Pret à mourir (12 Aug 2011)

I borrowed the title for this post from my friend Anton of Generation Bubble, who forwarded me a link to this NYT article by Stephanie Clifford about Pret à Manger, sort of the Target of sandwich shops, assuming Subway is the Wal-Mart. If you want to see a horrific application of all the principles of immaterial and affective labor, Virnoesque virtuosity, lateral surveillance, obligatory reflexivity, emotional management, gamification and so on, you need look no further.

How does any company encourage teamwork? At Pret a Manger, executives say, the answer is to hire, pay and promote based on — believe it or not — qualities like cheerfulness.

There is a certain “Survivor” element to all of this. New hires are sent to a Pret a Manger shop for a six-hour day, and then the employees there vote whether to keep them or not. Ninety percent of prospects get a thumbs-up. Those who are voted out are sent home with £35 ($57), no hard feelings.

The crucial factor is gaining support from existing employees. Those workers have skin in the game: bonuses are awarded based on the performance of an entire team, not individuals. Pret workers know that a bad hire could cost them money.

All the joys of tournament labor markets like those that exist in academia, with none of the "life of the mind" rationalizations. And instead of solidarity against management, each worker becomes the face of management, another Stasi spy for the happy police.

But that is not nearly enough surveillance to allow Pret's management to discriminate among workers:

Pret also sends “mystery shoppers” to every shop each week. Those shoppers give employee-specific critiques. (”Bill didn’t smile at the till,” for instance.) If a mystery shopper scores a shop as “outstanding” — 86 percent of stores usually qualify — all of the employees get a £1-per-hour bonus, based on a week’s pay, so full-timers get around $73. “There’s a lot of peer pressure,” said Andrea Wareham, the human resources director at Pret.

DARE sessions in school taught me that peer pressure was bad, but I suppose peer pressure, in this context, is good. It is the vaunted power of worker collaboration and cooperation turned inside out and made into a coercive management tool. One's very ability to get along with others is alienated and quantified,amde into somethign you would only do for money rather than from basic human solidarity. Pret rejects the sort of human sociality that might thrive outside of capital, that is possible in environments where making a profit by selling commodified service experiences isn't the overriding goal. Instead Pret chooses to incentivize human feeling and turn the point of exchange into an explicit, quantified moment of affective labor while turning worker cooperation into a reified shadow of itself. That policy is carried out all down the line, apparently, with no sociality left unincentivized and thus unexploited:

Pret reinforces the teamwork concept in other ways. When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive at least £50 in vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a “shooting star.” But instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must give the money to colleagues, people who have helped them along the way.

There are other rewards. Every quarter, the top 10 percent of stores, as ranked by mystery-shopper scores, receive about £30 per employee for a party. The top executives at Pret get 60 “Wow” cards, with scratch-off rewards like £10 or an iPod, to hand out each year to employees who strike them as particularly good. Pret has all-staff parties twice a year, and managers get a monthly budget of £100 or so to spend on drinks or outings for their workers.

“Rewards, through bonuses or ‘outstanding’ cards, affect behavior,” Ms. Wareham says.

Wow cards, I suppose, are the Scooby snacks of the service industry. It's always nice to be recognized, but there seems to be something backhanded about making even that a lottery scenario. And in the end, it's just Pavlovian manipulation, not genuine recognition of the worker as a human. The incentivizing of feeling leaves no space for the employees to be recognized in and of themselves. Everything about them as feeling creatures has been subsumed by the wage relation. That's what is so creepy about going into a Pret -- you know they are being forced to be nice to you and are being carefully watched by other fake-nice bosses and informers. It feels like those moments in movies about people in a mental asylum, where the patients try to maintain a facade of controlled politeness in hopes of demonstrating their newfound sanity. This sounds sort of insane to me, anyway:

Every new employee gets a thick binder of instructions. It states, for example, that employees should be “bustling around and being active” on the floor, not “standing around looking bored.” It encourages them to occasionally hand out free coffee or cakes to regulars, and not “hide your true character” with customers.

Can a boss really force you to display your "true character" without driving you into an insane spiral of endlessly recursive reflexivity? And is one's "true character" nothing more than picking random lottery-winner customers to hand a cake to? Are human interactions so conditioned by the imperative of exchange that giving and getting something for nothing is the best way to simulate genuineness, or sincere benevolence? Perhaps the looting in London was just a big expression of love.

The article should put to rest any ideas that the implementation of such concepts as gamification and the general intellect are inherently benevolent or subversive. Instead, they can be deployed by management to create a kind of affective Taylorism, where emotional experiences are assembled under hurry-up conditions and energetically concealed duress. Unless you believe that it's more fun to be forced to pretend to be having fun while working a deli counter -- maybe the findings that people who are forced to smile report being happier apply here also. Clifford notes that Pret's "annual work force turnover rate is about 60 percent — low for the fast-food industry, where the rate is normally 300 to 400 percent." Stockholm Syndrome is a powerful management tool.

The emotional labor being extracted from Pret employees exemplifies the way tight labor markets give employers the chance to cement expectations of a more pliant disposition from workers. The new normal is a grotesque sycophancy sugarcoated as a fun, cheerful workplace where "teamwork" rules. In an email, Anton says Pret's approach elicits an "unprecedented self-relation -- instrumentalization of mood and affect as a way of producing surplus value. It can only end in a psychotic break." I'm inclined to agree.

Pleasures of Scoreboard (9 Dec 2010)

This Wired article about "retail hackers" -- people who try to turn companies' price discrimination techniques against them -- offers this useful distinction:

According to Donald Lichtenstein, a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, super-couponers have learned to ignore “acquisition utility,” the pleasure and value one obtains from, say, a box of cereal. Instead, they peg their shopping decisions to “transaction utility,” the difference between what they’re getting the cereal for and what they think the cereal is supposed to cost. In other words, super-couponers don’t perceive a grocery item as food, at least not until they exit the store and serve it for breakfast. On the shelf and in the cart, the super-couponer evaluates products with the cold-eyed calculus of a trader.

This is another way of saying that these people are after exchange value rather than use value -- they are beyond use value, as Baudrillard liked to say. Or in other words, the utility they are after is what radio host Jim Rome and his devotees used to call scoreboard -- the sheer irrefutable fact of winning, of beating someone else. This old column of mine about "thrift-store gentry" discusses the idea in terms of obsessed thrift-store shopping -- I defined scoreboard there as "an ethical Occam's razor, a pitiless pragmatism that relentlessly transforms all situations into zero-sum clashes with clear winners and losers." My conclusion was that "beating the system" by scoring retail triumphs was not really beating the system but reinforcing it. You're still shopping and reckoning your identity in terms of acquiring stuff.

I think that we are encouraged to fall back onto such pleasures as scoreboard in shopping for a number of reasons. First, competitive consumption nicely mirrors the competitive aspects of production in capitalism, making that ideology holistic and naturalizing the idea of a zero-sum society -- that there should be winners and losers in the great game of making and distributing useful things. Of course, cooperation with others would be an illusion and off course there should naturally be vast inequality.

Also scoreboard is compensation for discovering that use value is a mirage, an alibi. Or to put that differently, the pleasures of zero-sum scoreboard are infinite, whereas our organic human needs are quite limited. Satisfaction is anathema to both our growth-oriented economy and our sense of limitless self-potential, of endlessly expanding identity, so fixating on exchanges for their own sake as the source of new pleasures makes sense. That is an inexhaustible well.

The problem with this -- the reason retail hackers seem more crazy than enviable -- is that focus on the pleasures of exchange blocks our access to the pleasures of the things acquired. We don't want to accept that use value isn't more real than exchange value. So we believe that the hackers don't really taste the cereal, in a way, if they ever even get around to eating it. It's akin to collecting mania, where managing the collection replaces enjoying the things collected -- you enjoy buying albums more than listening to them, if they ever get played. We become, if the article is to be believed, "cold-eyed" and dispassionate -- which, presumably, is inherently bad.

Baudrillard seems to argue that no one can ever really taste the cereal, that this is always already an ideological illusion necessitated by consumer capitalism. His position seems to be that you can't "really" experience anything within capitalist social relations (if ever) -- sensory experience is always mediated, and the mediation becomes the focal experiential point. To beat those conditions, you need to upend all of society, not aggressively clip coupons.

I wouldn't go that far, but I often find myself falling into the collector/scoreboard trap of fetishizing the triumph of winning the exchange, or completing the series, or whatever it is that makes me lose sight of the goods themselves in light of some other goal that seems like it should be subordinate. Then I generalize from my experience, wonder if there are structural aspects to consumer society that encourage us to fall into those traps. (Since obviously it can't simply be my credulity or weakness. Obviously.) The looming question is whether these derivative pleasures that come directly from capitalism's structure are actually less pleasing to us than the authentic pleasures of enjoying objects and non-exchange-oriented experiences.

Further complicating things, capitalism tends to makes us think that all experiences and goods can be understood as exchange-oriented, as trades in which a measurable status outcome is at stake. Scoreboard everywhere, all the time.

Goods Into Stories (1 Dec 2010)

As the holiday season settles in, I need to segue into Scrooge mode. In this Design Observer post, Chappell Ellison notes the sentimental exploitation of the idea of storytelling in some current ad campaigns, including Starbucks'.

“Stories are gifts — share,” snakes across the cardboard coffee cozies. “Share a cup, share a story,” proclaim the banners hanging in the store windows. While the act of storytelling and coffee is a logical connection, it hardly seems fair for Starbucks to co-opt such an intimate bond.

This offense might have gone unnoticed if several other large corporations weren’t abusing the art of storytelling. I recently spotted a Whole Foods bag, printed with images of snowflakes, red ribbons and the phrase, “Every meal has a story.” And here I was thinking that writers were purveyors of stories, not coffee chains or organic grocery stores.

Contra Ellison, I think that advertisers have always been the purveyors of stories, and fiction writers and marketing professionals have long traded tropes and structures meant to appeal to our desire for more suitable scaffolding for our daydreams. Advertisers tend to be more efficient in their evocations. In Ellison's examples, "storytelling" has become a shorthand idea in the story the companies want to tell, a metonym for family closeness, for holiday memories passed down generationally. "Fair" or not, Starbucks and Whole Foods want to glom onto those memories and draw some of their affective energy to their products, which can then serve as the prompt for evoking those feelings much more efficiently and cleanly, without the ambivalence that colors any genuine recollection (even if the ambivalence is an awareness of time passing, of mortality).

What may be new is the "sharing" aspect of these pitches -- that the products will prompt users to tell their own stories, just like using social media is supposed to do. Sharing and intimacy are conflated in the ads, even as the automation and commercial exploitation of sharing drives them further apart than ever. "Sharing" has taken on talismanic ideological significance in our culture as the great gift that has been bestowed upon us by technology and its miracles of connectivity. But the importance of sharing to business is in the value that "sharers" create without compensation: for example, by spreading advertising messages virally or innovating new meanings for products and enriching the storytelling base on which they draw.

So I think that the "creating/sharing stories" angle in these ads reflect not only the sentimental significance of storytelling for commercially exploiting notions of the idealized family, but also the increasing interest companies have in our brand-enriching immaterial labor, which, drawing on Lazzarato and Virno, I defined this way in an earlier Generation Bubble post:

the everyday acts of identity-building consumption and friendship that the increasing mediatization of society now make available for capture... This sort of labor has precipitated a value crisis of its own, in the form of work that can’t be valued in wages, as capitalism has always required. What is that work really worth? Why are we even bothering? What price tag can we put on the effort it takes to make life livable, to make ourselves known to ourselves, to secure social recognition?

If capital has run out of productive investments for making goods and services, and the cycle of expanding fictitious capital has played itself out for the time being, it may retrench by financing a manufacturing project that never ends — the production of the self, as carried out in the “social factory.”... Rather than imagining ourselves valuable for the traditional role we assume in our community, we instead try to discover and enlarge our subjectivity through publicized acts of consumption — be they conspicuous luxuries or altruistic acts or clever, innovative re-uses of goods, or what have you. We consume to create cool, which in turn reflects the glories of its creator. But from the point of view of capital, our acts of everyday self-realization are perceived as knowledge production for the information economy, elaborating the intricately woven code (as Jean Baudrillard calls it) that constitutes the symbolic value of brands and goods.

In this sense, Ellison is right. We tell stories about the things in our life that companies are more and more able to co-opt and transform into marketing. This in turn makes our own storytelling always already seem like marketing. The product placements are already implicit.

Drug Stores Selling Groceries, Lifestyles (15 Nov 2010)

I haven't yet figured out how to synthesize Rob Walker's column about the drug-store chain Walgreens starting to sell fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods neglected by traditional grocers and produce sellers and my somewhat mind-blowing experience at the brand-new Duane Reade (a NYC drug-store chain) in the hipster haven of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Neighborhood activists have encouraged a boycott (on Facebook at least) of this particular Duane Reade location because it apparently represents the wrong sort of gentrification and is uncooling the area with its non-mom-and-pop-ness. It sits across from another local pharmacy that has served the neighborhood since before it was colonized by 20-somethings and is therefore acceptably authentic.

To counter the bad vibes, Duane Reade apparently did some market research and concluded the way to win over locals was to hide the pharmacy in a remote corner and stock the store with a beer counter where one can have growlers filled; a huge walk-in beverage cooler that features, as it says above the entrance, "retro brands"; haute niche brands in both the food and makeup departments -- Ronnybrook Farms, Skyr Icelandic yogurt, Demeter fragrances (including Paperback, Dirt and Riding Crop) -- in the immense and gleaming K-mart-size basement-retail floor with luxuriously wide aisles. We can't give you mom-and-pop authenticity, the store seemed to be saying, but we can collect more of your lifestyle accouterments in one store than you ever dreamed was possible. People were audibly cooing and gasping in delighted surprise as they wandered around and saw just how much Duane Reade was willing to pander to them.

It's at this point that I want to draw some righteous parallel between poor neighborhoods and crypto-bohemian ones, between the food desert on the one hand and the desert of the real on the other. Whereas the Williamsburgers apparently want to see their warped integrity reflected in their neighborhood retailers, the people in food deserts see only society's general intention to ignore them until they disappear. The oversaturation of symbols and the esoteric plane on which the lifestyle war is being fought in the one neighborhood reflects the dearth of social resources in the other, the misplaced energies of a social order seeking profit opportunities and thus reinforcing hyperindividualism among the privileged.

Vanity Sizing for Men (9 Sept 2010)

In the U.S. men's pants are typically sized in inches, with one figure for the waist circumference and one for the length of the inseam. But as this Esquire piece by Abe Sauer rapidly making the rounds demonstrates, mass-market clothing manufacturers don't like standardized units like "inches" and have decided to make "36 Waist" mean whatever they want it to mean.

Sauer believes this is the migration of vanity sizing from the domain of women's wear into men's clothes.

The pants manufacturers are trying to flatter us. And this flattery works: Alfani's 36-inch "Garrett" pant was 38.5 inches, just like the Calvin Klein "Dylan" pants — which I loved and purchased. A 39-inch pair from Haggar (a brand name that out-testosterones even "Garrett") was incredibly comfortable. Dockers, meanwhile, teased "Leave yourself some wiggle room" with its "Individual Fit Waistline," and they weren't kidding: despite having a clear size listed, the 36-inchers were 39.5 inches. And part of the reason they were so comfy is that I felt good about myself, no matter whether I deserved it.

Such an interpretation is plausible enough, but I think retailers' facilitating the illusion that we are thinner than we are is a by-product of their chief goal, which is to force us to try on every item of clothing we are considering buying and let the endowment effect work its behavioral magic. Trying something on invests us in completing the purchase to a much greater degree -- we've gone to all that trouble already and want something to show for our effort -- and it also habituates us to the idea that we already own the thing we put on, and to not buy it feels as though we have lost something or had something taken away from us. So the sizes are just very vague guidelines to help us know which items to take to the fitting rooms.

Sauer also raises a different question, whether "comfort" has anything to do with the physical fit of clothes anymore, whether it has been entirely displaced and is now derived from what we think others will see or believe about us on the basis of our clothes. That we even have to wonder about this is a testament to the kind of commonplace alienation that consumerism fosters, muddling self-consciousness and the need for a specific kind of surface-based recognition with our physical awareness of our body in space. Less cryptically: we are always aware of our need to signify something with even our must mundane practices, and this puts us at an inescapable analytical remove from what we are actually doing and experiencing. There's no direct way to know even something as straightforward as how our clothes fit, since the standard is not absolute but has instead become mobilized, made into something affective, based on emotions and reactions and fantasy. Or to put this yet another way: every moment of communication in consumerism, even something as ostensibly straightforward as a waist measurement, must be exploited for its symbolic potential. It must be separated fro the real and made to function as part of a cycle of dreams and disappointments.

Trader Aldi's (3 Sept 2010)

I am a little bit obsessed with the oft-neglected connection between German hard-discounter Aldi and U.S. lifestyle-grocery Trader Joe's, mainly because most of the Americans who shop at Trader Joe's would never be caught skulking in an Aldi -- many of which are in lower-income, fringe areas in the U.S. -- and a high proportion of Aldi's customers probably don't even know what Trader Joe's is. It's a not so secret vanity of mine to be one of what I imagine to be few people shopping at both stores routinely. I'm not sure what system I think I am beating; I just feel that "they" don't want you to know that the food in both of these chains is of the same quality. (In Germany, Aldi apparently stocks Trader Joe's branded goods on the shelves, something we will never see in the U.S.)

Though both Trader Joe's and Aldi often get unreasonably crowded and entail long waits in line, they offer a stark opportunity to study class difference in America -- the way the same stuff is branded differently to appeal across income brackets; the different kinds of behaviors customers display and the sort of amenities they expect. Aldi is notorious for offering no amenities whatsoever; the food is piled in cardboard boxes on pallets in the store, and you must pack your own groceries, Euro-style, with bags you have to pay for. Trader Joe's has a weird shtick where the employees are dressed as if they were a ship's crew, and they seem instructed to make cheerful small talk with customers. They offer Dixie cups of coffee and free samples of prepared food -- the scramble for which can often become savage, with lots of anarchic pushing and shoving.

My sense is that Aldi treats grocery shopping the way it ought to be treated, as a grim and necessary duty carried out by responsible adults seeking the best prices and not seeking affirmation about what kind of people they are. The families trudging through Aldi, pushing the oversize cart that you must pay a 25-cent deposit for in the parking lot, are generally nonplussed by the goods on offer, a bizarre array of hapless pseudobrands like "Savoritz" and "Fit & Easy" and "Happy Farms." The products confer no status, so affirmation for people buying stuff there can then theoretically come from more appropriate sources connected to practices more integral to our identity than shopping. Whereas at Trader Joe's customers are patronized like children and flattered and cajoled as if they were helpless simps desperate to be told what will make them cool and clever. The food is marketed as if it all were potentially trendy and impressive. The general impression the experience seems designed to leave shoppers with is that they are superior to the ordinary grocery shopper because they are more alert to a veneer of signifiers overlaying the products and can keep up with and decode these signifiers efficiently. But I don't want or expect to be congratulated for buying the "frozen organic foursome" or "Trader Joe's Ultra-dark Bay Blend" -- I just want my figs and coffee beans and to get the hell out of there.

This recent Fortune cover story by Beth Kowitt supplies some confirmation for my nutty views. Kowitt claims that Trader Joe's is "an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience" -- a description that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the chain. (And if you don't think it is a chore to be in TJ's on, say, a weekend afternoon, you're nuts. It's like being at a public pool on the hottest afternoon of the year, only everybody is an entitled prig blathering on a cell phone.) Kowitt then systematically undermines that brand identity by exposing the way the illusion is constructed. She notes that TJ's is owned by Aldi and that "big, well-known companies also make many of Trader Joe's products" though they are packaged to seem localish in provenance. Vendors are sworn to secrecy about their relationship to Trader Joe's, allowing the grocer to maintain total control over the brand. She explains how TJ's shops for its customers by seeing which zip codes subscribe to foodie magazines and have high education levels -- these indicators apparently mark the insecure but trend-setting customers they want to attract, people for whom food is not something you struggle to afford but something you struggle to master and awe others with.

None of this is all that shocking, but it just points to the ways in which class gets delineated through consumer practices, as it must in a consumer society that on the surface promises purchasing power for all and equal opportunity to goods. But the class matters at stake in places like Trader Joe's appear to dissolve in an atmosphere of righteousness, of cool, of "quality" being bounced back and forth between customers and products, so that consumers don't believe they are partaking in anything unegalitarian -- they don't see themselves as responsible for reproducing class inequity at all.

Reward Cards, Interchange Fees, Class Warfare (22 June 2010)

I have never really understood the popular zeal for enrolling in airline-loyalty programs and collecting miles toward discounted flights or whatever else one uses that company scrip for. Part of my skepticism stems from a belief that companies don't particularly deserve any loyalty -- why blunt the beneficial effects of corporate competition? -- and if they did, it wouldn't be because they bought it with an intentionally confusing price-discrimination scheme that charges different prices according to how many arbitrary, bureaucratic hoops one is willing to jump through in hopes of bargains. (It's especially weird when airline-mile-collecting chumps are depicted as corporate-class swashbucklers. The film Up in the Air had an ambivalent take on this -- it seemed to admire its characters for the loyalty-program mastery that seemed to be part of the attempt to satirize them as tools.) Loyalty programs seem to present the promise of a deal down the road as a beguiling substitute for an actual deal in the here and now. It's an ongoing implementation of the rebate strategy, in which retailers get consumers to pay full price and hope they screw up or forget to apply for the money that they understood at the point of sale as a discount. it is confusion as a business strategy, and creates even more of an incentive for businesses to flood the zone with disinformation and fine print.

These programs are a manifestation of what Michael Betancourt, in this article, calls "agnotologic capitalism: a capitalism systemically based on the production and maintenance of ignorance." In such an economy, profits are secured by duping or trapping people, distracting them at the key moment in which they enter into contracts not in their best interest. Or to put this another way, firms sell consumers the pleasures of distraction, paid for by entering into unfavorable contracts regarding the goods the consumers are ostensibly interested in instead of the pleasures. Airline customers are buying the pleasures (such as they are) of playing the miles game as much as the flights themselves.

Lately, in an effort try to take the world as it is rather than stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it, I have signed up for rewards programs for several airlines, but all that I've accomplished by doing that is a tremendous spike in the amount of junk mail I receive -- mainly offers to sign up for miles-based credit cards through which I earn miles for using the card instead of cash. Such rewards cards are the basis of the credit-card-company racket of collecting more interchange fees -- the processing costs merchants must pay when their customers use plastic. This leads to a roundabout series of cross-subsidies, as Kevin Drum argues here, in which the poor subsidize the rich:

Banks charge merchants far more in interchange fees than it costs to actually run their payment networks, and merchants pay because they have no choice. Visa and Mastercard are functional monopolies, so if you want to do business with them — and what merchant can afford not to? — you have to pay whatever they tell you to pay. This cost gets passed on to consumers, of course, and the poor and working class pay it. The middle class and the rich, however, don't: they basically get the fees rebated in the form of reward cards.

The most diabolical aspect of this is that I become the agent of destruction: reward cards give me an incentive to use credit, which makes retailers increase the cost of goods for all customers, regardless of whether they use credit or not. It enlists me in the effort to exploit the poor, investing me in the structure of society that makes my advantage seem contingent on the continued disadvantage of those below me. Rewards programs are basically disguised class warfare. Middle class people like me get "rewarded" -- that is, we don't get punished by having to pay the passed-through interchange costs -- for being middle class.

Mike Konczal has much more about interchange fees here. Two highlights:

1. "The system is set-up to encourage you to use credit as much as possible, and then pay that credit off later. This is not an accident. The common phrase among credit card company people is that people are “sloppy payers”, and these sloppy payments function as a major profit center for businesses. This system also transfer money upwards in a regressive, tax-free manner and distorts prices so that shareholders of financial companies can get a cut." This is more agnotology at work. We basically pay for privilege of being care free about money, not simply the stuff we get with a credit card. Companies hope we will slip up and be careless, and thus promote such carelessness in most of their marketing materials. Credit card companies have put themselves in the business of encouraging us to be "sloppy."

2. "this is the payment system. If it was a random consumer good, I would care much less about cross-subsidies and squeezing. If people who drink their coffee black subsidize cream and sugar coffee drinkers, whatever. But this is the very mechanism of which our economy runs – the way in which we trade goods and services. If distortions goes to the core of the economy, it doesn’t surprise me that we have a lot of bad scenarios much further downstream." The payment system is not some God-given thing, as Konczal points out, it's "not a state of nature event" but the complex product of institutions, regulation, convention, social trust, and so on. All payment systems have clearing risks, and it seems to me that one of the justifications for federal states is to minimize that risk so that commerce can flourish; banks, on the other hand want it to be a profit center.

Happily, it seems that interchange will indeed be facing new regulation soon. Felix Salmon notes that this may have some effects that middle-class credit-card users won't like: "if credit-card interchange fees stay high while debit-card fees fall, then merchants will simply start offering broad discounts to anybody using cash or debit, essentially forcing customers to pay extra for all those frequent-flier miles and cash rebates." I hope that eventually means the end of credit-card reward programs in general.

UPDATE: Salmon has more on payment systems in this post. The essential point: "Being able to easily pay for things without worrying about the mechanism is a great public good." We don't want to have to decide between modes of payment anymore than we want to have to second-guess our doctors about what they prescribe for us, as advocates of competition in health care demand we do. Competition among payment systems seems like a libertarian idea that can be logically defended but is wildly impractical and would b counterproductive in reality. As Salmon writes, "The fact is that payments are a utility; they’re regulated like utilities; and utilities tend not to see much in the way of innovative new entrants."

And as my friend's old landlord, who refused to take checks, liked to say, "Cash is king."

Consumerism and the cold war (20 May 2010)

I have an essay up at Generation Bubble about how the cold war shaped what has become the de facto moral mission of consumerism -- protecting "freedom" defined as individualistic self-fashioning through consumer choices. To put that more plainly, consumerist ideology holds that shopping is a sacred right, and purchasing power is political power. Consumerism was the reward for being born in the West, the best justification for a political and economic system that generated vast and worsening inequality.

Naturally, consumerism subordinates (or rejects) the tenets of the counterdiscourse to it developed in the Eastern bloc, the official ideology of leveling, equal opportunity to all, and personhood through civic responsibility. That ideology, by all accounts, was routinely violated in everyday life under communism in myriad ways; poverty, it turns out, doesn't encourage much solidarity or sympathy, and it takes a massive and invasive state apparatus to suppress the tendency to want to individuate ourselves at the seeming expense of others. What I was trying to get at in the essay is how the ideals of egalitarianism and personal autonomy seem to serve as the horizons of each other, and whether this is a failure of our political imagination or if its an illusion generated to sustain the apathy that protects consumerism or if it's something else.

Consumerism and leveling (18 May 2010)

I don't often think of it this way, but my attitude toward consumerism was indelibly marked by my having grown up during the cold war, when the conflict between east and west was popularly depicted as a struggled between consumerism and a gray life of deprivation and standing in lines to secure soap and crusty bread. In the U.S., we were taught that people who had to stand in lines and who had no choices in department stores (let alone of department stores) were simply not free, in the most obvious and visceral of ways. As we were instructed to see them, the poor souls in communist countries were a featureless mass of lumpen people with no individual identity. They weren't allowed to express themselves, and the censorship extended beyond what they might have said or created -- with no consumer markets, no cornucopia of cultural products, what did they have to talk about anyway? -- to their very identity itself. Everyone was the same, and it was supposed to be awful.

Trapped in the angst of my teenage isolation, perpetually paranoid about both being sufficiently unique and included in the right cliques at the same time, that homogeneity didn't seem all that awful. I suffered from what seemed to me a kind of surfeit of identity, or at least a surfeit of potential identity. Every mundane choice about what I would wear or listen to or write on the front of my notebook seemed pregnant with obscure significance about who I was becoming, about what I was supposed to live up to, even though I desperately wanted not to care about any of it. I wanted to be in the endless eastern queue, waiting to be issued the standard package, my mind free to think about the things that mattered.

That was a conveniently rebellious attitude to have, anyway: Prosperity was a burden, and bourgeois conformity a crushing worry precisely because we weren't all issued Mao suits to wear. It was a relief to have the Iron Curtain countries out there as a fantasy alternative, as an anchor for resistance, even if at a deeper level, it represented an alternative no American kid in the 1980s in their right mind would have chosen when it came right down to it. Despite the optional paralysis, the hedonic treadmill, the invidious comparison, and all the rest of the vicissitudes of capitalism, I still wanted more stuff, not a one-way ticket to Leningrad. But still, it was comforting to have this concrete alternative to imagine, to think of an entire bloc establishing a limit to consumerism, promising that it was reversible, that people were still out there who were invested in the opposite ideal, that we shouldn't spend our lives competing to have better cars and clothes. One could imagine really existing egalitarianism and be allowed to regard consumerism as not merely the natural, inevitable way of life. One could imagine a time, or at least a place, where one could stop worrying about oneself.

Reading Slavenka Drakulić's early-1990s essay "A Communist Eye, or What I Saw in New York," about coming to Manhattan and encountering simultaneously the pressures of consumerism and the specific nature of western poverty, reminded me of my youthful fantasies, and to a degree, vindicated them. It turns out that people from the East actually did absorb an egalitarian ideal and were actually invested in a different way of life -- it wasn't merely a totalitarian state forcing them to surrender their innate wish to be better than their neighbors. QUOTE ABOUT COMMUNIST EYE. In the east, a repressive state channeled its people's ambition toward achieving freedom; in the west, already putatively free, our ambitions were turned subtly toward unfulfillable fantasies of self-aggrandizement in the name of sustaining endless economic growth. Prosperity replaces material deprivation with a psychic inadequacy that can't be meliorated.

In this n+1 essay about childhood in communist Czechoslovakia by Jana Prikryl are some hints that these differences in orientation may linger. She notes a UNICEF report that claims children fare better in the Czech Republic than in the U.S. because there's less comparative poverty, despite the U.S. being much richer in absolute terms. Prikryl explains that "the only economic advantage to being a child in the Czech Republic is that your peers are all about as poor as you are." Drakulić had noted something similar: "In socialism, we were not used to thinking of ourselves as poor," she writes. "The communist principle of uravnilovka (leveling) made us all live more or less under the same conditions. There were no ways, no means, not enough goods to establish a real, visible, palpable class distinction between poor and rich." In the U.S., virtually nothing is visible but such ways, means, and goods. Mastering through consumerism the constantly refining subtleties of the distinction between classes presents itself as the meaning of life.

Drakulić's essay vividly captures the way opulence and palpable inequality is oppressive in a different way than eastern grayness had been, an oppressiveness that in our own way we in the west were not permitted to admit. In our case, the proscription may have been more psychologically damaging because it was largely self-imposed, inculcated not directly by the State and by transparent propaganda but by what we voluntarily took in as entertainment, by what was directed at us from all sides by the existence of unnecessary goods we were invited to imagining possessing as our right. We conspired with the culture to make luxuries into necessities in our minds and to frankly enjoy the dubious pleasures of consumerism as though they didn't entail a sacrifice of an alternate ethical ideal.

In a passage about being dizzied by shopping at Bloomingdale's, Drakulić grasps much of what is unsettling and confrontational about consumerist ideology once it's made material and manifest in the commercial infrastructure -- invasive institutions of everyday life in the west that Americans cannot help but take for granted:

After a certain point, my eyes refuse to look, my mouth becomes dry, and I start to have a headache. I recognize this particular tiredness,... the feeling that it is just absurd to look at so many things and so many kinds of one thing, as if one is enclosed in a room with mirrored walls that endlessly reflect each other. It has to stop somewhere -- you think -- this multiplying, this plenitude doesn't make any sense. Coming from the world of shortages, one's idea of plenty is mainly of fruit, meat, vegetables, of shampoo, soap, or toilet paper. Here, you are murdered by variations on each of these and by the impossibility of distinguishing the differences. First you discover an immense greed, a kind of fever, a wish to buy everything -- the primordial hunger of consumerism. Then you discover powerlessness -- and the very essence of it, poverty. Moreover, you start to realize that Bloomingdale's for you is a museum, not a real store where you can buy real things for your real self.

And in that account of an afternoon's dislocation, Drakulić sums up an ideological education that Americans have drummed into them their entire lives. Americans learn that "real things" and "real selves" only exist as potentialities, though we are obligated to always pursue them.

Not that communism is a preferable alternative. Etc. The ongoing income inequality debate deals essentially with these alternatives of TK and TK, whether well-being is better promoted through leveling at the expense of economic growth, or whether growth enables general prosperity to obscure the misery of having less than some peers and the insecurity and intermittent guilt at having more than some others. The problem may be that some are better off under leveling, while others are better off with material prosperity, but no political system seems capable of embracing both possibilities, and so we alternate between them, leaving everyone worse off.

Objects and Experiences (13 April 2010)

PsyBlog has posted a list of "six psychological reasons consumer culture is unsatisfying." All of them can be boiled down to the idea that when it comes to purchases, experiences are ultimately more satisfying than objects, mainly because experiences become fond memories instead of outdated clutter. Retailers who sell objects are as aware of this as psychologists are, so their marketing efforts arguably tend to try to make shopping itself into an experience, and make the purchased object into a necessary souvenir of that experience. Or is that experiences have become polluted with souvenirs as they are made "consumable"?

I guess what I am driving at here is that the opposition of "object" and "experience" is not as absolute as it may initially seem. Contemporary "experiences" for sale are generally shot through with opportunities to purchase objects, and objects are often packaged as requisite goods for experiences -- e.g., you can't go camping without the appropriate gear, etc. The post contends that consumers typically have a "maximizing" approach to buying things (get the most value for the least money -- the neoclassical assumptions about rationality) and a "satisficing" approach to choosing experiences (getting just enough to satisfy without worrying about maximizing utility). I guess I would like to know more about how the studies were designed to reach this conclusion, because the point the post makes at the end -- that we can think experientially about buying objects -- seems eminently reversible. We can be goaded into thinking of our experiences as objects, as would seem to suit the vested interests of consumerism. That means that the "shopping as experience" ruse may work as a clever piece of marketing jujitsu, promoting shopping for things as an experience in order to habituate us to thinking of experiences as discrete purchasable things rather than a flow of possibility.

Also, I am skeptical that this sort of thing can work:

This experiment suggests that thinking of material purchases in experiential terms helps banish dissatisfaction. Try thinking of jeans in terms of where you wore them or how they feel, the mp3 player in terms of how the music changes your mood or outlook, even your laptop in terms of all the happy hours spent reading your favourite blog.

Making the effort to think in this way would seem to negate the ability to take the contrived thoughts seriously. You have to trick yourself, a la dialectical behavioral therapy, I guess, to forget about how you are forcing yourself to see things differently from how you know, at one level, they are.

Another way of putting this is this: we don't live in a culture that wants to let us think experientially about purchases or to transcend "invidious comparisons", so it requires active resistance to hold on to a experiential perspective. I think that we should worry less about experiences vs. objects and think more of a different continuum -- that of individualism. There must be studies out there that investigate whether thinking less about personal identity leads to a greater indifference about the signifying component of things and experiences and a broader sense of being in the flow of the events of one's life.

Performative shopping and "hauls" (22 March 2010)

Marisa Meltzer has an interesting piece at Slate about teenage girls who make "hauls" -- videos of the stuff they bought on shopping trips. Meltzer compares hauls to tech-unboxing videos; they reminded me of when I freelanced at Lucky.

Making haul videos probably seems entirely natural, like it might have seemed to form a garage band in past decades. The consumer society's great achievement is turning shopping into the viable medium for creativity and social connection. It seems natural, inevitable even, to relate to other people that way. Meltzer makes her own haul video and concludes, "With a camera on me, everything I bought felt inherently important." The way to intensify our feelings is to film them and launch them into the world, imagining someone will watch and care enough to judge us. That fantasy is not new, but the means for seeming to fulfill it are (you don't have to, say, start a band, practice, and try to book gigs at the VFW), and they are of course going to be commercially exploited. That's one way to interpret the long-term game plan of Facebook and YouTube.

It was predictable that hauls should start happening, considering the commercial inflection of online sharing -- and also because shopping is always getting harder and harder. There's inherently a vague dread in making the commitment to spend, considering the way that consumerism relates to identity, and these sorts of decisions are being logged permanently online. It's a semiotic jungle out there; the meanings are multiplying and teens especially want advice on how to buy what will send the messages they want to send in the appropriate way. Adults have more leeway in inventing their own meanings, or have come up with disassociative strategies about what we all have to do in terms of self-presentation. Teens have fewer defenses.

The sample that Meltzer provides is pretty polished; the girl shows the pieces she bought, models them, and explains why she pulled the trigger on them. I imagine there are less polished versions, that are more desperate or more ostentatious. Bourdieu-style analysis could break such videos down by class; you'd predict that as you move up the hierarchy, the more pretenses at being disinterested in the presentation there would be, the more likely the discussion would be couched in aesthetic terminology.

The rhetoric in the video is straight out of Lucky, in fact, and reminded me of the weird admiration I had for the copy there, the quixotic optimism in all products, that there was something unique and redemptive to say about everything if you were ingenious enough and mined the thesaurus thoroughly enough for new adjectives. I enjoyed the way the editors there would heedlessly and inventively transform nouns and verbs into adjectives to invent entirely new criteria by which to evaluate boots and jackets and lipstick shades. Here's a more or less random example that gets at what I mean: "The structured sweetheart neckline combined with the blousiness makes it super flattering--and the unusual mosaic pattern is so cool. To offset the girliness I'm going to wear it with some thick gray tights, these futuristic BCBGMaxAzria platforms and Diesel's oversize boyfriend blazer." (Before I worked there, I never had heard of "boyfriend" clothes." The paradoxical conundrum implied by that appellation -- clothes for women made to simulate clothes for men that women would borrow under intimate and cozy conditions? -- made me want to break out my copy of Barthes's The Fashion System to figure out what it meant. But I think this Sociological Images post shows how the phenomenon has reached dizzying ironic heights well beyond interpretation.)

Lucky taught me how shopping could be a vector for unfeigned enthusiasm strong enough to entirely mask the underlying cynicism. People who love shopping are not in bad faith, and they seem to honestly want others to experience the joy and confidence it can intermittently bring them. That same hopeful tone animates the haul video; she's not out to exclude anyone, though that could certainly be the effect. Instead, she is aping the mass-media tone of inclusion and eager solicitude. She's not doing anything wrong; she seems successfully well-adjusted. Meltzer notes that girls like the one in the video "resemble the popular girls at any high school, which is precisely why they are so appealing to other teens." The popular girl doesn't have to snub you, she can just make you a follower without following you back.

Anyway, that's what is so disheartening about online sociality to me: the likable girl in this shopping video is the face of marketing's future. Marketers will seem more well-intentioned than ever; they will be our peers. And we won't notice that our peers talk like a commercial because we'll be using the same idiom ourselves.

Miscellaneous (11 March 2010)

Here are a few things:

1. A report on neuromarketing from Open magazine. I expected something in the Vance Packard Hidden Persuaders tradition of outrage, but it's more a "wonder of science" thing. It ends with this though: "The future of design may well lie with neuromarketing -- a future designed for the consumer, but it will also be a future where companies know the consumer’s mind better than the consumer himself does." That's wrong. The future is not designed for the "consumer"; it's designed for capital to profit. Also, people don't have a mind about most marketing issues until marketers shove those issues in their face with ubiquitous and invaive advertising. The point is not to read consumers' minds but to make them.

2. At his blog, Chris Dillow urges us to read Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital. (Here's a review/summary of the gist of it; poke around online and you'll find full pdfs are out there too, I think.) Monopoly capital theory helps explain economic stagnation in structural terms. Dillow questions whether fiscal solutions can address what may be a structural problem -- one of Arnold Kling's favorite themes.

3. Lots of people have linked to this BBC story about North Tyneside, a borough which has built fake shops in empty storefronts. The Potemkin village of consumerism, as Tyler Cowen notes. My first instinct was to think this was imaginative, but it actually shows a profound lack of imagination, the inability for a society to conceive of alternatives to shopping.

The Ethics of Price Discrimination (5 Jan 2010)

Price discrimination is economics lingo for the retail practice charging customers different prices based on what they are willing to pay. Economists generally have no problems with this; that's just how fairness is defined in capitalist societies. Many consumers, I suspect, find the practice as unpleasant as I do, not merely because it can seem unfair to pay more than somebody else for the same good, but possibly because price discrimination undermines the cherished ideological tenet that there's a "true price" for goods, that useful goods are really worth something definite, and that fundamental use value is indexed to a good's cost. Instead, we learn that the price of many goods is indexed to our gullibility, to our negligence, or to retailers' ability to dupe us.

The price-discrimination game works best when pricing is not transparent -- visit a carpet warehouse, for instance, and try to find a price tag. Consumerism puts an end to the norm of haggling, however, since shopping in a consumer society must function as entertainment, and the shifty confrontations, the agonistic bartering with salespeople unnerves a lot of people. It makes us aware of all the asymmetries, makes us wary of bad deals, makes us aware that we must be willing to walk away with nothing oftentimes to not get ripped off. But consumerism requires a far more passive consumer who feels licensed to say yes to everything, to indulge in the pleasures of impulse purchasing, and take pleasure in the gratification of that impulse as mush as in the thing purchased, which more and more becomes a mere alibi for luxuriating in the retail world, where flattery and fantasy blend and become more salient to us. Shopping becomes an escape from conflict.

Hence, we have become more comfortable shopping with fixed prices, but retailers typically require prices to be less sticky in order to make a profit. They need to increase margins wherever and whenever they can. So there is constant tension between broadcasting a price to draw consumers in, and masking prices to charge consumers according to their class. Several strategies have evolved to address this: They can routinely reprice goods (easier now with automated systems), they can use various menu tricks to get consumers to choose more-expensive options (i.e., offering a ludicrously expensive option to make the second-most expensive option seem reasonable), they can offer loss leaders, they can bury additional fees in the fine print, they can sell the same crap with different labels to different customer classes, they can advertise a discount but not register it at checkout.

I encountered a blend of all this when I bought a TV this past weekend. I first went to P.C. Richard in College Point, in Eastern Queens, and tried to wrap my mind around the profusion of makes and models, all of which seemed largely the same, except for screen size and resolution. Various bells and whistles seemed tacked on to certain brands, but the flat-screen TV basically seems like a commodity to me -- any one would do, and I'd feel best about the one I selected once it was separated from all the others and began to become mine. Still I couldn't bring myself to simply buy the cheapest one on offer. The sale price for a particular model by a brand I have heard of was prominently displayed. I made a note of it, then went to Best Buy, where similar models were far more expensive (Best Buy is not always the best buy, apparently; they seemed to be banking on their mere reputation as a bargain retailer at this point.) So I went to the P.C. Richard in my neighborhood, and was baffled to find that the same sale model from the College Point store was priced $100 higher. I asked about it, and the salesman immediately matched the price I had seen at the other store. Then he tried to sell me a set of cables for $50. (It turned out I needed the cables to connect my laptop to the set, but you can get them on Amazon.com for under $20.) I was also buying a humidifier that was advertised on the showroom floor at $19, but when it was rung up, it defaulted to $25. I had to look over the salesman's shoulder at the register to notice this and have him correct it.

My point is that the TV purchasing process was riddled with opportunities for me to be lazy and get charged more as a result. My need for perpetual vigilance is no less than it would have been had I been required to haggle for it, only the illusion of stable prices was there to discourage me from worrying about anything. Should I yearn for a return to a haggling economy? Should I feel like I beat the system, or is that just more ideology reconciling me to the system? Should I point to the metaphoric scoreboard and celebrate the "bargain" I received at others' expense? Should I shop exclusively at flea markets and bazaars? Can any sort of regulatory intervention stop deceptive practices, or will retailers always find a new loophole or semi-deceitful practice to differentiate customers and dupe them according to their ignorance? Was it me? Was it you? Questions in a world of blue.

Corporations seem designed to maximize profit by exploiting every possible opportunity in a depersonalized economy. Any accommodation a big company happens to give a customer is the probably result of a probability calculation modeled on an analyst's spreadsheet. The message that corporations "care" about us is cooly manufactured in marketing departments as a sales tool and is blended with efforts to expedite price discrimination, to separate us into a million individuals cutting our own deals with that much less collective bargaining power.

If all competitors in an industry de facto collude to make customers miserable, so much the better -- just look at major U.S. airlines and cell-phone-service providers, or at the banks and credit-card companies. And look at health care, in which pricing transparency does little to contain costs. ("The evidence suggests the benefit of transparent pricing is limited, particularly when insurance companies are involved." Hmm -- I guess that's probably coincidental.)

Mike Konczal's recent post about businesses preying on the "cognitively weak" looks at some of the antisocial incentives of financial firms. Imagining himself an evil bank executive, he surmises he might be thinking along these lines, targeting old people whose brain function is fading:

Hitting up people with a lifetime of savings suffering from dementia is some real, serious money we can tap as a revenue source. Indeed, someone who forgets what they were doing between reading “Bullshit Surcharge: $40″ on their statement and calling the customer support number to complain is our ideal customer -- it’s the person who will be most profitable to us going forward.

To hard-liners free-marketeers, who tend to argue that companies are ethically bound to take advantage of their customers' foibles when they can get away with it, this is just price discrimination working its magic. The weak are punished, and the wise are thereby subsidized. It's financial innovation at its best. As Konczal explains, those who

are excited about how the current financial service industry excels because it punishes the ignorant and irresponsible: on what specific grounds could you not have to embrace, much less oppose, the Evil Rortybomb Plan above? I got a sense of proportionality in those arguments, that the most ignorant should have to pay the most. I don’t think anyone would argue against the idea that those suffering from dementia will be the most ignorant of their actual situations and most irresponsible in the sense that they aren’t capable of being responsible. The extra fees and traps they pay will in part also go to those enjoying extra bonuses and continued free financial services. It’s a win-win from this point of view, no? One must be consistent.

It doesn't take much for price discrimination to become plain old discrimination. Businesses want prices to differentiate the smart from the foolish to maximize the exploitative potential in society, whereas the rest of us want prices to indicate the social value of things so we can make more of what we need and stop making stuff we don't want. The result is a war over the meaning of prices, played out in the medium of information. Companies use disinformation and marketing to conceal beneficial or money-saving information from consumers, resulting in prices that can't be relied upon to mean much of anything.

The Authenticity Fetish (8 Dec 2009)

A study by MIT professor Renee Richardson Gosline (via BoingBoing and others) shows that people who buy "fake" handbags -- those branded without authorization -- sometimes go on to later buy "authentic" ones.

Gosline interviewed hundreds of consumers who knowingly bought fake luxury apparel, many at “purse parties” where such goods are sold. Gosline found that within two years, 46 percent of these buyers subsequently purchased the authentic version of the same product — even though other people could not necessarily tell the difference. Such behavior is another twist on Veblen’s thesis: For some status-seeking people, at least, the social power of luxury goods means that consumption must not just be conspicuous, but real.

That seems somewhat incredible (Felix Salmon calls it "astonishing"), but it fits well with NYT Magazine Consumed columnist Rob Walker's contention that we are own primary audience for our consumption displays. We can't fool ourselves with a fake.

But then, when we do buy fakes? Are we hoping that our own assessment of ourselves can matter less than that of those around us? Is it an attempt to silence the internal critic? Is a ploy to be postauthentic? Obviously it's similar to the dynamic behind pirating MP3s instead of buying them -- what does it matter if the source of the file is authentic if it is a copy that is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable for an authenticated one? In a world where it is so easy to copy things, authenticity becomes a kind of fetish, a value for its own sake that doesn't speak to any actual physical quality in the objects themselves. The power of the fetish derives from our simultaneous awareness that we should be skeptical of everything, that everything can be faked, including personal identity, which is more provisional than ever, being reinscribed on a moment by moment basis online in some instances. The more I keep telling myself who I am, how I want to see myself, the more I need to manifest that materially through gestures. If I want to believe I am authentic, I need to gesture authenticity. Voila: We seek objects with the aura of authenticity (expensive, distinctive, rare things mainly) so that we can try to feel more authentic ourselves.

Baudrillard literally wrote the book on this sort of thing back in the early 1970s -- For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, which compiles several of his essays about how use value is mistaken for an authentic transcendental truth. He argues that we tend to refer to our needs, and to an object's "real" usefulness as the basis for what should be true, particularly in critiquing consumerism. If we could only stop consuming objects as symbols of other things and just use them in a natural, unmediated way, we would escape the ways in which consumerism constricts and constructs us. (I fall prey to that line of thinking a lot -- I just want to wear a shirt, not signify I am the sort of person who wants to wear this sort of shirt.) But there is no such escape, as concepts like use and need are socially constructed along with identity as part of the same totalizing cultural system. "Just as exchange value is not a substantial aspect of the product, but a form that expresses a social relation, so use value can no longer be viewed as an innate function of the object but as a social determination." One can't pursue authenticity through that route -- by using only generic objects that we "need" -- anymore than one can by acquiring authentic luxury items. What is "real" about a given object's provenance is open to constant reevaluation; the emphasis can be shifted to suit the needs of those questioning reality at various junctures.

Luxury items are expensive not because they are intrinsically valuable (what is gold "really" worth, anyway? Seems pretty useless as a metal) but because of the social capital embodied in them. In fact, as other research of Gosline's suggests, people authenticate goods in terms of who is using them:

Consumers, Gosline observes, struggle to distinguish the intrinsic qualities of real luxury goods from fakes; instead, they rely heavily on social cues to make those judgments. Indeed, when some consumers are shown pictures of people wearing luxury apparel, they are twice as confident in their ability to judge those products, and willing to pay twice as much for the apparel, as when those consumers are shown pictures of the goods alone.

Social capital is a gestalt, then, an assemblage of goods, gestures, behaviors, etc., that convey a rank in the class hierarchy. If the goal is to climb in that hierarchy, goods -- fake or real -- are not enough. (Incidentally, Gosline's work also offers support for the immaterial labor idea I have been going on and on about lately: "Gosline has quantified Veblen’s famous observation: Consumers are willing to pay twice as much for luxury apparel when they can use those products to send or receive social signals." There is a relation between what goods can mean -- product of our using them -- and what they can be sold for.)

But why not use fake luxury goods for other reasons? They function as a kind of social sabotage, a direct attack on distinction that forces those invested in positional goods to become uncomfortable and shift their ground. In the world of simulacrums of simulacrums, authenticity is a constructed pose, a disguised power play. When the owner of a fake buys the real thing, it is a small triumph for luxury goods makers and the powers that be generally -- their definition of authentic is still holding enough sway to shape behavior. I guess I prefer the possibility that authenticity is worthless.

Black Friday (24 Nov 2009)

Economist Arnold Kling has an explanation for Black Friday -- not the Steely Dan song, but the crazy retail sales. He argues that the experience of shopping on Black Friday has been purposely made miserable, so that people who are willing to pay more for gifts will wait and pay more later. In other words, another example of price discrimination working its stratifying magic.

Temporary sales are often a tool for price discrimination. If you need something now, you have to buy it whether or not it is "on sale." But if the purchase is discretionary, you may only buy it "on sale." The store keeps its prices high ordinarily, in order to pick up profits from the price-insensitive shoppers. The store puts items "on sale" on rare occasions, hoping to pick up profits from price-sensitive shoppers. Unfortunately, they lose profits from price-insensitive shoppers who happen to come in the day of the sale.
The beauty of holding sales on "Black Friday" is that stores know that many price-insensitive shoppers will stay away in order to "avoid the crowds." So you can get revenue from price-sensitive shoppers without sacrificing profits from price-insensitive shoppers.

Once you start thinking about the retail world in this way, it is hard not to recognize this logic occurring always and everywhere -- an insight that for me is followed by frustration and melancholia. We commonly tend to think of social stratification as something that is reinforced by lineage and upbringing and by raw bank-account figures, but it plays out more significantly in everyday exchanges with the institutions of consumerism, rearticulating itself in that moment that you pay $4 for a coffee or when you wait 45 minutes in a fast-food drive-thru. Price discrimination is how the hierarchies of capitalist society perpetuate themselves even as they seem to dissolve in the pseudo equities of purchasing power.

Wishing For Frugality: Is It Just an Enabling Fiction? (7 Oct 2009)

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes about his skepticism of the much-ballyhooed new frugality. (He expands the column on his blog here.) After some zigging and zagging, he concludes:

But the evidence for a radical shift in the way we consume seems more like the product of wishful thinking (there’s a palpable longing among pundits for Americans to become more frugal) than anything else. In many categories, spending has dropped only slightly, if at all. And, while these are very tough times for retailers who believed that spending could only go up, retail sales rose briskly in August. Before we go proclaiming this the age of the American tightwad, a little perspective is in order. Even after the worst recession of the past seventy years, retail sales this year will be about where they were in 2005. Does anyone really think that four years ago Americans were misers?

His point about wishful thinking extends beyond pundits; it seems as though we all would like to see some more frugality from everyone else -- this would ease the pressure on us to spend more to keep up, and make what we purchase more distinctive. I suspect that many Americans carry around an idea of how much the U.S. should be saving, and that we would like to see as much as that as possible done by other people. Frugality is one of those traits we piously praise in others because we secretly believe that takes us off the hook for exhibiting it ourselves.

An Economist blogger makes a related point in this Free Exchange post. The credit bubble led consumers to bid up the price of desirable goods; the absence of credit will deflate those goods: "The end of the bubble years has meant an implosion in the market for many positional consumer goods." But the desire and appeal of these goods has not been lessened by our alleged moral soul-searching about the meaning of thrift.

At the same time, conspicuous consumption hasn't been driving the increase in consumption in recent years -- the housing bubble and great risk shift has. Surowiecki cites Elizabeth Warren, who made the case a few years ago that, in Surowiecki's summary, "a hefty chunk of the increase in consumption in recent decades has been the result of higher housing prices, the rising cost of medical care, more spending on education, and childcare." So it seems less likely that the sudden increase in the savings rate can be pinned to the disappearance of Veblenesque consumption. Surowiecki cites this CAP article by Amanda Logan and Christian E. Weller that attributes almost all of the savings rate jump to consumers cutting back spending on autos and gasoline. "Consumers have not altered the share of their total disposable income that they are spending on most goods and services very drastically," they conclude.

The point is that the level of general consumer frivolity cannot be extracted by simply looking at relative spending levels or broad savings rate data -- a lesson I have reluctantly absorbed in the past few years, having often attempted to make that case. I keep reminding myself that consumerism and consumption are not the same thing. The former is more a matter of marketing saturation, and of how people in a society orient their thinking, conceive of goals and their own identity. The consumer society can entrench itself deeper even in periods when consumer spending is dropping and savings is increasing. The mainstream media is responding to an apparent social need in pushing the "new frugality" narrative, perhaps to make us feel better about being unable to spend like we want to or perhaps to make us feel like there has been a moral consolation prize in the rising unemployment -- we've learned to be tough and economical and to surrender unnecessary vanities.

Frugality is a pleasing idea in the abstract, but what it means in practice is pretty flexible. In Rob Walker's most recent column, he notes how "habits of thrift and frugality have taken on the cast of virtue" recently before exploring the ways retailers are trying to take advantage of this through conspicuous discounting. But what attracts people is less the virtue of saving but rather the idea that they have gotten one over on the chumps who pay full price. That feeling is amplified by online retailers' creating members-only clubs for discounts. From Walker's column:

The members-only notion is an old one, notes Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of the recent book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, and pairs up well with the always-appealing bargain idea. “Once you become a member of a club,” she observes, “it makes you feel special, and it lowers your guard a little bit.” Discounting sparks similar feelings, she continues. “You often think you’re the only one in the world that could have found this. Which is why you brag about it to your friends.” There’s a trade-off on these sites, of course: the air of clock-ticking excitement isn’t exactly conducive to considered decisions. “You have to be a very savvy consumer to do your shopping this way,” Shell cautions.

But in the midst of thinking everyone else is a sucker for missing out on the bargains we've found, we become the actual suckers:

To reverse Shell’s formulation, it’s easy to conclude that if you’re shopping this way, you must be pretty savvy — and maybe that virtuously thrifty feeling gives you license. “You may think, Oh, I’m going to get a great pair of shoes today,” suggests Stacey Santo, a vice president of RueLaLa, “and then surprise yourself by walking away with a spa treatment.”

A climate of frugality may be nothing more than an enabling fiction, the necessary pretense of this particular moment to allow us to fulfill retailers' wishes and mistake them for our own.

Functionality as design trope (24 Sept 2009)

At Design Observer, Dmitri Siegel looks at the design of products in ordinary supermarkets -- design not selling itself as "design-y". "To end up here, Design ideas need to trickle down well past the middle-brow and survive extreme pressures of low margins and fast turn," he somewhat snobbishly remarks (and I think the capped D in design is a telling typo).

He points out the ludicrous ergonomic features of grooming products and the ubiquitous easy-pour spouts and remarks that these pseudo-functional additions to packaging are mere ornament. The convenience these things are supposed to supply (but most likely don't) is also, I would add, ornamental. Siegel's conclusion is that the design trades in functionality as a sign rather than anything that is actually useful. Rather than an after-the-fact evaluation of a product's actual ease of use, functionality becomes a design trope. Convenience as a value works the same way, I think -- an appealing idea in the abstract even when it never manifests itself in practice. Our craving for convenience is so inculcated in us that it suffices for a package to evoke the possibility of it for the package to have an added appeal. We can buy "convenience" without experiencing it.

Siegel cites architect Alfred Loos's "Ornament and Crime" (pdf), a manifesto from 1908 that's as insane as you could want any manifesto to be, impossible to tell how serious he is from our irony-saturated point in history. ("One can measure the culture of a country by the degree to which its lavatory walls are daubed," Loos declares in a typical aphorism.) Loos's main argument is that ornament is atavistic, though Siegel emphasizes Loos's claim that approving of ornament "was a tacit endorsement of society’s disregard for the quality of its workers’ lives." Siegel thinks the reverse is now true: "The ornament of today is the complete opposite of that described by Loos — to him ornament symbolized excessive labor, today ours symbolizes pervasive leisure."

He defends that claim with a reference to Veblen's notion of conspicuous consumption. Siegel suggests that the fake functionality of supermarket design allows for a conspicuous consumption of unnecessary utility.

Veblen describes how a rich man’s cane is a symbol of his membership in the leisure class precisely because he will never need to use it. The grip strips on a toothbrush and easy-pour spouts are exactly the same. They symbolize effort we will never have to exert.

We want to consume utility we don't need and then laud ourselves for the effort we have been saved from making, that is presumed to thereby be held in reserve and accrues to us. This then becomes a mark of distinction; the product's design allows us to claim for ourselves the effort it saves us from making. The contradiction takes on a signaling significance, in Siegel's view:

The fully equipped chef’s kitchen is a potent symbol of affluence precisely because anyone who can afford it clearly does not need to cook. The $400 Patagonia rain shell and the sport utility vehicle symbolize physical challenges and confrontations with the elements that their suburban owners can easily avoid, and so on.

Today's ornament mimics utility so that we can make a show of unnecessarily amassing it. When we have the finest kitchen equipment money can buy, every night we eat out becomes eve more redolent of our wastefulness, and therefore our wealth (if you accept Veblen's logic that gratuitous waste equals a proof of status). The overdesigned products in the store allow the middle class to experience a version of this joyous profligacy.

I think there is something to that, but I found Loos's take on this idea more compelling: "Humanity is still to groan under the slavery of ornament," he declares, though as a species we have "progressed far enough to find pleasure in purchasing a plain cigarette case, even if it cost the same as one that was ornamented." This still seems relevant. Products for the wealthy are those that can eschew ornament, transcend it, because the stratospheric prices obviate the need the products to compete on the more mundane level of superficial ornament. The lack of ornament connotes engineering expense, the effort of clean design, the quality of the manufacturing, the pride in the workmanship as it is expressed through the functionality. They are made for those people who don't need to indulge in shopping for leisure, people who don't need to amaze themselves with the unfathomable bounty in supermarkets and 99-cent stores, people who can afford more expensive pursuits and don't want disposable goods to allow to shop more. Shopping provides the lower class the ersatz, compensatory thrills of purchasing power over an array of crappy manufactured goods -- highly ornamented to make them more disposable and to justify the investment of more of our energy in the foibles of retail. But the rich don't have to resort to such cheap thrills.

Death of crocs (16 July 2009)

Here's a shock. The Washington Post reports that ugly-shoe-maker Crocs is about to go out of business. Wow. That seemed like a business built on a sturdy foundation, one that was built to last. Much like Krispy Kreme, it wasn't tied to a trend at all, and stock touts were surely right to recommend buying in back in 2007. Sometimes the economy is so unpredictable. Who would have thought that demand for Crocs wouldn't continue to grow forever, like the value of our houses?

The company had expanded to meet demand, but financially pressed customers cut back. Last year the company lost $185.1 million, slashed roughly 2,000 jobs and scrambled to find money to pay down millions in debt. Now it's stuck with a surplus of shoes, and its auditors have wondered if it can stay afloat. It has until the end of September to pay off its debt.
"The company's toast," said Damon Vickers, who manages an investment fund at Nine Points Capital Partners in Seattle. "They're zombie-ish. They're dead and they don't know it."

I think that it is safe to assume that Crocs might have found itself in some trouble regardless of the recession. It always amazes me that companies like this get hyped in the financial press; it seems a bit irresponsible and cynical. The unspoken subtext seems to be this: Everyone knows that eventually the trends that such companies are built on will pass, but everyone also believes that the other investors are more naive than they are and have bought into the trend unthinkingly. Everyone then wants to exploit the other's presumed ignorance, assuming some other fool will be left holding the shares when the day of reckoning comes. And the press is there to cheer this game along, pointing to how much growth the company has seen during its peak trendiness, encouraging the extrapolation of such unsustainable figures into the future. I wonder if all the analysts who recommended Crocs a few years ago (or the ones, probably the same ones, who recommended Krispy Kreme in the late 1990s) feel any embarrassment at all.

Fear of specialty stores (9 July 2009)

This could be a purely personal idiosyncrasy, but I'm wondering if it might indicate something larger about why big-box stores are so successful in America. I'm extrapolating from my weird aversion to going to the local bike shop. I just started to ride my old bike that I had in Arizona, and I've quickly realized that I need a few things for riding in New York City -- mainly a helmet and new handle grips. Even though there is a local bike shop five blocks from my apartment, I find myself procrastinating about going over there. Maybe I spent too much time in record stores as a teenager, but I have this unshakable paranoia that the people in the bike shop will laugh at me. They will see that I am not a "real" biker; riding a bike around is not my lifestyle, it's not my brand. I'm not going to ride my bike to work, let alone be one of those guys darting through traffic in midtown, menacing pedestrians and drivers alike. I'm not going to join Critical Mass and try to blockade the transit grid. I don't wear special gear to bike around in and I am not even sure I know what model of bike I have. (It has gears.) I'm strictly "entry level," to use Hipster Runoff terminology -- I'm a novice, an amateur, too clueless to even know what is at stake with the subcultural signifiers. If I had more strength of character, perhaps, I would brazen it out in the bike shop and get what I need, despite my vague sense that it will be slightly more expensive than it need be since I'd be paying the specialty store/small business tariff. I wouldn't care what people might think of me.

But instead I am attracted to the possibility of shopping anonymously. I think of going out to Target to get my bike helmet. There I can be assured that no one in the store particularly cares about what I am buying. I might even be required to check myself out at a self-service register, permitting me to have no encounter with another person at all. How convenient!

Anyway, my suspicion is that convenience, anonymity, freedom from other people's assumptions about our lifestyle, the automatic assumption that we are pursuing a lifestyle inauthentically, the desire to face as little human contact as possible while we are in consumer mode -- all these things are intertwined ideologically, and make up the field of consumer capitalism as its experienced by ordinary people -- or at least people like me. Big-box stores seem engineered to supply a specific retail experience that protects our anonymity and minimizes our need for human contact, preserving our bubble of narcissistic fantasy as we roam around handling the merchandise. When this bubble gives way -- when we seek the nuisance and insecurity of human contact -- we mediate the relation through the signaling function of our goods and disappear into the life that they imply.

Corporate 99-cent stores (17 June 2009)

As much as I like to cheerlead for hard discounters like Aldi, my love does not extend to the chain dollar stores, the predatory lenders of retail. These include Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General, which Daniel Gross recently profiled for Slate. Dollar General, as Gross explains, is doing well in the recession, but not necessarily because it offers cheap deals. Instead, they have found a better way to exploit the prejudices of their often captive small-town Southern populations.

Rather than simply pile up cheap bottles of detergents and ultracheap clothes—truth be told, only about 30 percent of the items it stocks retail for less than a buck—Dollar General began to think about how the firm could be more relevant to its customers. For example, even though most of Dollar General's stores are in the South, which is hard-core Coca-Cola country, the stores had carried only Pepsi.

On my recent cross-country road trip, I found that these sorts of stores sold the same crappy quality of goods that Wal-Mart specializes in, only they charged more for them and had a less-overwhelming selection. Also, they were like traditional mom-and-pop dollar stores in that they were laid out somewhat chaotically, with no rhyme or reason to where you might find items you were looking for. Ice chests might be next to the off-brand shampoos. Of course, in theory I think that chaos is a good thing -- it runs counter to the idea that shopping should be "fun" and hassle-free and contributes to putting shopping in what seems like its more proper place in our lives. It should not be an experience, entertainment in and of itself, but a chore. When shopping is convenient, this would seem to help dispense with that chore and expedite us to our other activities, but often convenience is geared toward getting us to spend more and enjoy ourselves in the store, exist in the fantasy prompted by owning goods rather than the activities that actually use them.

I'm entirely in favor of deglamorizing shopping, but the corporate chain dollar stores, while certainly unglamorous, don't seem like the answer. Stores like Dollar General combine inefficiency with bad deals, banking on its reputation as a bargain outlet to disguise the fact that its prices aren't actually all that low and taking advantage of the fact that they often stand as the only retailers in the interstices of rural America, the vast underpopulated swaths that are too scrawny for Wal-Mart to pick at.