Fork You: The Company Store:, 21st C Version

For those not familiar with the 1946 country classic by Merle Travis, Sixteen Tons, the refrain goes like this:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

Travis is writing about insidiousness embedded in the coal-mining economy of Appalachia. But the same oppressive system was also in play in the agrarian South of the 19th and 20th centuries. For those interested in researching more deeply into the policies and practices of Jim Crow, one excellent area of exploration is how the Company Store institutionalized a malignant cycle of debt among African American sharecroppers in the South, post Civil War.

Consider this story a modest, modern twist on an old, pernicious practice.

Imagine an association of chefs in Israel, all being represented by an overarching Big Brother that sets the rules for how these kitchens are run. For a monthly fee, they will promote you, but only IF: Your prices satisfy them; Your selection of how much to charge for delivery — no matter what the distance — is set by them; You have absolutely no communication with your customers, because in their eyes, these customers belong to them; You absolutely avoid solving any issues with your customers and leave those matters to them. Moreover, The Company utilizes undercover customers, hired to spy on chefs’ operations and report back. A WhatsApp group of all chefs was set up by the Company itself and is quietly monitored to insure that group discussions are, in their eyes, proper. And the apotheosis of this system of total control: If you decide for whatever reason to leave the Company and go out on your own, you are forbidden from contacting any of your customers to let them know where they might find you.

Monopolistic practices? Restraint of Trade? Denial of capacity to earn a fair wage? Paranoid Management? Pure meanness and spite? I don’t know. You find the phrases that seem most apt to describe such practices.

I suppose, in the scheme of things, such practices are mild in comparison, say, to the current disenfranchisement of certain Voters in the South (Black, poor). And to even suggest an analogy to Jim Crow practices denigrates the true, systemic evils of the Company Store system. In my own little corner of the world, in my own little mind here in my soul food kitchen, however, experiencing just a small taste of injustice goes a long way toward empathising with the more global struggles we unfortunately see all around us. Assuming I needed such a nudge in the first place.