They are sick of "choice." It's not feminist to say so, but "choice" in many realms, is overrated. Choice just means more time wasted making pointless decisions. Choice means more scouring the grocery store in a daze and scanning the menu trying to figure out what it is exactly that you "want," when a lot of times what you really want is to spend more time doing what you really want and less time being annoyed your friend can't decide what pair of jeans to buy. And when it comes to health care, "choice" for most people has only ever led to more cash for more paperwork and more advertising.

They want a day off. I want a day off. In fact, I want ten. If I were in a union, I would totally authorize a strike, just so I could get a vacation from which I could return knowing no one else has swooped in to render me completely irrelevant, which they always seem to do just when you think you've made yourself indispensable.

Because they can. There are more than 15 million retail workers in America. And how many members does the national Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that represents the Bloomie's cashiers and stock managers have? One hundred thousand. I'm sure there are other retail unions, but the fact is that I am not going to bother looking them up because I can tell you in full confidence that they have barely any members either, because department stores have been themselves rendered largely irrelevant by dollar stores and strip centers and suburban Best Buys and exurban Wal-Marts and ubiquitous Starbucks and all the other big companies that knew better than to let their workers unionize, lest they actually be forced to follow laws requiring them to provide uniforms and pay overtime and the like.

Because they're sick of Europeans. New York is being inundated with them right now, and although they're mostly attractive and friendly it's gotta be getting old, all those attractive, friendly people with their enviable education systems and universal health care and criminally high levels of life satisfaction and wads and wads of currency unweakened by the excesses of bankers and military industrial complex dwellers run amok and they're using it to buy out all the pretty dresses retail workers were hoping to get the chance to mark down. Fuck you, Euroca$h!

Because your store is making money hand over fist, but your 401(k) is going nowhere because the company keeps pissing it away buying celebrities who are RICH ENOUGH ALREADY. Macy's 1.17 billion ad budget of last year might have kept my old friends in the newspaper business on career life support for a little while, but it also lined the pockets of Jessica Simpson and Martha Stewart, and Jessica Simpson should have never been born.

Strike Possible This Week At Bloomingdale's Main Store [NY Times]

• Oh, look, it's Madonna. On the cover of a glossy magazine's "green" issue. How novel! And even more exciting: Elle is doing some fashion designer water bottle promotion. [Fashion Week Daily]
  
• Robin Givhan on Madge: "Her latest incarnation — blond waves, lace-up boots and a corset — speaks to the most old-fashioned, condescending sentiment of all: She looks good for her age." [Washington Post]
  
• Christiane Amanpour slipped Diane Von Furstenburg a note Monday night saying, "Congratulations, from one dominatrix to another." Click the jump while there is still time to get a Jamie Rubin Barry Diller BDSM image out of your mind! [NYDN]

• Food riots, rising Asian inflation and Malthusian apocalypse scares be damned, Armani will conquer the developing world. [Hindustan Times]
• The run-down of this apparel industry salute to the Good Life featuring Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren, Martha Stewart and Tony Bennett will surely warm your cockles. [WWD]
• If, like me, you have not left a three block radius in the past month, you may not have seen the spring window treatments at The Gap. Well some blonde lady at The Street did that for you, and guess what? She found them boring! But J. Crew is alive with color. [TheStreet]
• "Do You Wear Heels To The Beach?" [Fabsugar]
• "How do you avoid a crisis and keep your prom makeup from fading?" [Teen Vogue]
• For those who have long pined for a Hermes Grannysmith apple-shaped tote with matching peeler but never dreamed it was possible. [Missbehave]

• Vogue editor/socialite Lauren Davis is set to wed some Bolivian billionaire heir in what some gross person opines will be "the first real society wedding of the century." Can you remember back when there was a time you truly did not know about such things as "socialites"? Was the world maybe a better place then? [Page Six]
  
• Macy's is closing nine stores because no one shops at department stores not named Nordstrom anymore, even when you give them all the same brand name so that there is no confusion, then spend $100 million getting Jessica Simpson and Martha Stewart to star in the same commercial, and force your employees to work graveyard shifts so you can stay open 24 hours during the holiday season. [WWD]
  
• Poor people who get plastic surgery sometimes get shunned and chastised by friends/family/anonoymous internet people if they come out looking like totally different android fembots. So it is best to be totally open and transparent if you're planning on getting your nose cartilage sucked out or somesuch. "If you open up, you're unembarrassable," says some expert in things we are so happy there are "experts" in now. [NY Times]

• Liz Claiborne died this year. "She was a pear-shaped woman," says Chazen, "who knew how to design for women, most of whom are also pear-shaped." [New York Times Magazine]
• Other things that happened, as long as we're doing the year-end thing: Marc Jacobs alienated some people and dyed his hair blue, Valentino retired and that very furry Fendi Show on the Great Wall of China.
• Yeah, that's it. Have fun tonight!