dear life.
In the middle of a grass island there was a sign that said, “Cocaine and Hookers in ‘32 - Hunter for the White House!”. It’s unclear if the maker of the sign was for or against the former President’s son, now seeking the office himself, running against the incumbent President, Tucker Carlson.
The last remaining corporate giant of the mall was Best Buy. Kids loved to play with the display laptops and phones of which their parents couldn’t afford to get them for holidays or birthdays, nor could they gather the allowance. Due to over-mining and planned obsolescence, the rare earth materials necessary to create such technological marvels are in a critical shortage. The cheapest one could get a low-end laptop that is barely usable for anything but browsing the internet, was $2475.
On a finite planet, so are its resources, but that was little concern to corporations that were manufacturing these products. The smartphones, laptops, etc. were designed to break easily and deteriorate after a few years so that people would go on to buy new ones, creating what then seemed like a never-ending gravy train. It was also fashionable to have the latest technological products, those who could afford it always had the newest iPhone, Galaxy, Pixel, Oneplus, or whatever team they chose.
In the waning years of The Era of Great Abundance, Americans would constantly divide themselves up among consumer choices. People took great pride in the mobile operating system they used. There were only two major operating systems that were used on mobile devices, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. There were others that attempted to break the duopoly, but they eventually crashed and burned. Some examples include Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Tizen, Ubuntu Phone, and others.
iOS was designed for the devices of Apple, and the operating system was closed source, only the portable computers that Apple designed and produced were allowed to have this operating system on it. Google was kind enough to allow Android to be open source, meaning that anybody could use this operating system. However, Google had established an ecosystem, not as thorough as Apple’s, but one that was quintessential to the experience of the user.
If Google, and maybe the American Empire too, had a problem with a company, or the country of which the company is from, they could cut off this ecosystem and make buying a mobile device from a company much less appealing, as all of their favorite services wouldn’t be available.
This had actually happened once, when the Chinese smartphone company Huawei was intruding too much into the American market share of mobile devices. The President of the United States at the time, Donald J. Trump did not like this, despite constant feuding with American tech giants, he still preferred they do well than corporations of a country that was recently made enemy, China, do well. So, he banned any U.S. corporations from doing business with a list of Chinese corporations, including Huawei. To justify this, a questionable claim of spying on Americans by the Huawei Corporation was made.
There is rarely a need for evidence when American politicians claim the country that poses the greatest threat to America’s economic and geopolitical dominance is spying on Americans. Americans will voluntarily put every aspect of their private life on social media for the whole world to see, yet Huawei and Xi Jinping are spying on what Huawei smartphone user #2467344, Eric Martin of Sioux, South Dakota, United States of America, Earth is doing with their lives.
The Silicon Valley liberals cheered on the President that they pretended to hate’s decision to ban Huawei, as the Chinese were no longer threats to their profits for a few more years. This was no permanent solution.
Without Google Play Services, Huawei suffered, and few Westerners would be interested in buying phones without such services, this is because leaving an ecosystem is something that nobody wants to do, to upend their whole lives, to be left behind in the dust bin. Therefore few people would switch from iOS to Android. Therefore Huawei being banned from using Google Play Services on their products was so damaging.
Despite humanity technologically regressing due to shortages, the grapes kept on growing to be turned into wine. Due to a warming planet, grape vines overtook Northern Canada and Siberia. Wild grape wine from formerly arctic areas were all the rage and in great abundance and very frugal. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of different brands of virtually the same drink in Triplet Rivers Wine & Spirits, which happened to be right across the street from the Triplet Rivers mall.
There was, however, a shortage of spirits as there were massive grain shortages which have been increasingly sweeping the planet and threatening food supply. Governments worldwide banned the use of grain for anything but being used for human consumption, or for the consumption of animals that humans will slaughter and eat. Despite these laws, there was still not enough food to go around. As people had less food to stuff in their bellies, they turned to wine.
Alcoholism has increased more than tenfold since 2020. Doctors were less worried as over two thirds of the alcohol consumed was red wild grape wine from the former arctic. It was a wonderful source of anthocyanins, antioxidants which are good for the heart. The negative effects of the alcohol and anthocyanins were believed to cancel out, meaning the effect on the heart was neutral. Most doctors propagated this and recommended drinking this wild grape wine to all healthy adults. The truth of these claims is uncertain, but it was surely a damn good advertising campaign.
The arctic wild grapes were richer in sugar, nutrients, and anthocyanins than the traditional wine grapes, and the yeasts that were used were genetically modified and could tolerate alcohol by volume levels up to 35% percent. Due to the obscene sweetness of these grapes, if older yeasts, which would die at around 10-15 percent alcohol by volume, were used, the wine would spoil easily and taste almost like a soda pop. This new wine was as alcoholic as a weak vodka or whiskey.
The wild grape wine was treated as an elixir of the new era, a Brobdingnagian business which raked in cash for the new northern superpowers, Canada and Russia. The two countries were close allies and worked together to ensure a global market for this new wine. The Canadian-Russian Alliance of Grape Harvesters and Fermenters (CRAGHF) sold it under the brand of Arcvine. It was an illegal offense for any individual or company to attempt to create and sell the beverage on their own, except for in the pariah state of the United States of America. This was a state-sponsored monopoly on a beverage that encapsulated billions of skeletons dressed in flesh.
For those who had the money, they still maintained an excellent selection of more traditional grape wines. The average person would have trouble affording even a cheap Merlot, or a Cabernet Sauvignon these days. This was due to overproduction of Arcvine and traditional growing regions becoming too warm and dry.
The United States of America was in total distress, nothing could get done by the federal government and states increasingly became more like their own countries. On the global scale, most of the rest of the world couldn’t be bothered to listen to what the Americans wanted, and embassies started closing by the dozens. The President and most of the congress primitively projected hostility against Russia and China, leaving Canada and several Western European countries to say farewell to the once world superpower. The effects of global warming are heating up and many of the southern and western states that have seen an incredible boom in population in the late 20th century and early 21st century have become increasingly uninhabitable.
The few elders in Upstate New York and other post-industrial wastelands remembered the old days when their towns and cities were centers of industry and they prayed and prayed that these empty towns would once be bustling with industry, prompted by a mass immigration of climate refugees from the south and west. However, the Populus stayed stubborn, willing to stay in their Florida beach home until they drowned in the middle of the night. It wasn’t of much help that the mainstream media and politicians kept promoting the 2100 lie, it was only the 2030s, but it was of common belief our demise wouldn’t occur until the beginning of the next century. A problem for our children and grandchildren, possibly me if modern medicine continues working it’s magic and prolonging life.
These propositions were far from the case, but it was a comforting belief to help ignore the reality of things. Industry would never return to the rust belt and the vast majority of those in the southern and western states would flee to Canada or die an ugly and premature death. Sure, they could go to New York, but at this time any American would take any excuse to get out of the collapsing shithole the nation had become.