In Defense of Karens
You may have a little Karen in you, too.
Karens, or entitled rabidly confrontational white people, can be, as far as I can tell, divided into two distinct Groups.
These are 1) Karens who verbally abuse unsuspecting minorities, often hurling racial slurs at them and 2) Karens who go off on customer service representatives, such as airline employees.
While I firmly condemn Group 1 in no uncertain terms, I often empathize with, if not lionize Group 2.
By this I mean that if corporations are going to make it a point to gaslight the American public, at some point the stress is going to build up and someone is going to get yelled at, and it’s not going to be the CEO, it’s going to be someone on the front line, fair or not.
This all could have been avoided.
America used to enforce the antitrust legislation that we still have on the books, but one of the two major political parties made it a covert priority to render these laws impotent and allow merger after merger, so now the majority of industries the American public interacts with are not subject to free-market competition, but are in fact oligopolies with no incentive whatsoever to satisfy their customers.
This often manifests itself in the form of price-fixing, which the airlines are currently engaged in and have been for years, but also a fuck you attitude to anyone giving them money.
Entitlement, really.
It’s almost as though American Airlines is an anthropomorphized Karen, so you could argue that one Karen yelling at an airline employee is just two Karens going at it.
Take for example a recent experience I had at Ralph’s, a Southern California grocery chain which is owned by the parent company Kroeger, which also owns Albertson’s, Vons, Pavillions, and every other grocery store in my extended neighborhood, and, wouldn’t you know it, has very high prices.
It was late, eleven at night, and I wanted to make sure the store was open, so I looked at its website, and verified it was open until midnight.
I strolled through the parking lot at eleven-thirty where I was greeted by a locked double-door, with a disheveled employee standing guard behind it and letting customers out, but not in.
I checked my phone and gave him a confused look. He opened the door a sliver.
“We’re closed,” he said.
“I checked the website, it says you’re open ‘til midnight,” I said.
“We close at eleven,” he said.
“I can see that,” I said, “but why does it say midnight on the website?”
“The website is wrong,” he said.
“I get that,” I said.
This is where Karens are born. A cocky indifference, a basking in the glory of inconvenience. There was no way I was the first person this had happened to. I felt my pulse jumping, but I didn’t wish to be confrontational, as I understood it wasn’t this guy’s fault.
Still, I found it necessary to impart my feelings on the subject, my completely logical feelings, just a quick little jab I would slip in before my departure, a pathetic gesture aimed to nurse this reminder that I don’t matter.
“Maybe you should fix the website, this must happen all the time,” I said, while pivoting to turn away.
“You should contact corporate,” was the response from the behind the little crack in the doors.
Now, if a tree falls in the forest but nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
What if a guy yells at a Ralph’s employee but nobody is standing there with a cellphone and recording it? Is that guy a Karen?
I should contact corporate? Me? I might think it would make more sense if someone affiliated with the store contacted corporate in a menial effort to fix this issue, someone like, You!
Kroeger, actually, is ranked seventeenth on the Fortune 500 list.
I might think the seventeenth biggest corporation in America has an IT guy, and that this issue might be resolved in a matter of minutes, but no, apparently I should bear the responsibility, take the time out of my day to place a call and wait on hold for six hours, even though a store manager could get directly through to some rapey nepo idiot who could run it up the latter.
Plus, now I knew the hours anyway. The suggestion was preposterous. It made me angry.
In this moment I suddenly crossed the threshold and for an ephemeral moment may have legally been a Karen, because my response was to snarl and yell, “Maybe you should fucking contact corporate! Fucking pig!” and stomp off.
Like I said, I get where some of them are coming from.
A similar issue occurred when I went to Rite Aid to pick up a prescription.
Upon entering the store shortly after its opening, at eight in the morning, I was perplexed and disheartened to see that the pharmacy didn’t open until ten, two hours later, which I found odd because the first thing it says under Rite Aid on the sign is Pharmacy, as shown in the above photo.
This would be like a gas station only selling snacks and not gas for the first two hours of every day and feigning obliviousness when people found out they couldn’t get gas, day after day after day.
I was crestfallen, because I was sick and wanted the meds, but had somewhere else to be and couldn’t wait around for two hours.
I came back at one in the afternoon, where I again found the pharmacy closed, because it closes between the hours of one and two in the afternoon every day for lunch.
I sat there for an hour, and eventually, at ten minutes past two, I observed three employees entering the private door to the pharmacy, and they reopened it.
Three employees.
I got my stuff, but as I was turning to leave, I said to the middle-aged pharmacist lady with huge hair behind the counter, “You know, if there are three of you, couldn’t you just stagger your lunch times so that one of you would be here and then you wouldn’t have to close for lunch?”
“What?” she said, as though I were picking up a suitcase of antipsychotics.
“Nevermind,” I said, and turned away.
The only other pharmacy in my neighborhood is Walgreens.
It is owned by Rite Aid.
This is where we’re at as Americans. The gnawing sensation that you’re constantly being screwed with. That there is a boardroom of people somewhere literally laughing at you.
I think it explains why people are on edge and is at least half of the reason for the recent rise in Karenism.
I don’t know the answer. Just hold it in I guess, and hope nobody’s filming you in a moment of weakness, like in the Rite Aid, there were a lot of people there waiting for their prescriptions, with phones.