by William Skink

I have become a frequent visitor of box stores during this pandemic. I mask up and enter consumer labyrinths like Walmart NOT to buy essential items, like food and toilet paper, but to purchase plastic bricks (commonly known as Legos).

Since my wife is not 100% on board with her unemployed husband spending money on “toys”, I often use cash for my purchases because cash avoids the scrutiny of my fiscally responsible partner’s examination of the credit card bill.

Last week I was annoyed to discover Walmart had stopped accepting cash at the self-checkout lines. Instead, I was directed to an aisle with a real live human checker to get my plastic bricks. I asked this checker what the deal is and she explained that the self-checkout lines went cashless because of the national coin shortage. I said that didn’t make any sense and she agreed.

Yesterday a phone conversation got me thinking about all this. The person I was speaking with said she started noticing box stores in her community changing their layout BEFORE the pandemic, including a fast food joint that inexplicably added drive-thru lanes.

It might seem like a huge leap to go from one person’s anecdotal recollections to claiming corporate America had foreknowledge of the upcoming pandemic, but another story I remembered is worth noting here.

Last year corporate America saw a record number of CEOs leave their jobs. It was such a big number that CNBC wrote this article about it. From the link:

Thanks to 160 chiefs leaving their posts in December, 2019 totaled 1,640 departures by the heads of U.S. businesses, higher than the 1,484 exits in 2008 when the country was embroiled in the financial crisis, according to Challenger, Gray, & Christmas. The firm started tracking CEO departures in 2002.

“The number of chief executives who announced their departures in 2019 was staggering,” Challenger Vice President Andrew Challenger said in a press release.

The question that Americans should be asking is what did corporate America know about the pandemic and when did they know it? Instead we’re burning down cities and laying the foundation for armed civil conflict.

Will the American public remain incurious about possible foreknowledge of the pandemic by corporate America? If the suspicious economic activity before 9/11 can be ignored, then more obvious evidence of foreknowledge (like Event 201) of this pandemic will be ignored as well.