The hotel lobby was fashionably minimalist, with carpet softer than most mattresses and of the most exquisitely vibrant shade of white Avery had ever seen, it was sort of an electric white, like the white equivalent of neon pink, and it was spotless. Shockingly spotless, like fresh off the factory, not a single smudge or mote of dullness. That and an odd statue were the only things of note in the vault-like minimalist “splendor” of the Granger Ben Hotel.
Minimalist doesn’t mean spending less on decor, it means spending more on less decor. The elite will always spend to make sure the peons know they can. In the olden days, they did so by hiring a hundred artisans to work for a lifetime decorating every inch of a cathedral. Now they hire the equivalent in man-hours to create, install and clean a fantastically expensive alabaster carpet that gets steam-cleaned every ten minutes and one statue that was hard to identify but might have been a goat in a bathtub and which may have had a feminist bent. Avery couldn’t quite put his finger on what was feminist about it. It had a plaque, but he was not going to read a goddamn plaque about a feminist, like in a museum, but anyway, both the goaty shape and the bathtubby shape had a feminist air about them. So instead of hiring stonecarvers and woodworkers to build a cathedral for seventy years, they pay a couple million up front for some absurdly dumb feminist goat in a feminist bathtub and a million or two in wages over many years to various cleaners, installers, repairers, etc. They spend just as much, but they call it minimalist.
Avery would rather employ stonecarvers and woodworkers than feminists and cleaning crews. Plus, there’d be more to look at when he sat here twiddling his thumbs like a fucking idiot, waiting an hour and a half for that billionaire shitheel Charlie Tamperton. Avery was definitely deleting his dumbass apps. Except the one with the ostrich that finds coupons.
“There you are, Mr. Flowers,” said a suited man who appeared next to Avery, startling him. How he snuck up to Avery in a minimalist hotel lobby, with nothing to hide behind except six uncomfortable chairs, ten dead-eyed staff and a goat-in-a-bathtub’s worth of feminism, Avery will never figure out. Somehow the Asian man with the dead eyes and swampy cologne managed to surprise him. He gave Avery a polite nod. “I’m Delaney Chu, Mr. Tamperton’s campaign manager. He’s ready to see you now.”
From The Politician