Shafted By Staples

I've been in contact with them. If they actually cared, I wouldn't be here trying to get this story on page one of google.

LOL! Do you really think this is going to affect the company at all? What a waste of time that could be better used more productively. Staples has over 2,000 stores in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, and also offers its products through catalog and online. It's ok to vent, but just get over it, and move on.

This is really unbelievable. Staples is a $20billion a year company and growing by more than 20% a year worldwide. Every company has some disgruntled customers, but obviously this company is doing a whole lot of things right.

Do you really believe this vigilante campaign will keep any of its customer base of small to medium business owners away? If I went on a rampage like this everytime I get miffed on how I was treated, there would be no time for anything else.

My time is much more valuable than to spend it whining about a $675 deal gone bad. But, that's just me. Good luck at bringing Goliath down with your slings and arrows, David and your little cry babies.

You were excited by the idea weren't you...?

I thought you got stapled to a shaft!

All you have to say is that Staples sucks. Nothing happened with AOL until we the people started saying "AOL sucks". The word "sucks" has a much more powerful effect than whining or any other form of protest. The voice of the people should always include the word "sucks". I think there was a whole thread dedicated to this very powerful technique.

I used to have a business account at Office Depot, but they really pissed me off one time when they overbilled my invoice by 29 cents. I yelled "Office Depot sucks" so loud it was heard blocks away. People began chanting "Office Depot sucks", "Office Depot sucks", "Office Depot sucks" for 40 days and 40 nights. Now Office Depot is closing 112 of their stores.

David conquered Goliath using one stone. We the people can conquer the Goliath of corporate fascism with one word - "sucks". All it takes is the voice of the people using the right word. But this is getting dangerously close to the precipice of civil unrest, politics and religion which could get this thread deleted. That would be such a waste of otherwise valiant protesting.

I thought you would never ask. My favorite color is black, and I'll tell you why. Black is a very beautiful color, the composite of all colors. It is the color of determination, of resolve, of strength, a color by which all others are clarified and defined. Black is the mysterious surrounding of germination, of fertility, the breeding ground of new life which always evolves, renews, refreshes, and reproduces itself in darkness. The seed hidden in the earth, the strange journey of the sperm, the secret growth of the embryo in the womb all these the blackness surrounds and protects.

But, that is not the reason why I like black. For a considerable period of time anarchists used black flags as their symbol. The general drift away from the red flag towards the black must be placed in the historical context. During the 1880s the socialist movement was changing. Marxist social democracy was becoming the dominant socialist trend, with libertarian socialism going into relative decline in many areas. Thus the red flag was increasingly associated with the authoritarian and statist (and increasingly reformist) side of the socialist movement. In order to distinguish themselves from other socialists, the use of the black flag makes perfect sense as it was it an accepted symbol of working class revolt.

There are ample accounts of the use of black flags by anarchists. Probably the most famous was Nestor Makhno's partisans during the Russia Revolution. Under the black banner, his army routed a dozen armies and kept a large portion of the Ukraine free from concentrated power for a good couple of years. On the black flag was embroidered "Liberty or Death" and "The Land to the Peasant, The Factories to the Workers." In 1925, the Japanese anarchists formed the Black Youth League and, in 1945, when the anarchist federation reformed, their journal was named Kurohata (Black Flag). In 1968, students carried black flags during the street fighting and General Strike in France, bringing the resurgence of anarchism in the 1960s into the view of the general public. The same year saw the Black Flag being raised at the American Students for a Democratic Society national convention. Two years later the British based magazine Black Flag was started and is still going strong. At the turn of the 21st century, the Black Flag was at the front of the so-called anti-globalisation protests. Today, if you go to any sizeable demonstration you will usually see the Black Flag raised by the anarchists present.

However, the anarchists' black flag originated much earlier than this. Louise Michel, famous participant in the Paris Commune of 1871, was instrumental in popularizing the use of the Black Flag in anarchist circles. At a March 18th public meeting in 1882 to commemorate the Paris Commune she proclaimed that the "red flag was no longer appropriate; the anarchists should raise the black flag of misery." The following year she put her words into action. According to anarchist historian George Woodcock, Michel flew the black flag on March 9, 1883, during demonstration of the unemployed in Paris, France. An open air meeting of the unemployed was broken up by the police and around 500 demonstrators, with Michel at the front carrying a black flag and shouting "Bread, work, or lead!" marched off towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The crowd pillaged three baker's shops before the police attacked. Michel was arrested and sentenced to six years solitary confinement. Public pressure soon forced the granting of an amnesty. August the same year saw the publication of the anarchist paper Le Drapeau Noir (The Black Flag) in Lyon which suggests that it had become a popular symbol within anarchist circles. However, anarchists had been using red-and-black flags a number of years previously so Michel's use of the color black was not totally without precedence.

Not long after, the black flag made its way to America. Paul Avrich reports that on November 27, 1884, it was displayed in Chicago at an anarchist demonstration. According to Avrich, August Spies, one of the Haymarket martyrs, "noted that this was the first occasion on which the black flag had been unfurled on American soil." By January the following year, "street parades and mass outdoor demonstrations, with red and black banners . . . were the most dramatic form of advertisement" for the revolutionary anarchist movement in America. April 1885 saw Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Holmes at the head of a protest march "each bearing a flag, one black, the other red." The Black Flag continued to be used by anarchists in America, with one being seized by police at an anarchist organised demonstration for the unemployed in 1893 at which Emma Goldman spoke. Twenty one years later, Alexander Berkman reported on another anarchist inspired unemployed march in New York which raised the black flag in "menacing defiance in the face of parasitic contentment and self-righteous arrogance" of the "exploiters and well-fed idlers."

Now the question becomes why, exactly, black was chosen. The Chicago "Alarm" stated that the black flag is "the fearful symbol of hunger, misery and death." Berkman asserts that anarchists were "to adopt the black flag as a symbol of the workers misery and as an expression of their anger and bitterness." Historian Bruce C. Nelson also notes that the Black Flag was considered "the emblem of hunger" when it was unfurled in Chicago in 1884. While it "was interpreted in anarchist circles as the symbol of death, hunger and misery" it was "also said to be the 'emblem of retribution'" and in a labor procession in Cincinnati in January 1885, "it was further acknowledged to be the banner of working-class intransigence, as demonstrated by the words 'No Quarter' inscribed on it." For Berkman, it was the "symbol of starvation and desperate misery." Louise Michel stated that the "black flag is the flag of strikes and the flag of those who are hungry."

The use of the black flag by anarchists, therefore, is an expression of their roots and activity in the labor movement in Europe, particularly in France. The anarchist adoption of the Black Flag by the movement in the 1880s reflects its use as "the traditional symbol of hunger, poverty and despair" and that it was "raised during popular risings in Europe as a sign of no surrender and no quarter." Black flags represents the power of the people to get redress for the wrongs, and could be a powerful tool against the fascism demonstrated by the intransigence of Staples to put a laptop in every well-deserved lap.