What's with all the GameStop Store Front Photos?

Don't get me wrong, I am well aware of the news about the $GME stock squeeze and what r/wallstreetbets is doing to Melvin Capital and other predatory hedge funds. I even made a t-shirt to recognize the occasion. No, I'm not curious about why people are talking about the GameStop stocks; I'm wondering why almost every article I have seen has a photo of GameStop in the headline. 

Someone was paid actual money to take this picture this week. I guess to have an "up to date" picture of this crappy strip mall. 

My partner hypothesizes that it creates a good visual shorthand for the Boomers who are reading the paper. A sort of "Yeah, that GameStop, that store that you think your grandson would want to go check out, but he never seems to want to go in". But still, it's absolutely baffling to me that they are showing photos of the storefront when a picture of the logo would suffice. I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I think I've figured out why: it's because the fact that the stock is associated with GameStop literally changes nothing about the story. 

There are a lot of hot takes going around right now about the manipulation of the stock market by the ultrawealthy, and how this is, in a way, a backlash against Wallstreet by people my age who were in high school around the subprime mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008. I've seen hot takes about how this really is the first time Wall Street has faced any sort of repercussions for tanking the economy. I have seen a lot of hot takes about how the media and wall street are trying to shape the image of the people doing this, and all the ways that this effort is failing. 

If you think my take on this whole thing is room temperature, go spend five minutes on any mainstream financial new site. 

To me, there is a strange and baffling disconnect between the photos these headlines use, of strip mall storefront with no or few people in them, next to headlines about how someone with the screenname BabyPanda007 has just made enough money to buy God, ostensibly by 'investing' in the shell of a storefront in the headline. 

But isn't this what a lot of us are trying to wake the rest of the country up to? That the stock market really has no bearing on the economy? That we are so far detached from the basic concept of 'give this company money so they can do business, then they can do more business, and then they give you money back in proportion to all that extra business they did' to a point where we are simply trading stock in a company. Stock in a company has been degraded down to the level of a simple commodity. Like the worker, everything is eventually degraded to the level of a commodity. Karl Marx was right once again. 

Getting this screenshot was a pain in the ass because the video kept starting on its own, and I shit you not, it was an ad for Robinhood.

Part of me is hopeful. I'm seeing members of Congress talk about action against the brokerage apps that restricted trading, and I'm really hoping that we continue to see this trend of activist investing against large Wall Street firms. Part of me is hesitant to be hopeful, seeing as how I have never once in my life seen Wall Street be held to account for their reckless gambling. We've seen billions in hedge fund profits redistributed to retail investors, but that's nothing when compared to the over three and a half-trillion dollars stolen from the working class just since the beginning of the pandemic. 

Gamestop hasn't seen this many people in the same place since the midnight launch of Halo 3.

I guess in the meantime I'm just going to continue to watch the drama unfold and continue to root for the working class against the madness of the stock market. Maybe things will fundamentally change.

Oh, wait.