By Allan Stevo
June 29, 2026
Those who have lived in the Third World know the smell of a high-end Third World grocery store. If it has ready access to the produce, it tends to have that smell of rotting produce in the air. It is a slight smell, but a present smell. And in the Second World, that is how many of the grocery stores smell too. Somewhere under the roof of that grocery store is, or has recently been, rotting produce and the store seems infused with the smell.
Over the last 15 to 20 years, it has become increasingly common for grocery stores in the US to smell that way. This appears to be one of the gifts to the American people of the 21st-century. The standard for what is allowed in America has shifted. It has shifted in the direction of the Third World.
I cannot tell you every single reason that has happened, but it would appear America has been focused, for a time, on importing the Third World. Among other things, that means importing Third Worlders, but it means many other things as well.
While I have no particular animus against the Third World, I believe it is appropriate to be aware of who you are letting serve as your thought leader. When allowing a person to serve as your thought leader, it makes a lot of sense to have a familiarity with where they have come from and what those policies lead to.
That means, if you are to allow someone from the Third World to be your thought leader, you should first have a working familiarity with the Third World to the point that you have spent a significant amount of time in the Third World - especially in that person's country. I am talking months and years as a worker slogging through life, not days and weeks as a detached tourist. Though, even the latter can be enough to allow serious and appropriate pause for reflection in the right people with an observant mind able to understand cause and effect.
Not everywhere is like America. Not everywhere is like the West. You have a responsibility for maintaining the culture you have been handed and passing it along to the next generation. Ideally, you will leave it a little better than it was left to you.
If you are to make the decision of treating a Third Worlder as a thought leader, you have the responsibility to also perform the due diligence of understanding the Third World first, so you understand where that likely leads. Are tendencies always accurate ? No, but the trend is your friend, and a useful guide where little other data exists.
A strange thing has happened in the American technology space. Americans have built and hosted a tremendous amount of effective and powerful technology companies. Americans then imported many Third Worlder into Silicon Valley under the guise that they were doing tech industry work that no American could possibly do. And then leadership of those companies essentially handed over management of those technology companies not to Americans, not even to Second Worlders, but to Third Worlders. If you have not stepped foot in Silicon Valley and its environs recently, as I have done week-in-and-week-out for the last decade or so, you might not have realized that change. If you have not worked in the boardrooms of tech companies, you might not have realized that change. But you do not need to be in boardrooms to recognize that.
Those changes in culture can be felt throughout the company and throughout the customer base. I know to some, this may sound vaguely racist, and if that's what you want to do with this, you can. You can take your knee-jerk reaction, and pretend that that is reality. My complaint is not about race. My complaint is with your laziness.
The same intellectual laziness that causes you to claim this is about race, dismiss it, and then move on to doing whatever the thing you'd prefer to be doing is, that is the same intellectual laziness that has handed over the US to the Third World.
It would be awfully nice if you could get off of your device, get off of your gaming console, get off of your movie streaming service, and come join me in the real world for a bit.
That involves you getting to know the Third World before you put a Third Worlder in charge of anything. And it allows you getting to understand the diversity of human cultures before you choose to put a Third Worlder in charge of anything. And when I say choose to put a Third Worlder in charge of anything, it may not simply be when you have a hiring decision to make at work, though that is certainly part of It. What I am also referring to is how you spend your dollars and how you voice your values to those who operate the establishments you patronize.
Everything Smells Like Fabuloso
Smell is subjective. What smells good and what smells bad is subjective. Because of this, a lack of smell tends to be preferable to a strong smell. This is not the case with the cleaning product Fabuloso.
Fabuloso offers a strong smell. Fabuloso is a beloved cleaning product among some Third World nations.
The growing prevalence of the overpowering smell of Fabuloso is not just a natural consequence of Americans having handed over the job of cleaning to Third Worlders, but is something different. Instead of simply work, it is "thought leadership" and executive decisions in this area of life that you may argue is miniscule and irrelevant, but which I would argue is a microcosm of American culture and so telling of how negligently we, the heirs of that culture conduct ourselves. It is by handing over the managerial decisions over cleaning to Third Worlders that we have ended up with overpowering Third World fragrances in our midst.
Why is that ? Because a Third Worlder knows no better. I do not say that derogatorily. I say that from a standpoint of seeking to understand a person's lived experience. A Third World knows the Third World options for cleaning products. Accordingly, Third World cleaning products have become more common in America.
Just as easily, Americans could have opted to (and can continue to) encourage in Third Worlders less smelly cleaning products. They were not raised by your mother. They do not know the things your mother taught you by osmosis from living under the same roof as her. They do not know the hard-earned lessons American families struggled to gather over one generation or over many generations about doing things the American way. They know the Third World. And it is becoming increasingly common for Americans to quite uncharitably remain silent when one has the opportunity to share (remember sharing is caring) those details of intercultural exchange and to share the standard American preference. To the charitably minded, and the generous hearted, this should be a standard part of exchanges with people from the Third World and because of the existence of multigenerational migrant enclaves - sometimes even with their adult children.
Except, a bunch of ninnies are silenced by the unthinking claim of, "That's racist!" or some similarly vapid production of those Chicken Littles possessing the curious combination of flaccid cognition and an overwhelming desire to stand in judgmental control over the lives of others. Sometimes critiques of other cultures are allowed to have nothing to do with race. This would be one of them. If you really must buck trends and put Third Worlders in positions of leadership, even leadership over something as small as managing cleaning, it is incumbent upon the diligent to simply understand what exactly you are doing first.
Regarding the Third World penchant for Fabuloso, there is a Third World appreciation for cleaning products with smells that overwhelm, because the natural background smell in some places in the Third World can be described as overwhelming.
Sometimes an overwhelming artificial fragrance in that environment, can be considered superior to the actual smell of the environment. That can even feel like cleanliness where no cleanliness is able to exist.
The overwhelming fragrance is a note of reassurance that says, "The place you are in has recently been cleaned."
There are other marks of cleanliness such as a lack of cockroaches, a lack of rodent droppings, and a low prevalence of diarrheal infection among the population. Those are preferable marks of cleanliness. When obtaining that is effectively impossible, you may be happy to simply have the overpowering scent of Fabuloso around you, reassuring you, that someone has recently cleaned this space, making an effort towards cleanliness, even if it is an unsuccessful effort.
"It just needs to smell good," becomes the sanitary standard. "It just needs to smell overpoweringly unnatural," becomes the sanitary standard. That is Fabuloso.
The Person Holding Your Hand When You Die
When you die, because of the country and culture you have helped bring into existence, if you are anything like the average Baby Boomer, you may either die alone, or you may die with a Third Worlder at your bedside.
You had an opportunity in the first 40 or so years of life to arrange for a different end of life. That different end of life would have been the likely outcome if you would have had 5 children at a minimum, and if you would have kept them home as much as possible. And yes, I am talking about the common traditional path of keeping children in the home most of the day and near the home most of the day.
You would have helped to shape that path, by having your children do fewer after-school activities, and spending more time with you. That would mean you, too, would be doing not the activities that you were doing on your own at that time, such as work or a hobby or a passion, but would be doing either those things with a child (or more likely children) or doing child-centric things with a child.
Instead of being in or around the home all day, during the relatively few hours the child was home, the child was on the television, or the child was on a video game console, or the child was on some other electronic device. When it was dinner time, the family members ate alone, or they perhaps ate together at a table, but they might as well have been alone, for there was no substantial communication taking place. Their minds were elsewhere, especially the minds of the parents, not invested in the opportunity at hand. Those moments of bonding, starting from birth, lasting into maturity, extending into adulthood, with the earliest of those years being the most important and formative, are the years of investment that ensure that when you, the parent, die, you will not be alone, and you will not have a Third Worlder at your bedside.
America has imported the Third World. America, has not only imported the Third World, but has given vital functions to Third Worlders. It is beneficial for that adult child to be the one at the bedside of a parent during sickness and at the time of death. It is not only so important for the parent, but it is in ways a rite of passage also for that child. It is beneficial for grandchildren, too. It is beneficial for society to want that. It is beneficial for the child to have that kind of bonded relationship with a parent in which he can imagine no other thing than to want that at that time in his life.