Eleni Xenaki writes
She's wearing her best smile. Thursday's continuous schedule lends a sadness to her gaze. "I've been on my feet since half past six in the morning," he will tell me. Kallithea-Chalandri by all means: Bus, metro and bus again to be standing behind her counter at nine o'clock. The return journey is made in the dark. "I'll be home at ten at night."
Twenty-two Midwives with incomplete studies in tourism – "I didn't like the subject after all" – and living in the paternal or, more correctly, in the "maternal" house. Dad is away. And his income too.
The store is not a family business. No excuses for lateness and no coffee mugs allowed, like the friend's son who works at dad's business. Standing makes her dizzy, her eyeliner fades on her eyelids, her lips dry. But she's young and nothing fazes her.
Alone and with plenty of time as a customer – the saleswoman's nightmare – I strike up a conversation with her. Complaints are said with the lightness of youth: "How can I live with my boyfriend with such prices and such expensive rents?"...
Next to her is the popular Apple mobile phone. Suppressing my tendency to admonish, I ask her with genuine interest, "Do you have enough money to buy something that expensive?"
And I am informed that there is such a thing as a "mobile loan" that democratizes the consumer society and gives the opportunity (?) to a basic wage worker to succumb to technological temptation. And I'm also learning that said girl is dying to get her hands on the iPhone17. (Officially launched on September 19, 2025 with prices ranging from 979 to 2,549 euros). I was puzzled, I was angry, I mentioned Marx but also my aunt who always managed against the consumer society and went around with bags and I dared to say: "But living on a quarter of the basic salary to have this mobile phone?".
The affirmative movement of her head and her sly smile-slap at a woman who could be her mother was like saying to me: "Why not me?". And out of my teeth he said: "The reason I don't want to waste my time with studies is so that I can work and be able to have all these nice things that are around us." I wished her "good luck" - not ironically - and memorized her words to convey them verbatim to the group of friends who speak highly of society.
"Yes, young people are hungry and stay with their parents to buy with their meager wages some of the prestige and luxury that star in our social circus. Expensive mobile phones and coffee from the delivery man. OK?', I rhetorically asked my peers, savoring a cool Italian aperitivo. They rebelled. They couldn't go to Kallithea with a cell phone worth around a thousand euros. But they and they took it at all costs.
And why not? They rub our supposed interest in them in our faces. And they are not ashamed to admit that they will not fight, they will not take to the streets to claim the future we owe them, they will not demand better wages and cheaper housing, they will not fight for the eight-hour day. They will simply submit to the rules of consumerism by capturing their difficult lives in expensive pixels. And they will upload the teased story of their life imitating the carefree present of the well-to-do peers with the assured future. And should I tell you, Kostas? I understand them. I cried my heart out when I was sixteen to get a made in England genuine Gloverall Montgomery. And I got it by getting three A's, tidying my room every Saturday afternoon and polishing all the windows in the house. And when I put it on, it warmed my soul to think - phew! - that I was no different in class from the classmate in the ballet party with ice cream flambé.
Proletarians of the whole world, consume if you wish. And let those who buy for their children just because... they can, make you feel bad.
PS By the way, Apple in our country set a sales record in the first half of 2025.
FROM: POPAGANDA
