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Shoplifters Will Be Liquidated: A World Where the Minions are The Happiest People Around

While perusing the Aftershock Comics’ smorgasbord of miniseries, Shoplifters Will be Liquidated stood out to me. Not just because of the strange title, but because of the subject matter and setting. As the blurb on the company website says “Imagine Judge Dredd working for Amazon, and you’ve got a hint of what you’re in for.” While megacorporations with intensely powerful private security forces are not a new concept in futuristic and cyberpunk fiction, very rarely are members of the corporate goon squad given the central focus. It does raise the question: what goes through the mind of these characters? What drives the faceless mooks that usually only exist to be mowed down by the plucky, rebellious heroes? Well, in order to answer that, we must explore what kind of world he lives in and how it creates a dedicated corporate super-agent.

Returning to the self-professed comparison to Judge Dredd, the eponymous character is a police officer given full authority to exact justice as he sees fit in a dystopian “Megacity”. Since the system of law in his universe contains very little in the way of checks and balances, Dredd was trained to be loyal to the law and only to the law, and is fully committed to his job of enacting his government’s idea of justice. If you can picture that sort of blind, fanatical devotion to law and order and apply it to a mall security guard, you have Security Officer Nussbaum, the protagonist of SWBL. 

Now, your average retail employee isn’t likely to be too enthusiastic about their job, including security personnel. Having to be loyal to a company that pays too little and expects too much is a soul-crushing endeavor, especially when one has to pretend to be happy all day. Nussbaum doesn’t need to pretend. In fact, he is much too enthusiastic about his job in “Loss Prevention” by our standards. By the standards of the company, Caucasus Superstore, he has the perfect amount of enthusiasm. He’s a soldier, who uses extreme, often deadly tactics to prevent theft, vandalism, and destruction of property. In this universe, it seems that private security is given leave to use whatever methods available to do their job, including but not limited to mutilating attempted petty criminals, as Nussbaum is shown to do in issue 1. The only concern uttered by his superiors is how such gruesome acts affect the company’s optics, and he is unperturbed by this. 

A soldier working in Caucasus, unconcerned with the welfare of his fellow man and believing blindly in a cause that actively works against his best interests. This may be a somewhat familiar character to those familiar with the history of the real Caucasus region. Historically, the Caucasus has been a battleground for larger empires, with its rough and mountainous natural geography acting as a barrier between the Middle East and the Eurasian Steppe. It’s a harsh place with a great diversity of cultures and languages that have very rarely been able to find peace. These qualities translate into the distressingly cutthroat nature of Nussbaum’s job, but are even more appropriate when the true plot is set in motion.

One day, while pursuing a prospective thief, Nussbaum happens upon a hidden world underneath the superstore; a primitive society of farmers, tribes, feudal lords and other medieval archetypes. This society lacks peace and is constantly squabbling over resources (consisting mainly of items stolen from the store) with the small folk caught in the conflicts between the local lords. These problems are compounded when Nussbaum shows up and proceeds to raise hell in the name of his corporate overlords. He is in Loss Prevention, after all, and all of this world’s resources are the rightful property of the company, so it only makes sense to destroy everything they own for the sake of asset recovery. Nussbaum acts for the sake of an empire, much like the soldiers acting to take the real-life Caucasus. He seeks to destroy the people’s way of life for no other reason than because it’s his job. If they won’t abide by Caucasus’ rules, then they must be liquidated. 

Indeed, the title of the series has multiple meanings. “Liquidation” can refer to either converting material assets into pure cash, or to violently killing someone. The latter is in reference to the violent acts that Nussbaum performs on a daily basis, and the former is not only a common term in corporate finance, but is also in reference to one of the series’ main sub-plots: Lance and Bryce’s insider trading scheme. These two low-level employees seek to manipulate Caucasus’s stock prices in order to get rich quick and overtake the company. How do they plan to do this? By accelerating their boss’s planned suicide. How do they hope to push him over the edge? By convincing anti-consumerist radicals to commit acts of violence in the store. This gives us an example of both types of liquidation on display. The violent deaths are obvious, but Lance and Bryce seek to essentially turn the turmoil around them into profit. Their only motivation throughout this whole series is to make a profit and leave their middling positions behind at the expense of the shoppers and their boss. I’m sure that countless retail employees can attest to the fact that their pain is indeed being turned into profit for those who don’t deserve it. They would doubtlessly feel great catharsis when their plan fails and they are, in their own words, “boned.” 

This is quite appropriate, as the term “boned” is a repeated motif throughout the course of SWBL. Nussbaum uses it in relation to his most recent perp while reading him his rights in the very first page. Mr. Provo’s beleaguered assistant Judy uses it when she realizes that he is on a path to ruin. It’s an interesting recurrent quote, especially since this comic isn’t opposed to using more colorful four-letter words, yet the characters choose to keep things safely PG-13 when referring to their inevitable doom. Remember that Lance and Bryce were low-level employees trying to make it big. Nussbaum is so dedicated to his job that it defines his entire existence. Even in times of crisis, these characters have been conditioned to act politically correct, so as not to endanger their livelihoods. This isn’t consistent from character to character, as several Caucasus staff members swear openly, such as Nussbaum’s rather sadistic colleague in Loss Prevention, but she is shown to be more interested in fulfilling her need for violence than promoting her employers, admitting that she would have executions on the store floor if she were in charge. 

There seems to be an inordinate amount of death within Caucasus’ walls. If the first issue is any indication, Loss Prevention kills petty shoplifters on a regular basis, sometimes liquidating those that are only presumed guilty. While they’re not causing undue suffering for the civilian population, they’re preventing their fellow staff from ending undue suffering. Mr. Provo, the aforementioned suicidal boss, finds inspiration for a new business practice after Nussbaum knocks him out cold while he attempted to buy a loaded gun for the implicit purpose of ending his life in full view of everyone. He took his own misfortune as inspiration for his latest and greatest idea: commercial assisted suicide. While I doubt that any modern retail chains would ever market themselves as merchants of death, this universe apparently has a large enough market for this idea to pass the “ideas” phase. Death is the last thing that the average person wants to think about while shopping. It’s the last thing any company wants its customers to think about, yet Caucasus is selling it. It’s the endpoint of the marketing game. 

Perhaps this is the creative team expressing their belief that consumerism has reached its critical mass, that the only thing left to market, the only thing that people truly want to buy, is a way out. That’s certainly what all the main characters are searching for. Nussbaum is searching for a way out of the underworld that he sees as a perversion of reality. Lance and Bryce are searching for a way out of their disadvantageous positions at the company. Mr. Provo is looking for a way out of his tortured existence, and he finds it in the end. In the climax of the fifth and final issue, Provo gets his wish when he publicly commits suicide while announcing his new initiative. He ends it with a bang, taking a number of bystanders with him, including Nussbam, who just managed to climb his way back to the superstore only to take an explosion to the face.

With the combined failures of Nussbaum and the Insider Trader duo’s story arcs, as well as the rather anticlimactic end to another character arc concerning several denizens of the underworld hunting down Nussbaum to enact vengeance for killing their friends, it’s clear that there are no happy endings in this world. Every ambition was all for nought with the exception of the suicidal man. 

It is a rather nihilistic outlook, so what would the best course of action be in this scenario? Follow Mr. Provo’s example? That doesn’t sound particularly appealing to most people. It’s already been established that ambition doesn’t pay off, as our embezzling friends can attest to, so if you want to stay alive, what do you do? Maybe you should follow Nussbaum’s example: find something attainable and commit to it. He committed himself to Loss Prevention and was perfectly content until he fell into the underworld. When he had his brain probed by the underground leader, commitment to Caucasus was all he found. When all hope was lost, Nussbaum found satisfaction in the field he was good at. He never asked for anything more, and lived a fulfilling life until his death. 

A sad state of affairs when the corporate mooks are the happiest folks around, but that’s just the kind of world that Shoplifters Will Be Liquidated creates. The creative team doesn’t seem to think much of the world of retail, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve had bad experiences in the field. SWBL asserts that neither the customer nor the employee are valued in a corporate environment. Whenever it suits the company, both of these parties will be liquidated, figuratively or literally. If one is caught up in the machinations of the retail world, they’re headed towards a dead end where the only way out is in a body bag.

At least, that’s what I took away from it. 

Do you agree? Do you disagree? Let me know.

#comics #comic books #review #comic review #capitalism #aftershock #essay #thoughts #overthinking