My brilliant, amoral capitalist-surrealist trickster character Rocky Cornelius is back! Last time around, in “The Uncool Hunters,” Rocky slugged it out with her nemesis while doing market research in an Illinois CostCo. This time, we get to see her work her creative consultant magic, helping with the soft-launch of a peculiar concept shoppe. What’s a ‘concept shoppe’? I’m so glad you asked.

The idea of this ‘concept shoppe’ was to make shoppers feel like they were looting an abandoned store in a post-apocalyptic, collapseporn paradise. Rocky quite liked the idea. No one wanted to be a ‘consumer’ these days. People—especially Californians, who had lately been through so much—wanted to think of themselves as ‘survivors,’ as disaster-hardened protagonists in a return-to-their-roots story of rebuilding and social rejuvenation. It’s just that, if they could afford one of the new quake-proof condos springing up in Westwood, they wanted to do so without having to worry about tetanus, botulism, scurvy, or gluten.

The soft-launch goes swimmingly until things get a little too post-apocalyptic. To find out what the trouble is, you’ll have to read it, but I’ll give you this little taste of Theme Stated:

“But—” Franklyn began, but Rocky slapped him hard across his blond-bearded face.

“Snap into it!” she said. “You wanted The Event? There is no single The Event. Catastrophe isn’t evenly distributed and never will be. Some folks will get knocked back to the stone age, while others will keep on as sales reps and foot models and costume designers. Some will go greengrocer and others will go bandit. This here is your The Event! So get to it!”

I wrote in my newsletter about some of the themes behind this story, and how I accidentally tapped into my inner Le Guin when setting this story up in “The Uncool Hunters.”

Read or listen to “The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” in Escape Pod.