Amazon.com, the other tab that is probably open on your browser right now, announced Friday that it has agreed to buy the high-end supermarket Whole Foods, the final step in owner Jeff Bezos’ lifelong mission of cornering the market on whiteness.
If you want anything from mom jeans to farm-raised, vegetarian chicken wings or a copy of 50 Shades of Grey, you gotta go see Bezos. If you want a newspaper delivered by a drone, Bezos can make that happen. If you’ve ever desired a tiny box with an invisible white lady inside who knows the answer to all your questions, holla at Bezos for an Amazon Echo.
Even if you want to find the one place in the universe where black people can’t bother you, Bezos is the plug. Bezos has built his billion-dollar portfolio by slowly becoming the sole supplier for everything white people want.
According to the New York Times, Amazon offered $13.4 billion for Whole Foods (also known as “Wypipo Winn-Dixie”), and, of course, Whole Foods looked around at the cornucopia of organic, gluten-free, free-range bullshit on its shelves; kept its composure and shrugged nonchalantly; and said, “Aight.” But during the handshake, it surely thought, “Thirteen billion! I can’t believe we’ve been fooling Birkenstock-wearing Caucasians into buying this bullshit for this long! It’s the same shit that’s in Piggly Wiggly! We won!”
Bezos founded Amazon.com out of his garage in 1994 and made it into the all-encompassing superpower that it is today. The affable billionaire will undoubtedly evolve into a supervillain, because ... just look at him and his bio: He’s a superrich, genius scientist who grew up on his superrich grandparents’ 25,000-acre farm in Texas.
You know why you haven’t seen pictures of Bezos’ house? Because I’m willing to wager that he lives in a “lair.” He just looks like a Lex Luthor, lair-type dude to me. Or maybe he has a “compound.” Nah, he probably has both. Bezos probably owns a lair with a secret entrance to a sprawling compound, and I bet he has henchmen, too. I’ve always wanted henchmen.
With the Whole Foods acquisition, Bezos was handed a free-and-clear title to whiteness, since he has now found a way to capitalize on every aspect of the Caucasian financial markets.
I’m not saying Amazon is white, because I buy everything from there, but black America was late to the online-shopping bandwagon because we had to pray about handing over our credit card numbers to someone we couldn’t see. For the first 10 years of Amazon.com, it was the same to us as a Nigerian email scam: I give them my credit card number and address, and they send any book I want to my house? Yeah, right.
The fact that Amazon is the No. 1 clothes retailer in the U.S., selling $28 billion in apparel and accessories, is definitely a white thing. Have you ever been shopping for a pair of jeans with a black woman? Buying a house is a quicker and less deliberative process. Plus, the idea of free shipping—having money and purchasing power but not wanting to pay to have something delivered—is akin to having a plantation and thinking, “I have all this cotton, but who’s going to pick it?” It’s remininscent of ... never mind. I won’t go there.
Bezos also founded Blue Origin, the company dedicated to building a settlement on the moon, which proves that even when the boundaries of physics and common sense say “no,” white people’s love of colonization will always find a way to say “yes.”
Bezos is balling so hard that he recently went “full white” and purchased the largest house in Washington, D.C. (and when I say “house,” I mean he’s turning a $23 million museum into a residence where he can kick it during the few days a month he spends in D.C. checking on the Washington Post). Bezos bought the Post in 2013, making him the only person who still believes that newspapers are a winning proposition, even though their readership is dwindling to a handful of old white men.
Everyone else reads The Root.
Bezos is also partially responsible for funding Uber, which apparently wants to purge women and minorities from its ranks, which is why I use Lyft (but mostly because it’s cheap). Uber also pays a lower percentage of revenues to its drivers, which is pretty damn white (but mostly because it’s cheap).
He also earned billions funding Twitter and Google. I will admit that they aren’t exclusive to whiteness, but reading the president’s tweets, running across an “alt-right” troll or doing a Google Image search for “three black teenagers” makes me rethink my position. These companies aren’t racist or even white, but aside from country and western bars, Taylor Swift concerts and Donald Trump rallies, they’re the last spaces where white people can really hang out and be themselves.
And now the final piece of the puzzle: Whole Foods. I’m sure there’s already a group of concerned white ladies outside trying to get people to sign petitions to stop the acquisition because Amazon.com endangers the rain forests, uses nonhypoallergenic labels on its labels, frowns at puppies or does something else that causes Caucasians concern.
I’m not hating on Bezos, though. Controlling the white food supply seems like a smart business move. As Trump continues his push to kick Mexicans out of the country, everyone says that the Trump administration’s ethnic-cleansing plan will make lettuce rise to $792 a head. The people who shop at Whole Foods are already paying those prices, so they will likely be unaffected.
As for me, I’m gonna ride with Bezos’ vision of the future. There’s money in white people. I like his forward thinking. As a matter of fact, if you’ll excuse me, my Echo says my Uber is outside. I gotta stop by the Piggly Wiggly (I’ll be damned if I’m paying $11 for a banana), and then I’m headed over to the Bezos lair to drop off my application for assistant director of henchmen.
Wish me luck.
Read more at the New York Times.