The Positivity of Absolute Value

We have all recieved information that has shocked us to the point of apathy. We have all been put under such a great amount of pressure that we almost appear immune to it and simply make decisions because that is what we are ingrained to do, whether they are beneficial or not. I was faced with such a situation today and I feel as though the empire that I co-built has become extremely vulnerable to obsoletion. I helped to build a crew, I helped to build a facility, I helped to build nothing less than an attitude, that defied what corporate America is gradually forcing everyone and everything to become. I help to run a Starbuck's retail location, and I arrived on the scene one week after my current manager and long time friend assumed responsibility. Now this particular location necessitates a second assistant manager, because of the volume it generates. I was, chronologically the first assistant, and remain so to this day, a year and a half later. My manager and I have gone through four second assistant managers and countless amounts of baristas and shift supervisors. We are a couple of the very few that not only survived the turn-over, but dictated the voice of the store. We hired, fired and watched retire the best and the worst of them, but we were always there the next morning to talk about how we were going to prepare for the next rash of inadequacy. It was always us. We built an empire, and today I watched that empire fall to it's knees. My manager put in her two weeks today and the effect was astounding. I understand the concept that no one is indespensible. Everyone can be replaced. This is the philosophy ascending the heirarchy, but what they don't see, are the tears that I saw today. They don't see the pain and the fear. they don't see the hate. This happened because of the corporations need for conformity and consistency. This happened because we are all, everyone one of us, supposed to look and act like little-bo-peep. No one is allowed to have an opinion because opinion equals revolution. There are very few of us left with the knowledge that at one point we were encouraged to have individuality and personality. We were encouraged to speak as though we were human beings.
Now we are expected to learn this universal rhetoric that will take away any form of innovation that may have been able to occur in the daily work environment. We are Starbuck's artificial intelligence. Ask me any question you want and I will have only a limited amount of answers that I can give you because they have taken away my ability to improvise. They have taken away my ability to serve you in the best way that I know how. And believe me, you all will suffer from this. Today I watched one of the few remaining truthful and opinionated empires fall to it's knees in the face of this "powerful conglomerate" seeking to control the minds and humanity of individuals, and I am not okay with it. I am not okay with watching someone else come in and ruin all that we have built. I am not okay.

For that wonderful and articulate comment to my post. I am glad that we can all agree with your stance, as was the point of my post, so it will be completely unnecessary to leave the comment that you just left.

I wonder.
I can't speak for any of you, but I am a seller on Half.com, which is this branch of ebay that acts as their used online store. You don't have to bid for anything, you just browse, click and buy. I have never had a significant issue with any of ebays policies as far as Half is concerned, but it seems that recently they may be on the front of an odious display of conglomerate power.
Recently ebay added a discussion board to their site at half for sellers and buyers alike to chat and respond to any issuances on policy or news the company presents. I visited this discussion baord for the first time the other day and read a few of the items that ebay posted for "discussion," and was overwhelmed by the negative response from users to them.
For instance, the first post that you can see at the top reads, "Elimination of Order Confirmation on Half.com." This post returned 987 responses which we can only assume are predominantly negative, because if countning the proponents, we take only the first thirty and do the math, we end up with 0 out of thirty. That's right count them 0. Though some of the responses are idle and apathetic, there are a few with some spunk. Such as this one by rebelrazor, "Ebay does not care what we want. They would like to eliminate Half.com. This is just a start of future eliminations of services."
What's really interesting is the fact that ebay seems to be handing out false statistics, "We are doing this after hearing from the majority of our sellers that it is a cumbersome and unneeded process." A "majority...," interesting word choice. Even if there were one advocate for the elimination of the confirmation process, this would greatly strengthen ebay's argument. But I have yet to find one of those advocates.
There is also the second post you see from ebay that states, "Change to Pre-orders Feature on Half.com." This post returns 274 responses and if we do the same statistical check, we get the exact same result, 0 out of 30.
The underlying theme to the responses is that the elite of this company, the decision making buisnessmen that put it all together are slowly but surely phasing out this branch of ebay alltogether. This may or not be true, but the thing to do may not be to just give up on half.com and never look back. Maybe the thing to do is have your voice heard in another forum. Say this one for instance. Perhaps if enough bloggers blogged, and enough of the right listeners heard, something may actually be done about this. Perhaps it does not need to happen this way.
I wonder.