Thread regarding Nike Inc. layoffs

Cringe on top of cringe. Hoprfully Chelsea at least got a couple free pairs

@OP Would this be different if the people featured were still employed? Were they part of the lay offs?

@fn Why do you assume the OP is a woman? And why do you assume they are offended?

Two random thoughts:

1. After reading all the comments I genuinely wonder if the OP is still offended, and/or if she believes she was correct to be offended in the first place.

OR, is there any possibility the OP has rethought matters and realized after the fact that yeah, she should probably think through matters more holistically before just instinctively deciding to be offended?

I’m not kidding. I’m super curious where the OP landed here. Hey OP, please kindly grace us with your presence once more and give us the scoop. Pretty please??

1. An anthropological thought for everyone: If @b8+1m5x4m9ft hadn’t posted what he or she did, would this thread have instead turned into a dozen different posts containing various creative ways to express how offended people were and how evil Nike is? I’d guess there’s an excellent chance that would have occurred.

Reminds me of my neighbor, Mike. Very recently I asked Mike - a somewhat ardent admirer of the current president - if he still thought the 2020 election had been stolen. Mike said, “No, and I never believed it was in the first place.”

I reminded Mike that six years ago he was all kinds of fired-up and angry about what he believed was a “stolen election”. Then I asked Mike, “If you never believed it was stolen, then why were you so angry and adamant it WAS stolen six years ago?”

Mike paused for a second and then gave me a refreshingly honest answer: “I don’t know. It’s what everyone else was saying so I guess I just went along without thinking about it too much.”

Hopefully some of you understand the related lesson there.

Yes it was funny - I worked with those people. They would laugh about it. It’s ok…

@be the people ruining this company are clearly all the clueless boomers

Aside from Complex, in the last week there have been several write-ups on this meme SKU. Oddly, none of those writers seem offended. Across the Internet, it appears if you want to find someone who is offended by these shoes you have to go to thelayoff.com and find this thread. LOL!

I swear, some of you would complain if your cube neighbor fa---d and you couldn’t smell it.

@ee Getting offended on behalf of someone else, even when the person you are defending doesn't even feel offended, is a plague on our culture.

@be I wouldn’t have put it that way. Nonetheless the point you tactlessly made has merit.

Each new generation brings fresh, great, and novel ideas & perspectives, and we hopefully take the best of those and employ them for the betterment of society at large.

Each new generation also brings its own unique challenges and problems. One problem I not infrequently observe with people under the age of 35 or so is an over sensitivity to normal & routine life events, in general. A certain “lack of resiliency”, “lack of toughness”, or whatever you want to call it.

It often results in people being too easily offended by, again, normal and not especially challenging life events that previous generations simply accepted and dealt with as an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.

Honestly, I first noticed this with Millennials (yes, I know many are now over 35) and their creation of concepts such as “trigger warnings”. My first introduction to this was in 2016, when an intern here asked me why are employee handbook didn’t have a “trigger warning” in the prohibited behaviors section. Although I didn’t say it, the first thought in my head was, “Wait, are you even being serious right now?” Indeed she was absolutely being serious. Imagine being SO sheltered, SO lacking in resiliency, and SO emotionally fragile that you feel a warning is needed before your very precious eyes might be exposed to…words describing people behaving in a suboptimal manner.

Regrettably, that ethos was both inherited by and expanded upon with Gen Z and now Gen Alpha. And I honestly worry how those generations will react when we see another 9/11 or worse. For whatever reasons (there are likely multiple), these generations simply haven’t been raised to deal with any sort of real adversity in a healthy manner.

All of this is to say, I’d guess the OP and most of the people who upvoted the OP’s post reside in these generations. At least I very much hope that’s the case. Because if anyone truly thinks these footwear being tied to a meme is so offensive that it’s worthy of our shared outrage and condemnation, well…good luck when one day you’re confronted with actions and behaviors that are actually offensive and worthy of condemnation. I suspect such an event might add some harsh but much needed perspective for our younger colleagues.

Omg you soft young sensitive babies are what’s driving this company into the ground.
You’re also lazy and entitled.

@a5 you "heard" they weren't paid, from the voices in your head making up a story to make it fit your narrative. Who fu--ing cares anyways, nobody is going to make the connection outside die-hard Nike fans/historians. For all we know it was just some designer throwing in an easter egg that nobody else even thought to question.

I’m going to disagree here.

I think these are provocative, slightly off-kilter, slightly edgy, and a “If you know, you know” nod to both runners and Portlanders. And also, a little…weird.

In other words, EXACTLY what this company used to be in its better years.

But hey, I certainly do appreciate the faux-outrage. Yeah, I didn’t stutter. I said FAUX-OUTRAGE. Because if these shoes really and truly do offend you, the problem with Nike isn’t the shoes. The problem is that Nike employs people who wouldn’t have survived two weeks in this place back when off-kilter and edgy was not only OK; it was expected.

Oh, and the couple in that video that some of you apparently want to nominate for Sainthood in The Vatican…or at the very least paint them as brutalized victims who were trashed by an evil company that has lost its way?

Yeah, sorry, but you’re not even close. They’re both very cool people who possess an old-fashioned trait known as “being able to laugh at yourself”. Apparently a few of YOU are far more offended by these shoes than the people to whom these shoes pay tribute. They LOVE them! And yes…I would know. ;)

In other words, please feel free - no, please feel obligated- to get over yourselves.

I heard they were not paid. Learned about it in the press. Agree with @a4 that it's sh---y and a sign of something gone wrong at Nike.

This is unbelievably sh---y of Nike. They were former employees, and they've had to live with the cruelty of being memed and mocked for over a decade.

This is what Nike has become? Officially taking part in mocking people, ex-Swooshers no less? Would never have happened years ago. What a weird choice.