As supermarket woke war escalates, no solace found in Captain Cook's feet

I peered into the hollow holes of Captain James Cook’s sawn-off feet holes but I couldn’t see a single familiar Australian corporate personhood inside to comfort me.

No Wokeworths, no Bunnings, nobody. All I found was only the lingering scent of crime and an angle grinder. White with terror, I screamed.

Up until that moment, I knew exactly where I stood. (Or sat, rather, because I was online all month in the lead-up to Australia Day.) I was pissing, moaning, bitching and whining, mostly about Wokeworths. They made the woke decision to stop selling Australia Day merchandise because of those woke Reconciliation Action Plans they have these days. So we all went to battle for the month of January.

The Opposition Leader of the real political party, the one that actually wants to run the whole country, called for a boycott of Wokeworths, channelling his frustrated inner student activist.

A man wrote a timeless patriotic cry on the façade of a rich inner-city elite Wokeworths:

‘5 days 26 Jan Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Woolies fuck you.’

A timeless clarion call for true anti-Woolworths patriots.

A full-time-salaried TV person seriously asked the CEO of Woolworths on Sunrise:

“At the end of the day, is it your role to tell Australians what they can and can't buy?”

Dutton should legislate on Australia Day and Woolies boycott

Peter Dutton should not let Woolworths and other noxious actors get away with trashing Australia Day.

All month it felt like the shops were telling me what to do. Aldi went woke, too, so now I hate them as well. Senator Pauline Hanson got mad at Bunnings for not having the blowy-uppy flag thumbs. So now Bunnings is woke.

Wokeworths bought the pet shop Petstock, and Wokeworths probably whispered all this woke stuff to Petstock when they were buying them and got in their head, and now Petstock is woke, too. So Petstock said they won’t sell the blowy-uppy flag thumbs either.

Some other supermarket that is not woke called Drakes got mad at Wokeworths for being woke. Drakes and Wokeworths aren’t talking to each other anymore. I'm glad the good supermarkets are telling off the woke supermarkets.

I can’t remember when I started to see the shops as people. Sometimes they feel like my friends and sometimes they feel like my narcissist ex. Maybe it happened sometime in the pandemic, when all I ever had to do was go out and compete with people in Woolworths for toilet paper. Sometimes the only people I ever see are at the shops these days.

Some journalist called Cam Wilson posted to Threads:

One thing I’ve noticed about the National Australia Day debate that’s happening in public right now is that no one is really making the case to change the date or name or whatever.

A portion of the population has decided they don’t like what it stands for and are adjusting their own lives accordingly. Meanwhile, there’s a loud contingent of public figures who are loudly arguing they need to Save Australia Day by trying to force individuals and groups who they think aren’t celebrating enough.

Dutton shaming Woolworths a step backward in rebuilding corporate trust

The decision by Woolworths to avoid stocking Australia Day merchandise has prompted Peter Dutton to cry "woke" rather than addressing serious economic issues.

He's just a wokeist, but now that he mentions it, I’m not even sure if anyone’s even saying that “change the date” stuff anymore. So maybe we don't need to save the day. Well, my thinking goes like this: all Australians ever do is go to the shops. So if the shops are like me, then Australia must be like me and so all I really need is to make sure the shops are more like me. Starting with stocking the big flag thumbs I like.

There was some Debbie Downer poll I saw in The Daily Mail which said Australians care more about supermarket price gouging than they do about any of this Australia Day stuff.

Actually, over 60 per cent of Australians depend on Coles or Woolworths. The figure is rising annually; the business model of that twin hydra of mirror megaliths involves choking all lesser competitors out of the sector as they both indenture every Australian farmer and grower to supply their nationwide trade.

Coles and Woolworths have the power to drastically affect the CPI all on their own by increasing their prices, which in turn increases many of our other household expenses. So you could say they literally have a unilateral stranglehold on the wallet of the working-class Australian family. Their stores have hundreds of cameras in them and their theft-prevention AI-driven software retains all our personal data on private platforms. So Australians are likely more surveilled by Woolworths than they are by state intelligence.

Apparently, Australians care more about that stuff than the Australia Day merchandise.

Well, I don’t give a shit about any of that. Once upon a time, we used to express our love for our nation through good old-fashioned aggressive hate rallies like at Cronulla or St Kilda. Meanwhile, grandma would attend the big parades in the CBD. But there’s no place to be a real White Australian anymore because nobody’s organising any hate rallies and they keep ending the parades so granny can’t be a patriot, either.

There’s no place to be yourself anymore that isn’t a shop. At least all the bitching and moaning about Wokeworths created a big old fuss, and it was comforting. It was a great month. I felt part of things.

Say 'okay' to Australia Day in May

There is an alternative date for Australia Day that holds historical significance and would be a sound replacement should the nation become a republic.

And then someone cut the feet off Captain James Cook. And so I found myself staring into his feet holes.

We don’t even know who did it. Nobody made any big long points about it. They just... cut his feet off and he fell over. And then they probably quietly headed to one of those big woke Invasion Day marches. Like they didn’t even need to argue with us about it!

So I stared into the holes of the feet, there on the ground.

I thought I’d see something woke in them. Some message for me. A post. Something. Was anyone in there?

Wokeworths was not in the feet holes with her woke Reconciliation Action Plans. Patriotic Coles wasn’t in the feet holes with her big flag balloon thumbs. Not even Bunnings was in the feet holes, with her famous sausages.

The shops I like weren’t in the feet holes; the ones I hate were also not in the feet holes.

It didn't even make sense. Why would you cut it off at the feet? Why the feet? Why hollow feet holes?

The holes were as dark as night. Yawning black chasms.

And in sheerest terror, I screamed.

What I screamed:

“5 DAYS 26 JAN AUSSIE AUSSIE OI OI WOOLIES FUCK YOU!”

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist. Tom does weekly videos on YouTube commenting on the Australian political fringe. You can follow Tom on Twitter @tom_tanuki.