Retail-Speak American Style

Hidden or overshadowed by U.S. President Trump’s coined term, fake news, American retail’s utterly contrived, and thus fake jargon went unscathed by consumers in first few decades of the twentieth century. Even nonverbally acknowledging the verbiage spewed out by employees and even front-line managers in a retail store or coffee shop as if the jargon were legitimate subtly enables and thus extenuates the sordid trend. Were enough customers to question and even object to the “corporate correct” lines, perhaps the feedback would move its way up managerial hierarchies and result in cleaner, more transparent conversation at the store level. To the extent that business culture pervades a society, changes are greater that the verbal artifice will be received as if it were real, and thus a valid way of communicating. Perhaps the more general question concerns the extent to which linguistic artifice saturates American culture and has even come to be viewed as genuine. The subtle influence of business culture in America may be vastly overlooked.

Perhaps the most contrived verbiage utilized strategically by retail managements is, I do apologize. Especially fake is the corporate apology when for your inconvenience is added. That the customer has been inconvenienced by a managerial decision that is in the financial interest of the company without the manager being willing to compensate the customer in any way for the “inconvenience” renders the word itself, as well as the apology, utterly fake. It may even be considered to be passive aggressive, especially if the manager could offer to compensate the aggrieved customer. An apology is not in itself compensation, even if it feels good to hear the word, but such a feeling should not lead to the conclusion that the apology is genuine. In fact, customer-service employees, such as at call centers, are trained to apologize for virtually anything because apologizing is free. In a pro-business societal culture, customers may leap to the conclusion that even such an apology, even when a company wrongs a customer and the management could compensate the person for the harm or cost but refuses, is genuine. The astute customer might reply, unfortunately I cannot accept your apology because your company has not solved the problem but could do so. The use of the word unfortunately is just as fake as when it is used by an employee or manager as if the outcome were unfortunate also for the company, which is not the case because it benefits financially by not solving the problem or compensating the customer. 

The underlying brain sickness behind the corporate apology can be detected when, after replying, unfortunately I cannot accept your apology, the customer is treated to yet another apology! With such passive aggression (i.e., in the sheer disregard and thus disrespect of what the customer has just said), the angered customer could also be repetitive: Unfortunately, I cannot accept your apology. Astonishingly, even that statement may be insufficient to stop the verbal diarrhea on the other end. Perhaps the line of apology as an appeasement strategy is so entrained by supervisors that the underlying pathology triggered in the employee lies in the brain’s reversion to a primitive, reptilian stage.

Another, not so passive aggressive, instance of fake managerial jargon in retail is the fake greeting as a customer enters a store. When done by security guards, however, any greeting is inherently passive aggressive. Translated into real meaning, such a greeting as welcome means Just so you know, I’ll be watching you. The managerial decision to fuse the two roles of greeter and security guard at the entrance of a store reveals not only a basic disregard for the comfort of customers, but also an unconscious sadism, wherein the infliction of discomfort and even pain in another person gives pleasure to the culprit.

The sheer fakeness of greetings by employees and store managers when customers are entering a store even before they are oriented to the new surroundings can be seen in Starbuck’s corporate directive to have store employees say Welcome in to customers as they enter, as if welcome and come in make any sense fused together. An astute customer could reply, Greetings! Such a way of saying hello is so stilted that it can communicate the acknowledgement that the communication is utterly contrived and fake rather than genuine. Perhaps the way to eventually end the linguistic managerial fakeness is to give employees and store managers a of their own crap in return. The exchange of genuine and fake, from customers and employees, respectively, is unfair to the customers, as it is insulting to speak genuinely only to receive trite, contrived pieces of company jargon, especially if every employee is utilizing the same words.

A third instance of contrived jargon concerns a retail company’s managerial decision to revert to Happy Holidays immediately after Halloween, as if the words Thanksgiving and Christmas were toxic even though both holidays are official U.S. holidays and thus completely legitimate in all of the member-states (each of which recognized both holidays, at least as of 2026). To single out two major holidays as if they constituted cups of bland, generic water is not only dogmatic, but also passive aggressive against Americans who legitimately express positive sentiments about either or both of the two holidays. It is interesting—meaning ideologically convenient—that on the day after Christmas, the same employees who had been saying Happy Holidays suddenly can’t stop saying, Happy New Years. The fact that not every American celebrates every holiday does not invalidate any of the official holidays; nor does the fact that some people dislike an official holiday. 

It is arrogant, even presumptuous, to demand that other people refuse to acknowledge an official holiday that a person dislikes. In enabling this sordid, even pathological mentality by substituting the passive aggressive “greeting” Happy Holidays for Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas, retail managers, whether in stores face to face with customers or in corporate management, do not realize that the appeasement is both enabling and passive aggressive. The astute customer could think of an equally generic response to convey a refusal to accept the squalid subterfuge as if it were not actually hostile and ideological. Perhaps Have a happy 24 hour period may be sufficient to convey the acknowledgement of the unsuitability of the generic holiday “greeting,” but something else equally generic and more oriented to holidays may be better suited as a reply. “Wishing” employees Happy Holidays for every other holiday is one possible tactic. 

If the generic holiday applies to Thanksgiving and Christmas, then the same greeting applies to Independence Day, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Halloween. After all, some American Black people object to the first holiday due to slavery existing when the Declaration of Independence was announced on July 4, 1776, some Quakers may object to Veterans Day and even Memorial Day, and some rich industrialists in labor-management disputes might object to Labor Day. Evangelical Christians may object to Halloween due to its devilish connotations, preferring instead All Saints Day on the next day. Is the name of every American holiday to be forbidden in retail settings just because at least somebody objects to a given holiday? It is unfair to capitulate to only the detractors who harshly accost people who mention Thanksgiving or Christmas by name. In doing the bidding of those detractors, retail managements take sides ideologically and even impose the ideological bias on customers whose mention of either or both of the two legal holidays is entirely legitimate and therefore should not be countered with Happy Holidays as a virtual slap on the face. Astute customers may dismissively retort, also in passive aggression, Of course you do, as well as wield the Happy Holidays club themselves on every other legal (and other) holiday.

The extent to which retail managers in stores and even at corporate headquarters engage in what is really passive aggression in the guise of appeasing customers so not to lose any has not been made transparent to the vast majority of American consumers. Taking Happy Holidays superficially at face value enables the grinches who have lashed out verbally at employees merely for saying Happy Thanksgiving or Merry Christmas. Employees and managers alike should have replied, Thanksgiving (or Christmas) is a national holiday in the United States. The corporate path of least resistance can itself be problematic, especially if enough consumers in America become aware of the sheer manipulative artifice being utilized in the retail sector and are offended by the ungenuine, scripted replies by employees and store managers. Resisting the generics with generics may cure the patient or at least shift the disease to defense.

Enjoy Your Holiday: On the Weaponization of Kindness

In Europe, the word holiday can refer to what in America is called a vacation, which of course can occur whether or not the vacation falls on a national holiday. Regarding the latter, the official designation of a holiday by a government renders the holiday valid anywhere in the country’s territory. This does not mean that very resident or even citizen is duty-bound to pay any attention to a given national holiday, but deciding not to celebrating a holiday does not thereby mean that it is not legitimate and thus valid. Deliberately acting out from the instinctual urge of passive aggression by refusing even to say the name of a national holiday in public discourse, as if a personal decision not to celebrate a national holiday eviscerates it on the national calendar can be viewed as a case of hyperextended projection from a personal dislike to the personal desire to cancel the national holiday, as if a personal dislike could nullify a national law or proclamation. Behind the passive aggression is none other than selfishness, which implies loving oneself over loving God. Theological (rather than psychological) self-love renders the world as a projection of the self, including its narrowly circumscribed (to private benefits only) interests. Hence, the unrestrained ego leaps from its own dislike to being entitled to unilaterally, as a private actor, nullify an officially designated national holiday as null and void. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy can shed some light on this modern phenomenon concerning Christmas, an official U.S. holiday. Kindness as actually passive aggression is tailor-made for Nietzsche’s eviscerating scalpel, which he wielded to expose the power-aggrandizement being exercised under the disguise of the moral injunction of Thou Shalt Not!

Nietzsche, late nineteenth-century European philosopher, theorized that the weak seek to beguile the strong by pressuring the latter to be ashamed of being strong, which includes being self-confident rather than resentful. Whereas the strong designate the weak merely as bad, the weak, who resort even to cruelty as a desperate means of feeling the pleasure of power, the weak label the strong as evil. The asymmetry here leaps off the page! Such seething loathing of the strong is itself an indication of the deplorable weak constitution of the weak, especially those who are too weak to master their intractable urge to dominate. The strong are strong enough to master their most intractable instinctual urge, so any resentment toward the herd animals is mastered such that they are merely bad, rather than evil. With such internal mastery, the strong can bathe in their self-confidence, out of which generosity naturally flows. Even in regarding the resentful weak as merely bad rather than as evil, the strong can be viewed as being generous, for the attitude of the weak toward the strong is indeed sordid and even toxic. Therefore, Nietzsche suggests that the strong maintain a pathos of distance, which can be interpreted both as social distance and emotional distance, from the ill herd lest the strong too become sick. The shift to “happy holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas” had by 2024 become so ubiquitous in public without any official mandate that a herd mentality can be inferred.

It is not enough for the resentful weak to refuse to celebrate a national holiday, such as Christmas or even Thanksgiving (who doesn’t like food?); the weak who seek to dominate the strong, in spite of the obvious point of being weaker both in terms of external and inner power, actively attempt to beguile the strong into being ashamed even for saying the word Christmas in public! The American retail sector has been acting as an enabler for the weak by tacitly refusing to recognize Christmas even though stores are almost all closed on Christmas Day. The retail executives and middle managers who espouse passive-aggression by directing employees not to say, “Merry Christmas” even on the day before Christmas; instead, customers buying Christmas presents are accosted with the inherently passive aggressive, “Enjoy your holiday” as a looping recording blasted out throughout the store, “This holiday, . . .” A national holiday is by definition not your holiday, as the holiday is officially recognized within the territory of the nation.

As if turning on a dime, every year on December 26^th, public discourse suddenly reverts back to being able to say the name of the next holiday, New Year’s Day, without any hint of the previous month of “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday.” Making this switch it itself a passive aggressive slap on Santa’s rosy cheeks. As an experiment one year, I turned to “Enjoy your holiday” after Christmas whenever a stranger (including retail employees!) said, “Happy New Year.” More than once, the other person was offended. Imagine if I were to say, “Enjoy your holiday,” to a Black American on Martin Luther King Day in January. Naturally, the person would take offense, as the explicit implication would be that the holiday is only valid for Black people even though it is a national holiday. Were I to apply the phrase to July 4^th, which is Independence Day in the U.S., I would be implying that I am against that nation. Were I to say, “Enjoy your holiday” on Thanksgiving and even go so far in passive aggression to insist that the holiday be called a day of mourning (even though the holiday is based on a peaceful feast in 1620 attended both by American Indians and European settlers in Massachusetts), my resentment would (or should) be quite evident to other people. Were I to inform people in public places, including stores, not only that they cannot say Thanksgiving, but also that they must refer to the holiday as the Day of Mourning, the hearers could legitimately call me out for not only stubbornly refusing to admit that Thanksgiving is a national holiday, but also imposing my own ideology as if everyone else must speak in line with it. One year at a “Holiday Party” at my alma mater, Yale, an employee replied to me, “We can’t say that,” after I had quietly observed that it was really a Christmas party. We can’t? Was a law passed in Connecticut prohibiting people from using the words, “Christmas Party” even at a private university? It is precisely the default of can’t as if its pronouncement were a jurisprudential fact of reason that I wish to expose and eviscerate as not only sordid, but enabling too.

There is a qualitative difference between personal and public holidays. To unilaterally, whether as an individual of a member of a group, implicitly castigate people even for saying the name of a public holiday as if it were a personal holiday, whether of an individual (e.g., a birthday) or a group (e.g., the Solstices, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Hanukkah, Devali, and Quanza) is to conflate two different categories. In fact, a third category exists: holidays that are not official national holidays and yet are not limited to a group and thus are de facto (rather than de jure) public in nature (e.g., Halloween and Valentine’s Day, and perhaps St. Patrick’s Day, as drinking green beer is hardly limited to Americans under 40 of Irish ancestry). Were there no difference between private and national (and even de facto public) holidays, then governments would hardly go to the trouble of proclaiming national holidays, which of course are explicitly valid officially valid throughout a country. I turn now to some implications.  

Firstly, that everyone does not celebrate a national (or de facto public) holiday does not nullify that holiday. In fact, it is ridiculous for a person to claim that because one does not like or do anything on a given national holiday, it is therefore not really even a legal holiday. 

Secondly, that a number of private, group-only holidays occur in the same month as a national (and even a public) holiday does not mean that people should not refer in public to the national holiday by name. In the U.S., there is only one national (and public) holiday in the month of December; Americans don’t say “happy holidays” leading up to Halloween even though Veterans Day is not far behind in November.

Thirdly, the fact that a group relishes a certain national (or otherwise public) holiday does not render that holiday only private, and thus devoid of any broader meaning or significance. If the group is religious in nature, this does not necessarily mean that the public holiday is religious. For other religious groups to stubbornly suppose so in utter resentment and jealousy ignores the separation of “church and state” in the U.S. Constitution, which bars Congress from establishing a religion and thus proclaiming a religious interpretation or origin of a public holiday. A secular holiday can be proclaimed as such and thus clear the bar of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution even if a religious group celebrates the holiday in a non-secular way and even if the holiday itself had a distinctly religious origin. Halloween, for example, which admittedly is not a U.S. national holiday but it generally observed nonetheless (rather than being a group holiday) had by the twenty-first century become almost completely secular in America even though it is on the eve of All Saints Day in Christianity. The latter does not negate or nullify the secular holiday of Halloween; children need not accept the Nicene Creed in order to put on costumes and go trick-or-treating for candy. As for Christmas, the distinctly Christian feast of it is not theologically significant as neither the Incarnation or the Resurrection are celebrated on December 25th, for the Incarnation is celebrated on March 25^th—nine months before December 25^th, and the Resurrection is celebrated on Easter in March or April. It is a blunder, therefore, to assume not only that there is no secular holiday (e.g., gift-giving, Santa, and even Frosty the Snowman), but also that that even the religious holiday marks anything distinctly theological (qua  supernatural)!  Jealousy and resentment can indeed be blinding, or at the very least have a distorting effect on a person’s emotions, cognitions and perception.

For an advocate of a group-limited private holiday not only to refuse to admit that a public holiday is such a holiday, but also to insist that other people cannot acknowledge and even say the name of such a holiday in public simply goes too far. Resentful selfishness that resorts to passive aggression is indeed evil, for to insist that other people abide by a social reality that is a projection of the selfish self denies that none of us are deities. That is, self-love over love directed to God is the root sin behind the over-reach here. To counter such evil, I recommend that people in the U.S. say “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday” for every holiday except Christmas, even to retail clerks. Even though most people might be confused, others—the more insightful—will get the passive-aggressive message that it is unfair to single out a certain national holiday as non grata and even as forbidden in public discourse. The main point is of course that passive aggression should be rendered transparent so that its beguiling and hateful spite can be weakened, as befitting the weak who tacitly, yet intentionally nonetheless, weaponize the phenomenon of holidays.

That the American retail sector enables this weaponization renders companies as de facto accomplices, and thus hardly as neutral parties. To the extent that American culture reflects the retail culture, including its nomenclature and mannerisms, the responsibility of business not to perpetuate and enforce a specific passive-aggressive ideology whose source is exogenous to business is all the greater. By interiorizing such an ideology, a store (i.e., its employees, including store managers) becomes passive aggressive and thus deserves push-back from resentful customers. The irony is that the store managers and even their executives at company headquarters intend precisely to avoid offending customers. Including the name of all national holidays, rather than substituting this holiday or happy holidays for one such holiday both in the stores and in advertisements, is a legitimate and fair alternative marketing (retail) strategy. That some customers might be offended just by the name of a specific public holiday is no reason for the dog to be led by its tail. Being led by oversensitive ideologically-driven customers is not socially responsible, as it is not fair to all of the strong, self-confident customers who are willing to generously spend in the midst of celebrating a national holiday. For a national, public holiday is a statement that a certain holiday is legitimate and thus valid in a country, even though not every resident necessarily does anything to mark the holiday and some residents, even citizens, may be personally opposed. To be sure, the latter have a protected political right to oppose something based on an ideology, but they do not have the authority to impose that ideology to limit the free speech of other people, not to mention to unilaterally cancel a national holiday. Such a holiday is valid whether its opponents like it or not, and the latter do not have the right to cancel the free-speech of other people who wish to specify even just the specific name of such a holiday. Arrogance looking down on the rest of us from the stilts of false-entitlement is indeed unbecoming of anyone.