YOUR AD HERE »

Hartley: No, really, you just bought a box of poop

Todd Hartley
I’m With Stupid

It’s finally happened, people. We’ve finally passed the stupidity tipping point. We are now so irretrievably idiotic that some of us are paying for feces. That’s right: feces, poop, dung, stool, whatever you want to call it. Apparently, people have been buying it online.

So how did we devolve so far as a species that we’ve reached this sorry state? For the answer, I think we need to start with Jesus, as it’s his birthday that’s at the heart of the problem.

Once upon a time, Jesus was born, and three guys gave him gold and a couple of perfume ingredients, so people decided that everyone should give presents on Jesus’ birthday. That was nice and thoughtful, but it still kind of made sense and it wasn’t profitable enough, so someone decided we needed an old, fat guy in a red suit to fly around the world in one night delivering even more presents by sliding down people’s chimneys and putting stuff in their socks.



Just in case that wasn’t silly enough, someone also decided that the guy in the red suit should live at the North Pole with a bunch of elves who would make presents for every kid in the world. Then, after stuffing those millions of presents into one magic sack, the man in the suit would take to the sky in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, including, on foggy nights, one with a red light bulb for a nose.

What kind of lunatic dreamt up that myth? And how in the world did he get people everywhere to adopt it as the official story of Christmas? Seriously, if someone told you a story like that at a party, you’d take away their keys.




Mind you, I’m not saying I think Santa Claus is stupid; I’m just saying that if you tried to explain Santa Claus to an alien visiting Earth, the alien would definitely think you were stupid.

But that’s not the point. The point is that even with Santa Claus, Christmas wasn’t as profitable as it could be, so retailers decided to do everything in their power to whip consumers into a buying frenzy starting around Labor Day each autumn and continuing right into the new year. Thus was born the annual “Only (insert number) shopping days until Xmas!” countdown.

That worked a little, but corporations still weren’t squeezing every cent they could out of each customer, so someone came up with the idea of Black Friday — a day of sales and Wal-Mart muggings immediately after Thanksgiving — as a way of making even more money. And that, as we all know now, became a massive success.

Upon seeing the throngs lined up outside stores in anticipation of Black Friday and hearing about the crowds and the fights once the doors opened, I thought for sure we couldn’t get much dumber as a society. Turns out I was way wrong.

Before you knew it, store after store decided to start Black Friday on Thursday, right when people ought to be sitting down with their families for Thanksgiving dinner. I figured there was no way such a ploy would work, but rather than scoffing at the very idea and ignoring the early openings, millions of people flocked to the stores and have now incorporated Black Friday into their holiday traditions.

All of that just says to me that people are essentially mindless, free-spending zombies who can be talked into buying just about anything. And that’s where the feces comes in.

Last year for Black Friday, Amazon raised its prices on a card game called Cards Against Humanity. This year, in protest, Cards Against Humanity pulled all products off of its website on Black Friday and offered instead only one item: a box with “literal poop from an actual bull.”

In case you’re wondering, yes, the boxes were literally full of crap or, as the company’s founder tweeted, “If you buy the poop expecting it to be something else that’s not poop, you’re actually buying a valuable life lesson for $6.”

So to sum up, because someone gave Jesus myrrh, a fat man in a red suit needs to give everyone presents and we the public need to start shopping before Thanksgiving dinner is finished for reasons I still can’t figure out. But because we’re so conditioned to spend, spend, spend, someone decided to actually sell us bulls— just to see if he could, and in a few days he sold out of 30,000 units.

God, we’re dumb.

Todd Hartley is selling vials of literal urine from a literal columnist for the low, low price of $99.99. To read more or leave a comment, please visit http://zerobudget.net.