James' World 2

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Marta Crilly has come to despise her outdoor patio heater. She bought it in the late summer of 2020, hoping it would allow her to host some outdoor gatherings before the Boston winter really hit. “It wasn’t honestly that warm, but it was better than nothing,” she says. At least it was an excuse to get people over. In the summer of 2021, she decided to get rid of it — she figured there’d still be a market for it, since Covid-19 was still with us, as would soon be the Boston cold.

Turns out nobody wanted it. She’s been trying to sell the device and even give it away for nearly a year, and she’s had absolutely zero bites. In the Buy Nothing group she’s in, all anyone would have to do is come pick it up. “Nobody’s even interested,” says Crilly, an archivist for the city of Boston. “People don’t even like the post.”

Crilly is hardly alone. Plenty of people are sitting around their houses and apartments, weighing their pandemic purchases — sometimes the house or apartment itself — and wondering, “Huh, what was I thinking?” Consider it a Covid-specific flavor of buyer’s remorse.

When in distress, a lot of consumers are inclined to throw money at their problems. During the early days of the pandemic especially, there was all this pressure to better ourselves, or at least channel our energy somewhere, which in our society often translates to buying stuff.

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Amid the Covid-19 pandemic social distancing and mask-wearing restrictions and requirements, beach-goers take a boat ride with their dogs on a sunny summer day off Santa Catalina Island, California, on August 11, 2020.Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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Jorge Colombo

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The working woman’s problems in 9 to 5, the Jane Fonda-starring feminist comedy about three secretaries’ revolt against their chauvinistic boss, only seem distant at first.

Yes, the movie is four decades old. Female office workers and secretaries are no longer the largest sector of the American workforce; 20 million women don’t roll on pantyhose and sling on high heels every morning while staring down the barrel of another day of mind-numbing clerical work and coffee-fetching. The battle to end the gender pay gap and sexual harassment on the job still toils on. But the feminist movement of the 1970s organized resistance against male bosses who regarded the women around them at work as “office wives” and not fellow professionals. Female office workers took to the streets and brought their message to employers, legislatures, and pop culture.

Finally, women’s careers diversified; cultural attitudes changed. For many Americans, the oppressed secretary’s struggle for respect and recognition now seems frozen in time, stiff as the four-inch halo of hairspray curls around every woman’s head in 9 to 5.

But right at the end of the movie, just before we toast champagne with Fonda, Dolly Parton, and Lily Tomlin in their newly egalitarian office, 9 to 5 reveals a more radical vision of the workplace than the simple eradication of every “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” (Like their boss, who gets relocated to Brazil.) Tomlin rattles off new employee benefits and accommodations including an in-office daycare center, flexible hours, a job-sharing program, even resources for recovering alcoholics—on top of the basic things like robust health care, equal pay, and the catharsis of watching a serial sexual harasser shipped off the continent. Workers are happier and more productive, making higher-ups happy too. It’s a gleaming example of how functional and humane work can be.

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Memorial Day weekend is almost here. We want the first hot dog of your summer to be the best one. So we ate 15 of them to figure out exactly which one that would be.

One week later, we still feel kind of puffy. How does Joey Chestnut do it?

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