I’ve always known there’s an army of RV gypsies out there, but…

…it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder what the 2008 “recession” did to it.

The linked article is ostensibly about Amazon exploiting an unorthodox resource in filling its need for seasonal workers (apparently robots don’t do quite as big a percentage of the warehouse work as Bezos has implied) but the interesting part is about what retirees do when their savings are stolen by bankers and they’re left on the street. I suppose they’re expected to quietly wander off and die somewhere, but you know how actual people can be so troublesome that way – they have a bad habit of living on and clogging “the system,” and they’re doing that by the thousands and tens or hundreds of thousands.

I suspect Obamacare’s “single-payer” successor will have a plan for that. Then things will all be neat and tidy and workers won’t ask any intrusive questions. But in the meantime all those troublesome older people insist on living on after their usefulness is expended. What can a giant corporation do but exploit them?

Meet the CamperForce, Amazon’s Nomadic Retiree Army

Before the crash, the Apperleys had been doing all right. Bob worked as an accountant for a timber products firm, and Anita was an interior decorator and part-time caregiver. They thought they would retire aboard a sailboat, funding that dream with equity from their three­bedroom house. But then the housing bubble burst […] Bob compared the “slow-dawning reality” of his new life to waking up in The Matrix: learning that the pleasant, predictable world you used to inhabit is a mirage, a lie built to hide a brutal reality. “The security most people take comfort in—I’m not convinced that isn’t an illusion,” he says. “What you believe to be true is so embedded. It takes a radical pounding to let go.”

I know exactly how that feels. It feels like terrifying shit. There’s a life past it, though I have to admit a camper in Quartzite never sounded very attractive to me.

h/t