#retail failure

[robthepensioner]

The Most Wanted shop in Fleetwood failed to live up to its name and went out of business.

[satari-raine]

Forever a turtle, but life update:

Got a job! It's a retail position at a local thrift store chain, which is a tiny bit disheartening for some dumb personal reasons, but it's certainly something - overall, though, it's a good thing. Hopefully it'll help get my finances back in order and a sense of routine again. It'll be a bit rocky at the start, catching up on bills and getting used to retail again, but it's something.

Just wanted to say a genuine thank you to those that helped out and gave well wishes during me rambling on here for a few months. It meant and still means a lot to me, it really does. Hope you all are doing well, too, as always. Rooting for you.

[foggysirens]

.

[yesyourstalker]

Neta: training day, training day we're all here for training day. How are we all doing today?

Antho: it is 7:30 in the morning

Neta: yehhhh sorry about that but I have to train everyone and teach them how to close and open my store. So unfortunately for you...Antho. You also have to learn how to open.

Anto: *huff*

Neta: great! The mall is closed. It opens around 10:00 but we have to get here around 7:00. The first thing that I or mahi does is count money, fill the registers. While you guys have to unpack inventory, unload inventory from the trucks annnnd clean up the store. So that means folding shirts, picking up miscellaneous items. Make it look nice and presentable.

Vinny: what do we do first?

Neta: so what we usually do first is to fill the registers. So let's just go to the back here where the money machine is.......It's also my office so if you need anything feel free to come back here. The managers are in charge of withdrawing the money. You guys are responsible for depositing the money....so we usually get $100 worth of 20s for each register $50 worth of 5s, 10s we usually get $30 worth and and another $100 worth of 1s

Fugue: is that the amount we have to do every time?

Neta: this is usually the amount we put in but it can also change depending on how busy it is or how slow it is. So you know if you guys ever become a manager just go with your hunch and how much money you need the day.

Neta: All right so we got the money. Put them in the registers. Safety rule you can never deposit or withdraw the money by yourself. You have to have someone with you at all times just in case something happens.

Anto: like what?

Neta: well a lot can happen

Vinny: I knew this guy who used to stay in the store until closing and when employees were taking the register to the back. He'd push them and snatch the register and run out the door.

Anto: I'm assuming that person was you

Vinny: actually it was my babysitter. He used to watch me and my sister's all the time, he was a nice guy

Neta: ok let's change the subject so after we put in the registers. We go back to the back, the second door to the left next to my office is receiving I also call it storage and you can call it whatever you want.

Naomi: this is a lot bigger than I expected

Neta: yeah it is. We keep boxes back here. New releases, old releases, limited releases

Fugue: what happens when it get overcrowded?

Neta: usually when it gets overcrowded we have a big sale. So we don't do this every morning but this morning we had a truck today. So we go over here......... Lift up this door and you can see the cargo entrance.... It's only a few boxes.

Antho: and you expected to unpack all this?

Neta: No, you have to unload and then unpack.... And their specific ones that you can unpack and then the rest you can leave in the back. Looking at the labels you only need to unpack the 15 and keep the 20 in the back....ok... I'm going to split you guys into groups Vinny and I are going to stay back here to unload fougu you can unpack the items.

Vinny: great this is going to be easy.

Fugue: do you provide a box cutter?

Neta: yep I got a whole desk full in my office just to pick one out. Everything with a blue label we open up immediately. Anything with an orange label we don't open until the set date on it.

Vinny: what about the pink label?

Neta: those we don't open up until next month Those are splat fest tees.

Antho: splatfest tees??? So if we open those boxes we know which splat fest is going to be next

Neta: yeah totally... You also get an automatic termination and blacklisted not only from all the stores in the mall but also around the city. So.............you want to play some stupid games and win some stupid prizes? I'm serious like I'm not even allowed to open it I had to sign a waiver and everything

Antho: that sucks

Neta: yeah I know.....ok....you and Miss Naomi..... you're just going to have to pick up the store You know clean it up. Fold shirts. Organize everything... We do have a system. Everything with the green tag has to be folded. Everything with a red tag is hung up on the rack. Everything with a purple tag is hung up in the front of the store. Any questions?

Antho: I have a question

Neta: what's your question?

Antho: what happened to your ear?

Neta:.............................................................. Do you have any questions regarding your job?

Naomi: is there the proper way we have to fold the shirts

Neta: Great question. we fold them into rectangles so it's small and it gives us space for more shirts. So fold two times on each end....... and you put it together and.......here we go! Make sure that the band or logo is visible. And for the hanging clothes he puts the smallest in the front and largest in the back. ..... Anything else?

Antho: hu-

Neta:No great........ Antho come with me for a sec.

Antho: Am I fired already?

Neta: No, you're not fired and just going to need to ask a quick favor. Listen........You can be as mean and rude as you want to be with me. You can't hurt my feelings....* Inhale*....... The customers on the other hand..........unless they deserve it and trust me there are going to be some people who definitely deserve it but for the ones who don't.... please be nice. Okay?

Antho: ......................

Neta: and also be nice to your fellow employees. I know underneath this little meanie personality you have is a nice kind person

Antho: No, there isn't

Neta: Yes there is and I can sense it and you know what goes great with a nice kind person?

Antho: a reality check

Neta: No. Another nice kind person to keep them company........That's why you'll be working with Naomi! Yayyy!!! you two are going to be sharing the same shifts!! You're going to have a shift buddy.

Antho: whaat? Why?

Neta: because..... She's a nice girl. She's really sweet..... and she's also kind of sensitive and I don't think she'll be able to handle some of our.........

Antho: asshole customers?

Neta: yeah ............ Just be there to back her up if needed. You know I don't want anyone making her cry. Can you do that for me? Can you do this one small gesture or are you just incapable of kindness?

Antho: ..........ugh..... fine I'll help her.......... You better pay me extra

Neta: I'll make you an employee of the month.

_______________________________________________

Antho:.....................

Naomi:....................

Antho:.......so............ What's your deal?

Naomi: hm?

Antho: why are you working here?

Naomi: oh...uh........um........I just....... wanted to get out of the house....... ...... yeah

Antho: hmm k..................* Inhale* * exhale*.........(Tap ..Tap.)................ So like you live around here?

Naomi: oh yeah.....I-i do It's usually just one train stop......

Antho: hmmmmmm...... I know you said that you weren't allowed to like disclose what manga you used to work on but like

Naomi: I work on "turf war heart break" and " I love princess Nami "

Antho:I think I saw Vivy read one of those...hm... Probably not....... So you got permission to talk about your work and you won't get fired or anything will you?

Naomi: ............ I only said I wasn't allowed to disclose because I was embarrassed...... I didn't know how y'all would react.

Antho: oh.........well.... They're popular books..... So do you write it or draw it or?

Naomi: I just do outlines for the books That's it............

Antho: that's cool....................

Naomi:........................... I actually work on my own stuff when I'm free.

Antho: oh..... So what's your book about

Naomi: well I'm still working on it. I still haven't gotten the plot or the characters. I'm so just writing ideas down. It's nothing. I'm sorry I'm actually just-

Neta: so how's everything up in the front?

Naomi: * gasp* uhhhh....umm

Antho: we're finished

Neta: I can see that the store looks great! Good job you two

Antho: hum

Naomi:. Hmmm thank you

Neta: well it's around 8:00. Everything is unloaded and unpacked. We just need to take it from the back and put it to the front. We'll do this until 9:45

_______________________________________________

Neta: We're all done and it's........ Oh it's only 9:30. Usually that takes longer

Fugue: it could be because you have more people here

Neta: yeah, that's true..... Well while we wait, I guess I can teach you guys how to use the register. It's not hard at all let me put it on training mode and-

Warabie: GOOD MORNING!

Seth: hey guy .....

Neta: Good morning ... . Hey Candi.. ..... You look..... You look great babe....... Look at you you're glowing

Candi: uh huh .... yeah.......* Mumbling*

Antho: did she get hit by a bus this morning? Geez

Neta: shh!...

_______________________________________________

Neta:ok we're going to learn how to use the register warabie is going to be right here to help you

Warabie: hi guys

Neta: alright so .... Vinny why don't you go first?

Vinny: alright!

Neta: Great! I'm going to be customers and hand you this item right here so can you ring that up for me?

Vinny: ok...... That will be....... $8 cash or card?

Neta: I'm going to split it

Vinny: ok.. so how do I-

Warabie: so you're going to go to split payment. If they give you cash first you press the cash icon you put in the exact amount that they give you. If they do the card first you go to the card icon and then you put in the exact amount they want to pay. Once the card is approved you take the cash and put it in the register.

Vinny: ok ...... So how much do you want to pay in cash

Neta: I'm going to pay... $4 in cash the rest of my card

Vinny: ok great....... All right, that's something hard to do

Neta: see it's easy. Antho You're up next

Antho: alright...... How can I help you today?.........

Neta: well I like to return this please

Antho:.....k........... I'm assuming you're returning these short shorts because it's not your size.

Warabie: *snort* ha! Hehehe I'm sorry....hehehehe.. that's not funny hehe....*ahem*...... be serious Antho.

Neta:................... Just return it

Antho: I'd love too but I don't know how to do that. So I guess you're stuck with this. If it makes you feel any better, we do have some fishnets and boots that will look great with this. I think you look good in it! you know..... In dim lighting.

Warabie: hehehehehe hehehe....

Neta:.................................

Antho: you might need to shave your legs though

Warabie: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Neta: okay.... okay!!! THAT'S ENOUGH!........ I get it just return it.

Warabie: ok..uh ahhah.haha.. I mean I think you'd look hot in it..

Neta: warabie!

Warabie:.. right! sorry....So you press return.... you scan the receipt and you scan the item and it'll give you an option to put it back on the card or to return it to them in cash. If they don't have a receipt with them, you can press this button right here and tell them to insert their card and you can find their last purchase with the store. When you find it highlight and click return. There's also work when they don't have the tag on it.

Antho: All right, great. Here you go sir. ... Your money went back on your card have a pleasant day

Neta: thank you.... You could have done that without humiliating the custome

Antho: I thought you said I can't hurt your feelings

Neta: you can't, but you might hurt someone else's feelings so let's not do this to an actual customer.

Antho: All right, I won't do that.....to their face

_______________________________________________

Neta: All right so that concludes today's training. Tomorrow's training day you guys are going to do that....... .... Well....you're actually going to do that at home...... I just want you guys to watch five short videos. It's just going to talk about safety regulations..... Our tolerance policy...... One safety and one sanitary video and the last one is just going to talk about employee benefits and whatnot.

Vinny: I have a question about benefits?

Neta: shoot

Vinny: so like do you provide the benefits or does the mall itself provide the benefits?

Neta: It's the mall. The mall provides the benefits for everyone who works here, including me.

Vinny: do they cover dental?

Neta: yes ... All the information is in the video

Vinny:... Medical expenses like injuries like a broken arm or stitches

Neta:.......... Yes they provide all that......Yes

Naomi: * whispering whispering*

Vinny: yeah I need that too.......... Gender affirming health care

Nate: actually they do, yeah! You can get more information from the videos..... All right! So I guess we're done for the day. The store opens in 20 minutes so uhhhh you guys are free to head home. Enjoy the rest of your day or you can stay until we open and complete your whole shift up to you.

_______________________________________________

Antho: ...*huff*.............hey

Naomi: hm?

Antho: you said you were working on your own book earlier

Naomi: yeah.... it's.... it's still in the development stage tho so. . Yeah

Antho:hmmm what about you puffy you have a hobby or something

Fugue:..... Don't call me that.... If you must know, I enjoy making ceramics

Antho: That's lame. I don't care

Fugue:...... Well then you shouldn't have asked

Antho: I thought you were going to say something interesting

Fugue: well it is interesting if you just let me finish.... I'm actually planning on making my own dish set for my drom room I even made one for my future roommate

Antho: uhhhhh Don't you play video games or some shit like a normal person

Fugue: I do... I'm normal...I ........ I don't have to prove anything to you!

Antho: oh shit! He's actually puffing up! Heheh

Neta: awwww look at them. They're getting along

Candi: uh-hu

Neta: I guess he's making friends in his own way....... Naomi seems to be opening up a little too........ Can't believe I'm going to have a new crew coming next year....... I'm going to miss you guys.

Candi: uh-hu

Neta: I mean that doesn't mean I'm not going to visit. Of course I'm going to check up on my old store and see you guys. I can also share shifts between stores but I don't know how it's going to work out. I have to drive 5 hours but you know it's worth it to see you guys I love-

Candi: Neta can you shut the fuck up for like 3 seconds? God.....why are you in such a good mood!?

Neta: well......when my shift ended I was going to taste test wedding cakes with ikkan.....I guess I'm just excited. I'm sorry....... I know you're tired.... You want to go home early?

Candi: no .......*ugh*.......mmmmmmmmmm....... I'm sorry......*crying*...... I'm just so fucking tired..

Neta: oh babe come here.......

Candi: *crying*.... I wanted chocolate waffles this morning..........

Neta: you did? Awww... What happened?

Candi: *crying* and I told Donn to go to the store and and and he bought back blueberries ones!! *Crying*...... I told him I didn't want those! He said that's all they had!!! He's fucking lying!! I know he is he picked up the wrong ones!! My morning was ruined *crying*

Neta: ohhh I'm sorry that happened

Antho: what's wrong with her?

Neta: hush....she's pregnant

Antho: that explains a lot.

Neta:..................... Go home

Candi: and this is one of those rare fucking mornings where I'm not sick..... It was my only decent morning and he fucking ruined it!!!!!! *Crying*..... this sucks... I don't like being pregnant.....*sniff*.... I mean I do. I love it..... I'm making life........ but you know.....*sniff * I just *crying* I'm so tired of sweat pants.....

Neta: ohhhhh*heh* I'm sorry........ You sure you don't want to leave early? You can go cake sampling with me.

Candi:...*sniff*........hmm ...ok .......

Neta: ok...(Peck).... Why don't we leave extra early and we can get you some maternity clothing?

Candi: you mean those stupid moo moos no..... I got enough of those from my mother-in-law.

Neta: we can get you a nice sundress perfect for spring.........huh? Doesn't that sound nice?

Candi: yeah......*snort* ok ....

Neta: ok....

Antho is the new work child that Neta has adopted. But he has to share custody with @fish-at-fish-fish-resort

[dykecadence]

voice in my head telling me to quit my job getting louder and louder

[frankenshane]

really gonna need people to remember that the 49ers haven't played in sf for like a decade, they should rename themselves to be the santa clara 49ers since the bay area 49ers clearly isn't sticking.

[gentlethorns]

okay okay i'm calm. hung w friends and talked through it and everything will be fine, i know that. i am looking forward to better days

[autogynecologist]

how "No one would work these jobs if they didn't have to" mfs look when wide-eyed kids at the library and target and McDonald's and construction site come at them

[equalonline]

How To Maintain Your Weighing Scale

As the name suggests, a weighing scale is employed to measure the weight of an object. If you employ a weighing machine in your day-to-day life, it's necessary to make sure that it's error-free. Hence, it's vital that you simply invest some time in its maintenance. Pre-planned periodic maintenance provides accuracy and longevity. 

A weighing scale is a tiny machine and doesn't need a lot of maintenance. So, for its peak performance and proactive maintenance, you'll be able to browse and follow the points mentioned below.

Keep the Weighing Scale Grounded

While employing a weighing scale, make sure, it's placed on a stable and vibration-free surface. A soft or irregular surface may cause inaccurate results. A Digital weighing scale provides a further advantage. It shows a miscalculation message once it's not placed on a physical object.

Regular Inspection

As the job of a weighing scale is extremely crucial, it ought to be handled with additional care. A regular inspection may result in hassle-free functionality. Conduct regular reviews for harm or corrosion. Also, look out for any reasonable wetness and check if its paint is faded or stark naked. Perform a constant examination and avoid further damages on scales to avoid high repair prices.

Testing and Adjustments

For any weighing scale, it's natural to expand and to witness a touch amendment over an amount of your time. Within the case of thermal growth, it's necessary to create many chances for correct readings. For optimum system potency, confirm the size is correct and supply the right weight.

Repair

If you discover any damage or corrosion on a scale, the twig is repaired. For safe and reliable operations, a quick repair is extremely necessary.

Along with the preceding tips, there are other things that you simply ought to consider:

Do not overload a weighing scale on the far side of its capability.

Rough treatment might have an effect on its performance. Don’t touch sensitive scales throughout operations.

For the digital scale, it's needed to examine its battery often.

Do not dismantle or tamper with the scale.

If you follow the above steps, you'll get many edges like increased operational safety, reduction of failures, cost planning, optimum utilization of system and instrumentation, and better system handiness.

If you're aiming to get an advisement scale, you can flick through EQUAL. We offer a large range of these weighing scales online at an affordable value.

[xtruss]

'It Hasn't Delivered': The Spectacular Failure of Self-checkout Technology

— 15th January 2024 | By Sam Becker, Features Correspondent | BBC

Self-checkout technology has grown, but not every business and consumer is happy with the investment. Credit: Alamy

Unstaffed Tills Were Supposed to Revolutionise Shopping. Now, Both Retailers and Customers are Bagging Many Self-Checkout Kiosks.

It's a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth.

"It hasn't delivered anything that it promises," says Christopher Andrews, associate professor and chair of sociology at Drew University, US, and author of The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. "Stores saw this as the next frontier… If they could get the consumer to think that [self-checkout] was a preferable way to shop, then they could cut labour costs. But they're finding that people need help doing it, or that they'll steal stuff. They ended up realising that they're not saving money, they're losing money."

Alamy One of the frustrations of self-checkout can be the extra work of having to find a specific PLU code to ring up a purchase. Credit: Alamy

Unexpected Problems in the Bagging Area

Many retail companies have invested millions – if not billions – of dollars in self-checkout technology, which Andrews says was first developed during the 1980s, and started appearing in stores in the 1990s. They're not exactly cheap to get into stores: some experts estimate a four-kiosk system can run six figures.

Despite the cost to install them, many retailers are reversing course on the tech. Target, for instance, is restricting the number of items self-checkout customers can purchase at one time. Walmart has removed some self-checkout kiosks in certain stores to deter theft. In the UK, supermarket chain Booths has also cut down on the number of self-service kiosks in its stores, as customers say they're slow and unreliable.

Dollar General, one of the fastest-growing retailers in the US, is also re-thinking its strategy. In 2022, the discount chain leaned heavily into self-checkout technology – it's not uncommon to see only one or two employees staffing an entire Dollar General store in some areas. Despite the investment, they are now planning to increase the number of employees in stores "and in particular, the checkout area", according to the company's CEO, Todd Vasos.

"We had relied and started to rely too much this year on self-checkout in our stores," he said during the company's Q3 2023 earnings call on 7 December 2023. "We should be using self-checkout as a secondary checkout vehicle, not a primary." (Dollar General did not respond to the BBC's requests for comment).

“Some Data Shows Retailers Utilising Self-checkout Technology Have Loss Rates More Than Twice The Industry Average.”

Some retailers cite theft as a motivator for ditching the unstaffed tills. Customers may be more willing to simply swipe merchandise when using a self-service kiosk than they are when face-to-face with a human cashier. Some data shows retailers utilising self-checkout technology have loss rates more than twice the industry average.

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn't lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. Just as Dollar General appears poised to add more employees to its check-out areas, presumably increasing staffing costs, other companies have done the same. Despite self-checkout kiosks becoming ubiquitous throughout the past decade or so, the US still has more than 3.3 million cashiers working around the nation, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Humans or Machines?

Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. However, years later, they're still queueing for tills; waiting for store-staff assistance with errors or age checks; and searching high and low for the PLU code of the Walla Walla Sweet Onions they're trying to purchase.

In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice, yet 67% of consumers have had the technology fail while trying to use it.

Alamy Experts say some self-checkout kiosks may stand abandoned as some shoppers transition backed to staffed tills. Credit: Alamy

The bottom line is businesses want to cut costs, and shoppers want to get in and out of a store. If self-checkout isn't the answer, they'll find another avenue.

"It's not that self-checkout technology is good or bad, per se… [but] if we try self-checkout and realise we're not benefitting from it, we might switch back to not using it," says Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas, who studies consumer behaviour and decision-making.

That appears to be happening in many cases, as customers' frustrations with the technology persist. But Andrews says that while stores may change up their strategies – as seen with Dollar General and others – many large retail chains are likely to keep kiosks in stores due to sunk costs. "They spent billions putting it in stores, and are hoping they can still get the public to buy into it," he says.

Retailers may continue to rely on the technology, but many aren't putting all their farm-fresh eggs in the self-checkout basket. Instead, they're increasingly giving customers the option to choose between human and machine.

For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there's one thing Andrews believes won't change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

[indianahal]

For the last five years retail crime in America has been rising.  Now we're seeing crime such as flash mobs and smash-and-grab offences happening in growing numbers.  This usually involves well organized gangs of teenagers that coordinate their sometimes violent retail thefts smashing store windows and displays in order to steal merchandise.  While there are a number of reasons for this crime, it has raised the public's awareness on crime, policing, and how the judicial system has failed so many people.  My new report entitled "U.S. Retail Crime, Flash Mobs, And Smash-And-Grab Offences Increasing."

[screams-of-silence]

Uuggh my mother is driving me fucking insane again.

So I've had a part time job for almost two years now at a co op, but I don't work enough hours to get a decent pay which sucks but nothing I can really do about that.

Anyways my mother is constantly on my fucking back and sayin how I need a real proper job because I don't pay digs as much as I should (45 a week like which is ridiculously hard to do when I earn less than that a week)

Well, newsflash Karen. It is fucking hard as shit trying to get a new job! And trust me I've been trying because I hate this job so much. But I almost flunked outta highschool so I have pretty much no qualifications due to that, which makes finding a better job hard as fuck you know.

But like, why the fuck hasn't it kicked in for her yet that I already have a fuckin job!?

Like sure, it fucking sucks but I'm trying and she should be more appreciative about that.

And she's constantly bringing up how my older sibling got a job immediately after highshool but she has a car and she actually graduated with honours so excuse me if I'm not perfect and smart like her.

I need to move out but that isn't happening anytime soon in this life because of shit like this.

[avid-idiot]

Actually, the banjo one got nothing on this

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[seat-safety-switch]

It's hard to explain to people from other cultures that our malls are largely useless. In most of Asia, for instance, the mall scene is still vibrant. Stores are in business, generating massive revenue, and attracting daily shoppers, who buy exotic foreign goods like "clothes" and "food."

Here, though, malls have rotted from some kind of unknowable internal malaise until they collapsed in on themselves and took half the economy with them. This unexpected failure has terrified capitalists, who have fled the retail sector in much the same way that folks of old used to cross the street to avoid those with facial deformities. Can't take a chance that it's contagious. Have to think of my family, who happen to all be badly spelled cryptocurrency scams and presale condo flips.

In my town, there's one large mall that's still successful. The demise of all competition has served to make it stronger, like in the movie Highlander where the main guy figures out that he can perform a leveraged buyout of Bluestar Airlines. Every Christmas, this lucky survivor of promenade warfare is thronged with the entire city's worth of shoppers, demanding to be let inside to a warm space where they can walk between stores to do their stuff-gaining. In other words, it is a ripe place for me to enjoy the heated underground parking garage in which to fix my car.

Sure, if you ask the security guards, "I'm not allowed to" change my oil while the moneyed elite are fritting to and fro. They're pretty busy at Christmas, though, and they certainly won't get upset at a guy with a Sak's bag sitting on his trunk, even if that bag is full of dirt-filled 15w40 and smelling faintly of coolant. They just can't take the chance that kicking me out is what killed the other malls.

[buttercandy16]

Shadows from the Past

Sequel to "The Bully"

PAIRING: Dark!Agatha Harkness x Reader

SUMMARY: Your past will never let you go.

WARNING(s): Abuse, Stockholm Syndrome, Manipulation, Torture, and many more Dark Themes.

Years had passed, but the ghost of Agatha Harkness lingered in your life, her shadow creeping into every corner of your mind. No matter how much distance you tried to put between yourself and her—geographically, mentally, emotionally—she always found a way to slip back in.

High school was behind you, yet the horrors endured in those dimly lit hallways clung to you like old scars that refused to fade. She had turned your formative years into an unrelenting nightmare. Your only solace had been leaving town the day after what happened in the cafeteria, promising yourself you’d rebuild from the rubble she’d left behind.

But escaping Agatha wasn’t as easy as leaving.

Life hadn’t been kind since your departure. You’d scraped by working dead-end jobs: waitressing, retail, data entry. Nothing lasted. Over time, you began to feel cursed. Managers would praise you one moment and fire you the next. Coworkers would smile at you but whisper behind your back. Each dismissal came with the same dismissive refrain: “It’s not a good fit.”

Each time, you wondered what you’d done wrong, what flaw they saw in you that made them push you out. But deep down, you couldn’t shake the suspicion that it wasn’t just bad luck. It was a feeling that settled deep in your gut: a cruel hand was behind all of this.

You stared at the eviction notice pinned to the cracked wall of your studio apartment. It mocked you, its red letters glaring against the yellowed wallpaper like a physical manifestation of failure.

Thirty days to vacate. Thirty days to figure out where you were going to sleep next. You couldn’t borrow money—you’d already alienated the few friends you had left by constantly asking for help. No family wanted to step in either; they’d given up hope long ago.

Slumping down onto the edge of your creaky bed, you stared at your phone screen, scrolling through endless job postings with no responses. You’d applied to over thirty positions in the past month. Nothing.

It felt personal. Too personal.

That’s when the email arrived.

The notification flashed across the screen, an unexpected break in the monotony. There was no subject line, and the sender’s name was unfamiliar. Normally, you would have deleted it without a second thought. But desperation pushed your fingers to open it.

The message was brief but chilling:

*Dearest [Your Name],

I’ve been watching. It seems life hasn’t been kind to you since our time together. But I can make all of your problems disappear. I can offer you comfort, stability, even a home. All you have to do is come back to me.

Meet me at 845 Blackthorne Drive tomorrow, 8 PM. Refuse, and… well, you know how persistent I can be.*

The blood drained from your face. You didn’t need to guess who had sent it. You knew. Of course, it was her. Agatha.

You closed the email immediately, your hands trembling, bile rising in your throat. You hadn’t heard her name—or dared speak it—in years. You had forced yourself to believe she was a distant nightmare.

But now, the past was staring you in the face, with claws sharpened and fangs bared.

The mansion loomed at the end of a long, winding road, shrouded by gnarled trees that reached toward the sky like skeletal hands. Blackthorne Drive was far enough from the rest of town that it felt completely cut off from reality. The house itself was imposing, its gothic architecture exuding an eerie dominance. The massive iron gates groaned as they opened, as if reluctant to let you pass.

Your car crawled up the driveway. The building grew larger and more menacing with each inch closer. Stone gargoyles leered down from the rooftop, their grotesque forms barely discernible against the stormy evening sky. Lightning flashed, illuminating the dark silhouette of a figure standing at the top of the stairs.

Agatha.

She looked exactly as you remembered, though years had polished her beauty into something sharper and more refined. The same piercing blue eyes, the same cruel smirk that had haunted you for so long. Her tailored suit clung to her form, exuding authority and control.

“Right on time,” she said, her voice cutting through the heavy rain like a blade.

You clutched the strap of your bag tightly. “I didn’t have a choice.”

A smile curved her lips, but there was no warmth in it. “You’ve always had a choice, sweetheart. You just never make the right one.”

Her words stirred old memories—memories you had fought to suppress. The cafeteria, the locker defacements, her voice whispering cruel truths in your ear. You had spent years trying to build a wall between you and those memories, and now it felt as if she was tearing it down with every step she took closer to you.

“Come inside. Let’s discuss the terms of your employment,” she purred.

The interior of the mansion was no less intimidating. It was darkly elegant, with rich mahogany floors, towering bookshelves, and ornate chandeliers. Yet there was a suffocating energy that weighed down the air, making it hard to breathe.

“Your duties will be simple,” Agatha said, circling you like a lion stalking its prey. “Clean. Serve. Obey.”

Her tone was light, but there was an undercurrent of menace in her words. She wanted you to remember who held the power now—if you’d ever had any to begin with.

You tried to protest. “Agatha, this isn’t—”

“Ms. Harkness,” she corrected sharply, her eyes narrowing. “We’re not on a first-name basis anymore, darling.”

Her smirk deepened as you faltered, biting back your words. She reached out, running her fingers along the edge of your jaw, forcing you to meet her gaze.

“You’ll find,” she said softly, “that resisting me has consequences.”

The first month in Agatha's mansion blurred into an endless cycle of humiliation and despair. Each morning, you woke to a rigid schedule outlined in excruciating detail. Agatha handed you the list herself, her fingers grazing yours as she delivered it with a sly smirk. It wasn’t just work—it was a gauntlet designed to test your limits.

The tasks were mundane in concept but laced with subtle malice. Polishing the marble floors until they reflected like glass was a daily occurrence, though she ensured new scuffs appeared overnight. Preparing her meals required precision to an absurd degree: the perfect temperature, perfect presentation, and even the placement of silverware had to match her exacting standards.

She monitored your every move, ensuring you were always within her grasp. Every task she gave you became a test of your endurance, every failure an opportunity for her to assert dominance.

One day, she ordered you to scrub the kitchen floor on your hands and knees. The task was grueling, the heat from the stove making the air heavy as you worked. Agatha leaned casually against the counter, sipping wine as she watched you struggle.

“You missed a spot,” she said idly, pointing to an invisible imperfection.

Your hands trembled as you scrubbed harder, the muscles in your arms burning with the effort.

“Pathetic,” she murmured, her voice low and mocking. “Do you know what I see when I look at you?”

You paused, your breath hitching as her words dug into your skin like needles.

“I see someone who was nothing before I came into her life,” she continued, her voice sharp. “You think you’ve suffered? You have no idea what suffering is.”

Her words lit a spark of defiance in you, even as tears stung your eyes.

“Why are you doing this?” you choked out, your voice raw with emotion. “What do you want from me?”

Agatha crouched beside you, her cold blue eyes locking onto yours.

“I want you to realize that you belong to me,” she said softly, her hand brushing a strand of hair from your face. “You always have. And you always will.”

Agatha began finding excuses to pull you away from your duties, insisting on long, tense dinners where she dissected every aspect of your life. She pried into your thoughts, your fears, your dreams, twisting them into weapons to control you.

“You’ve always been so weak,” she remarked one evening, her tone almost pitying. “Even back in high school, you needed someone to guide you. You’d have been eaten alive without me.”

Her words reopened old wounds, the memories of her torment flooding back with brutal clarity.

“You’re wrong,” you said, your voice trembling but defiant. “I was fine until you came into my life.”

Agatha’s smile faltered for a brief moment, her expression hardening.

“Fine?” she echoed, her voice icy. “Do you call this fine?” She gestured to the house, to the life she had engineered around you. “I gave you everything. Without me, you’d have nothing.”

Her words struck a painful chord, but you refused to let her see the effect they had.

“I’d rather have nothing than live like this,” you said, the defiance in your voice wavering but unbroken.

Agatha’s eyes narrowed, her jaw tightening as her control slipped for the briefest of moments.

“Careful, sweetheart,” she murmured, her voice dangerously soft. “You’re treading on thin ice.”

Her cruelty wasn’t just about control—it was about possession. She wanted you to feel her presence in every corner of your mind, to know that no matter how far you ran, you would always belong to her.

Her games became more psychological. She’d arrange personal items in your room—things you’d never brought with you, things you’d left behind in high school. A worn notebook you’d written in during freshman year. A bracelet you hadn’t seen in years. Each item was a reminder that she had always been watching, always waiting.

One evening, she cornered you in the kitchen, her hands bracketing your body against the counter. The faint scent of lavender filled the air, mingling with the oppressive tension.

“You’ve been quiet lately,” she said, her voice dripping with mock concern. “Are you unhappy here, sweetheart?”

You didn’t answer.

Her hand cupped your chin, forcing you to meet her gaze. “Do you know why no one wants you? Why every door you’ve tried to open has been slammed in your face?”

Her smirk deepened as your silence stretched. “Because I made it so.”

Your heart sank, the weight of her confession crushing you. Of course, it had been her. Every rejection, every failure, every lost opportunity—it had all been orchestrated by her.

“Why?” you whispered, your voice barely audible.

She leaned in, her breath ghosting over your ear. “Because if I can’t have you, no one can.”

The second month in the mansion was worse. Agatha’s punishments became more invasive, more intimate. She began to invade your space with increasing frequency, her touch lingering longer than necessary—a hand brushing against your arm as she passed, fingers tucking a strand of hair behind your ear.

“You’re mine,” she reminded you constantly, her voice a low purr that sent chills down your spine. “I’ve always loved you, you know. Even back then.”

Her twisted idea of love suffocated you. She wanted you to break, to surrender, to accept her as the center of your world.

And yet, there were moments of terrifying vulnerability in her eyes. Moments when she looked at you not with malice, but with a desperate longing that bordered on obsession.

“You don’t understand, do you?” she whispered one night, her hand resting on your cheek. “I did all of this for you. To protect you. To keep you safe.”

Safe. The word felt like a cruel joke, given the hell she had put you through.

What little humanity she offered was just as terrifying as her cruelty. Late one evening, you collapsed against the counter, your muscles aching from scrubbing floors for hours. Agatha appeared behind you, her presence announced by the familiar scent of lavender and something darker—whiskey, maybe.

She placed a hand on your shoulder, squeezing it just enough to make you stiffen. “I can ease this for you, you know,” she said, her voice soft yet sharp as a knife. “All you have to do is surrender.”

You didn’t dare ask what she meant, but you could see it in her eyes. Agatha didn’t just want your service. She wanted every part of you: body, mind, and soul.

When you flinched away, she sighed in mock pity. “You’ll see eventually,” she murmured. “It’s only a matter of time before you’re mine entirely.”

It was a game to her, an amusement at your expense. She thrived on your frustration, your exhaustion, the trembling in your hands as you tried—and inevitably failed—to meet her impossible demands.

Agatha ensured you were utterly dependent on her. The mansion was isolated, far from town, and the cell service was mysteriously spotty at best. Every attempt to reach out for help was met with failure—calls that wouldn’t connect, emails that bounced back.

One night, after weeks of relentless torment, Agatha pushed you too far. She had caught you crying in your room, curled up on the floor, your body trembling with exhaustion and despair. Instead of offering comfort, she stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, her expression unreadable.

“Look at you,” she said softly, almost tenderly. “So fragile. So weak. You need me, don’t you?”

When you didn’t respond, she stepped closer, crouching in front of you. Her hand reached out, tilting your chin up so you were forced to look at her.

“You’ll see it one day,” she murmured. “You’ll see that I’m the only one who’s ever truly loved you.”

Something inside you snapped. All the fear, all the pain, all the years of suffering boiled over in a wave of anger and defiance.

“Love?” you spat, your voice shaking. “You don’t know the meaning of the word.”

For a moment, Agatha’s mask slipped. Her eyes darkened, her expression hardening into something unreadable. Then, without warning, she grabbed your wrist, pulling you to your feet.

“You don’t get to talk to me like that,” she hissed, her grip bruising. “Not after everything I’ve done for you.”

Her voice cracked with something raw, something vulnerable, but it only fueled your defiance.

“You don’t own me,” you said, the words trembling but firm.

Agatha’s lips curled into a dangerous smile. “Oh, darling,” she whispered, her voice low and menacing. “I already do.”

You should’ve left. Walked out the front door that very first day and refused to let Agatha Harkness tighten her grip on your life. But desperation binds people, ties them to their torment in cruel, unyielding knots. You were broke, friendless, and hopeless. Agatha knew this. She had engineered this.

One day, driven by an overwhelming need for freedom, you slipped out of the mansion while Agatha was occupied in her study. You didn’t have a destination, only an overwhelming desire to breathe air that wasn’t tainted by her presence.

But you didn’t get far.

A black car pulled up beside you within minutes. The windows rolled down, revealing Agatha’s ice-cold gaze.

“Tsk, tsk, darling,” she said, her voice cutting through the quiet night. “Running away without saying goodbye?”

Her driver opened the back door, and Agatha stepped out, stalking toward you with the predatory elegance you had come to fear.

“I warned you,” she whispered, gripping your wrist with surprising strength. “There’s no escaping me.”

The ride back to the mansion was silent. Her grip never left your wrist, her nails digging into your skin. When you arrived, she led you inside with a calm, almost detached demeanor.

“I thought I was being kind,” she said once you were inside, closing the door with a resounding click. “Letting you work for me instead of keeping you locked away. But it seems you need to learn your place.”

Agatha’s grip on your wrist tightened as she pulled you closer, the dangerous gleam in her eyes making your heart race with equal parts fear and anger. She exuded control, towering over you not just physically but emotionally, the years of torment heavy between you like an anchor.

“You say I don’t own you, but here you are.” Her voice was soft, almost soothing, but her words dripped with venom. “You came to me, desperate, broken… and I welcomed you. I gave you purpose. Don’t you see?” She leaned in, her lips just brushing your ear. “You were always meant to be mine.”

The suffocating weight of her words threatened to overwhelm you. Agatha had taken everything from you—your independence, your sense of self, and now, even your will to fight. You stood there, frozen, as her fingers brushed along your jawline, a twisted facsimile of tenderness.

But there was no love in her touch. Only possession.

“You owe me,” she whispered, her face inches from yours. “You owe me everything. And you’re not going anywhere.”

That night, Agatha removed every shred of freedom you had left. No phone. No access to the outside world. You weren’t her maid anymore. You were her prisoner.

The days that followed were a blur of torment and submission. Agatha’s control tightened around you like a noose, her presence suffocating every moment of your existence.

One evening, as you lay in the cold, sterile confines of your room, a realization washed over you: there was no escape. Agatha had trapped you in her web, her obsession consuming you completely.

And in the depths of your despair, a horrifying truth began to take root.

You had fought so hard to resist her, to maintain your independence, but the constant push and pull of her control had worn you down. You were no longer the person you had been, no longer the girl who had dreamed of freedom and a fresh start.

You were hers.

And she knew it.

Agatha stood in the doorway, her silhouette framed by the soft glow of the hallway lights.

“You’re finally starting to understand,” she said, her voice soft but triumphant.

Tears streamed down your face as you looked at her, your defiance crumbling under the weight of her control.

“Why me?” you whispered, your voice breaking.

Agatha stepped into the room, her gaze never leaving yours.

“Because,” she said, her voice tender and possessive, “you’re the only thing I’ve ever wanted. And now, you’re mine.”

The moment your defiance crumbled, it felt like death. The person you had fought to hold onto, the fragments of your former self that Agatha hadn’t destroyed, slipped from your grasp like sand through your fingers. What replaced them was something darker—a hollow version of you, shaped by her control and your desperation to survive.

Agatha stood over you, a predator basking in her triumph, her blue eyes gleaming with satisfaction as she watched the tears streak your face. Her hand cupped your cheek, the possessiveness in her touch both suffocating and strangely comforting.

"That's it," she whispered, her voice soft as velvet. "No more fighting. No more pretending you're anything other than mine."

You didn’t respond. You couldn’t. Instead, you let your body sink into the bed, limp and resigned, as she leaned in, brushing her lips against your temple. The gesture was almost gentle, but it only served as a reminder of the power she held over you.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. The silence was thick with unspoken truths, with the undeniable reality of what you had become. You hated yourself for it—for the small, treacherous part of you that found solace in her touch, that craved the twisted sense of stability she provided. Agatha had broken you down to the point where even her cruelty felt like love.

And that was what terrified you the most.

Agatha’s dominance over your life grew even stronger after that night. She no longer needed to coerce or threaten you—your surrender had made that unnecessary. Instead, she began to blur the lines between control and affection, lacing her cruelty with moments of twisted kindness that left you reeling.

She bought you expensive clothes, dressing you in fabrics that felt like cages. “You look stunning,” she would say, her tone dripping with approval. “Perfect for me.”

She demanded your presence during her late-night dinners, insisting that you sit beside her as she drank her wine and recounted the day’s events. Sometimes, her hand would rest on your thigh, her grip firm but not painful, a constant reminder of her claim over you.

Other times, she would pull you into her lap, her arms wrapped around you like steel bands. “Tell me you belong to me,” she would whisper, her breath hot against your ear. And every time, you would nod, your voice trembling as you gave her the answer she wanted.

“I belong to you.”

Over time, the resentment that had once burned brightly within you began to dim, replaced by a numb acceptance of your new reality. Agatha’s world became your world, her needs and desires shaping every aspect of your existence.

She began to soften in subtle ways, her sharp edges smoothing out as she reveled in her victory. She would brush your hair before bed, her fingers gentle as they combed through the strands. She would trace the scars on your wrists from past despair, her lips pressing against them as she murmured, “You’re safe with me now.”

It was a cruel irony, the way she twisted the concept of safety to mean submission. But in your fractured mind, her words began to hold a strange kind of truth. Agatha had stripped you of everything—your independence, your identity, your dreams—but she had also filled the void she had created. Her presence, as suffocating as it was, had become the only constant in your life.

One night, as you lay beside her in bed, her arms wrapped around you like a cage, you found yourself leaning into her touch. The realization hit you like a blow to the chest—you no longer hated her as fiercely as you once had.

“I hate you,” you whispered, your voice barely audible in the darkness. But the tears that slid down your cheeks betrayed the lie in your words.

Agatha’s lips curved into a knowing smile as she tightened her hold on you. “No, you don’t,” she murmured, her voice filled with twisted affection. “You just hate how much you need me.”

And in that moment, you knew she was right.

Your days bled into weeks, then months, until time became meaningless. The life you had once imagined for yourself—a life of freedom, of love untainted by pain—faded into the background, a distant memory overshadowed by the reality of your existence with Agatha.

She had transformed you into exactly what she wanted: a creature entirely dependent on her, bound to her by a dark and unshakable connection. And as much as you despised what you had become, a part of you—small and desperate—began to find comfort in the life she had built for you.

Agatha, for her part, seemed utterly satisfied. She no longer needed to assert her dominance with cruelty; your surrender had solidified her victory. Instead, she began to lavish you with affection, her gestures laced with a possessiveness that made your skin crawl and your heart ache.

“You’re mine forever,” she would say, her lips brushing against your temple as she held you close. And every time, you would nod, the words leaving your lips like a prayer.

“I’m yours.”

But deep down, a tiny spark of defiance still flickered within you, buried beneath the layers of submission and survival. It was a fragile thing, easily snuffed out by Agatha’s overwhelming presence, but it remained—a reminder that, no matter how deeply she had claimed you, a part of you still longed for freedom.

And as you lay in her arms, her breath warm against your skin, you couldn’t help but wonder: would that spark ever be enough to set you free? Or were you destined to remain trapped in her web, a willing prisoner of her dark and twisted love?

Agatha’s voice broke the silence, her words soft but commanding. “Say it,” she murmured, her lips brushing against your ear. “Say you love me.”

Your breath caught in your throat as you hesitated, the weight of her command pressing down on you like a vice. And then, with tears streaming down your face, you gave her what she wanted.

“I love you,” you whispered, the words tasting like ashes on your tongue.

Agatha’s smile was triumphant as she pulled you closer, her arms tightening around you in a suffocating embrace. “Good girl,” she purred. “You’re mine, and I’ll never let you go.”

And in that moment, you realized the horrifying truth: you didn’t want her to.