Irrationality and shopping "addiction" (19 Dec 2008)

As the scare quotes in the title of the post indicates, I'm skeptical of the notion and prevalence of "compulsive shopping," an affliction detailed in this WSJ story in light of such sufferers' unusual vulnerability within our current economic climate. The notion of a shopping addiction seems another manifestation of how we tend to pathologize and medicalize phenomena that may have a cultural explanation -- that way we make these conditions seem natural if unfortunate rather than products of a culture we can and should change. But I guess that makes me a heartless scourage to the 8.9 percent of Americans who are allegedly afflicted. The WSJ article is full of poignant (if not risible) anecdotes about compulsive shoppers who feel compelled to collect shoes amd can't resist the promise of a sale:

Saks Fifth Avenue this season offered 12 months of no interest and no payments for people who spend $2,000 or more in a single day, a deal that Mr. Shulman says is like a "crack dealer saying, 'Come here, try a sample.' "

Such stories are good for rationalizing our own compulsive shopping behavior -- whatever foolish and unnecessary purchases I've made lately pale in comparison to these, and as pleasant as it can be to score a bargain, I don't find myself jonesing for that pleasure. So I have nothing to worry about! And at the same time we experience the vicarious thrill of letting no obstacle stand in our way of our getting whatever stuff we want.

Anyway, this interview with psychologist Peter Ubel from Scientific American's Mind Matters blog offer a more sober and less sensationalistic look at the relationship between mind and retail, tracing the various ways the classical economists' presumption of rationality fails to reflect the ways people actually behave. Rather than pathologize shopping addiction, Ubel frames compulsion in terms of precommitment -- deciding a measur eof resistance in advance and adhering to it, à la Ulysses vis-à-vis the sirens:

One reason we humans don’t always behave rationally is because we have limited will power. We know that exercise is good for us. We understand that junk food is bad. But we cannot follow through on our rational desires. We plan to run for 30 minutes, but after 10 we get off the treadmill, and convince ourselves we are a bit stiff today. We try to cut down on empty calories, and then grab a handful of M & M’s from a candy bowl, almost unaware of our action. No single M & M caused anyone to have diabetes. No one experienced a heart attack because they were 20 minutes short of their exercise goal. And yet our lives, our waistlines even, are the result of thousands of such decisions and behaviors.
To improve ourselves, we have to act like each M & M matters. Like each decision has important consequences. To do this, it helps to make rules and follow them. Commit yourselves to no candy, no desserts, and you’ll become more mindful of M & M bowls. Run outside, rather than inside on a treadmill, and you’ll be forced to finish your running loop. Tell a friend you’ll walk with them for 30 minutes this afternoon, and you’ll be forced to show up.
Want to save more money? Have some money automatically deposited into a savings account that you cannot access easily through ATMs, debit cards or checkbooks. Sometimes the best way to behave better when you are weak is to impose martial law upon yourself when you feel strong.

This passage gets at an irony, a contradiction, in consumerism. Consumerism proliferates on the basis of the ideology of choice; we believe that thanks to consumerism, we get to make meaningful choices in the marketplace all the time and these extend and enrich our identity. But in fact, these choices tend to become reflexive, unconsidered -- we fail to recognize their important consequences, or at least misconstrue them. The more retail decisions we make, the less important any one of them seems to our lives generally. We feel the meaning slipping away from us, our identities diminishing. One response is to force ourselves to make more choices in search of that diminishing meaning at the very moment we need to be taking decisions out of our own hands, or better, locating meaning in some other aspect of our lives. So consumerism basically prompts us to value choice more while making our choices in practice less meaningful and significant. So suddenly we are left wondering why our choice of blueberry over boysenberry jam hasn't had a lasting impact on our existential weltanschauung.

Forever catalogs (24 Dec 2007)

In time for the holidays, BusinessWeek wrote about a service called Catalog Choice that will try to get your name off catalog mailing lists. It turns out that is not as straightforward a task as it seems.

when an activist Web site called Catalog Choice contacted the likes of L.L. Bean, Williams-Sonoma (WSM), and Harry & David and asked them to take thousands of people off their mailing lists, the retailers knew they had a public-relations problem.
How did they respond? Some—mostly outdoorsy brands like L.L. Bean and Lands' End (SHLD)—made soothing noises. Others blew off the Web site (and subsequently, the people declining their catalogs), and have done nothing with the names.

You think you wouldn't need an "activist" service for this, that expressing a wish not to be pestered by mail wasn't a form of activism. It would seem as though you could simply request that the company stop wasting time, postage, and paper by refraining from sending you a catalog you don't wish to receive. But catalog merchants, as persistent as debt collectors in pursuing their aims, apparently know better than their prospective customers what those customers really want.

L.L. Bean says it has removed some of the names on Catalog Choice's list, but is still evaluating it for accuracy. The company wouldn't say how many names it had removed or how long the evaluation would take. Williams-Sonoma, which also distributes the Pottery Barn (WSM) catalog, says it "is still figuring out the right thing to do for our customers" and has only analyzed samples of Catalog Choice's list.

The right thing to do? What is there to "figure out" about a person saying, "Please stop sending me catalogs"? But retailers know that people say one thing -- "I want to save," "I care about the environment" -- and do another when they, in the privacy of their own homes, are confronted with pretty pictures and insinuating fantasies. Knowing this, nothing short of a restraining order would stop the retailers from sending the catalogs. Like all direct mail operators, they don't care what the recipients say. They only abide by the mathematics of the proposition. If the profit from sales closed through the mailings outweighs the costs of sending out the catalogs, they will continue to do it. And with the microtargeting available, the math can be more precise, they can likely track the sales returns on catalogs send to a specific zip code, maybe an address. Hence, if people don't want catalogs, they probably need to stop shopping.

Rolling off a cliff (22 August 2007)

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported on the precipitous drop in the value of shares of Heelys, manufacturer of those rolling shoes that were popular a season ago with kids looking to break their necks. (I guess the WSJ is still good for something. My flight to quality and the FT won't be complete until my WSJ subscription runs out.) My first reaction to this was delight; the shoes were a stupid trend, and there's schadenfreude in seeing its inevitable demise. You have to wonder what sort of investor saw a sustainable growth potential in a business that sells novelty shoes to ten-year-olds? Optimistic neophytes, or opportunistic daredevils? Anyway, I started to wonder why I had anything invested myself in the fate of this company, even if it was only emotional investment. Why was I so pleased?

Initially, the failure of such companies as Heelys seems to prove that it's a bad move to base businesses on frivolous fashion, which by extension seems to suggest that fashion itself is a dubious force, something better eradicated, like volatility in the markets. When the Heelys of the world fail, it should theoretically remind everyone not to get too wrapped up in fads, and to look elsewhere for engines of growth -- to technology that breeds efficiency, for example. This is in keeping with my general skepticism regarding retail stocks, which are always dependent on fickle and unpredictable customers spending irrationally in a way I wouldn't otherwise condone.

But if I'm hoping that the failure of fashion-forward companies somehow portends the end of the industry, I really need to consider more carefully this passage from the WSJ article:

Industry analysts said [Heelys'] sales drop stems from a more prosaic cause: An increasing number of youngsters said they would rather wear something else. Amy Braunstein, 14 years old, who was shopping at Dallas's NorthPark Center mall last week, said Heelys were popular among her classmates two years ago. Now, the eighth grader said most children wear Nike Inc.'s Converse shoes, leaving their Heelys at home. "They're old," she said.

If anything, Heelys' failure demonstrates the remorselessness of fashion, and how deeply it has been entrenched even in the mind of preteens. It's influence is far from showing any signs of mitigating; instead its stranglehold on culture grows stronger. Were Heelys able to establish itself and maintain its stature perpetually without having to come up with "new shoe designs, including nonwheeled sneakers and a wheeled boot" -- pointless innovations (nonwheeled shoes sort of defeats the whole company's raison d'etre) -- then foes of fashion would have reason to be pleased. Instead, I'm thoughtlessly celebrating the opposite. This probably means that I actually take more pleasure in trends than I ordinarily admit to myself -- I just happen to enjoy the side of the cycle when trends fade and companies fail rather than when they rise, like a craps player playing the don't-pass line. Foolishly, I think this makes me a contrarian, and I pretend that I'm not really interested in the craps game at all, while I am making private little bets all the while.

Conquesting (11 June 2007)

Before reading this WSJ article, I had never heard of conquesting, and would have assumed it had something people did in World of Warcraft, not a proxy war waged by companies through the means of ad placement.

In an increasingly popular form of online advertising, marketers are taking out ads right next to editorial content about their rivals. The aim is to convert consumers from one brand to another -- and also to issue a public challenge.

While it may seem as though the existence of competing and contested claims would make the marketplace that much more opaque and confusing, it strikes me as a clear victory for consumers. If companies are directing their ads at one another, that means they are failing to target their natural enemies, shoppers, who are instead being alerted to the disingenuous of the medium of advertisements themselves. Rather than getting people to change allegiances, seeing companies refute each other's claims and poses likely leads people to consider all ads with more skepticism. It could theoretically work like negative campaigning, which is routinely alleged to turn off voters from the political process altogether. Perhaps conquesting has the same effect on shoppers.

The porn supply (15 Feb 2007)

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen wonders why it's profitable to sell new porn when there's such a huge amount already in circulation. " I don't understand why buyers demand such a regular flow of material. Why don't they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um...busy...for many years?" He suggests that it might be "that buying the material yields more pleasure than 'using' it."

I had a similar thought in this essay, where I argue that pornography makes sex more like shopping and thus aligns the pleasures it gives closer to those we are acclimated to by consumer society, namely convenience and ownership as ends rather than means. Consumer society seems to encourage us to collect experiences rather than simply experience them; continually collecting porn rather than having sex or even masturbating seems symptomatic of this. The moment of pleasure is moved from the point of experience to the point of purchase; the pleasure is change from a sensual one to a conceptual one based on convenience and security (a stockpile of potential experiences in your porn heap defends you from the fear of exhausting desire.)

At the Economist's blog, Megan McArdle (presumably) suspects the answer to Cowen's porn paradox "must be some evolutionary imperative towards novelty," and asks, "Why do listeners demand such a steady flow of new music, almost all of it inferior to, say, Beethoven's 9th?" What's interesting is the implicit connection between music and porn: both are digital-media products widely and controversially distributed on the Internet. Both track, in their way, trends in fashion. Both tend to be male preoccupations -- especially in terms of building collections. Is recorded music analogous to the commodified desire of pornography -- is recorded music to performance what looking at porn is to sex? Could the impulse to continue to acquire both stem from the same impulse, the same wish to pin down and master the excitement (in the specific sensuality and in the zeitgeist changes they record) each are able to arouse, control it and domesticate it by turning it from an experience into a possession in a ritual that must be continually reenacted? It may be that we enjoy this ritual (albeit in a kind of defensive, self-protective way) almost as much as we'd enjoy direct experience of music or sexual desire.

Yes, porn makes available for direct consumption and enjoyment all sorts of patriarchal prerogatives, but I want to put that analysis on hold for a moment to make a different point about the impulse to collect. As the experience of accumulating music and porn becomes easier (as it becomes, in more and more cases, free), the moment of reassurance and mastery seems to come not at the moment of purchase but the moment of classification, when that digital file is given its appropriate place, is understood and processed and stored in some theoretically and permanently accessible way. Digital reproduction and distribution are making classification more important than ownership -- tagging is all-important, very Web 2.0. We master an unlimited supply by asserting control over it, capturing it, with the unique taxonomies we generate. Novelty becomes an opportunity for taxonomy.

I think this explains the vast amount of music on my years-old iPod that I've never listened to once. In some significant way, the moment I drop a song on the playlist has supplanted the moment of listening to it -- at that moment I am able to experience the satisfaction of the song without having to spend all that time actually listening to it. I manipulate it in a more direct and convenient way that provides me a feeling of mastery, which is what I may be looking for rather than sensual experience. The same thing seems to lurk behind porn blogs, where people curate their porn collections for public view. Something about the impulse to organize one's fetishes has itself become fetishized. And fetishes, in general, are about containing anxiety rather than permitting open experience.

The fear that beauty (in music, in another body) inspires is that it will be lost to us; it summons an intolerable awareness of its own loss. Our culture (and not, I would argue evolution -- the need for novelty seems contingent on what society can promise and provide) prompts us to defend ourselves against this anxiety by accumulating more and more of the stuff, and we think with technology we can realize the dream of perpetual availability. (This plays into the interpretation of porn as primarily being a fantasy of perpetual female availability, i.e. of women's objecthood, of her significance being regarded as received rather than self-generated.)

Consumption inequality (13 December 2006)

The debate about increasing income inequality continues and the rationalizations for it are always being refined. (See Paul Krugman's recent Rolling Stone article for a cogent explanation of the situation.) The social Darwinist notion (sometimes masquerading as a paean to meritocracy) underlying most defenses is that unequal distributions of the gains from an economy's growth and productivity mirror the just deserts of the fittest; outcomes are unequal because some people are smarter and some people work harder than others. Extending that, some people come from a lineage that is rich in social and human capital, providing them with networks of well-connected people to exploit and habits that connote success and attract rewards; these people have inherited "fitness" and are rewarded accordingly. The alternative would be to punish them unjustly for their inherent advantages, to dim their bright light when we should really let it shine.

This explanation is hard for most people to swallow, particularly when they suspect that not only are outcomes unequal, but so are opportunities. The problem is outcomes and opportunities are often blended, such that one of the perks of being on the better side of unequal outcome is greater opportunity. In other words, we could measure outcomes in terms of opportunities, rather than presume we all begin from some par level and achieve to different levels. Social advantages, and the attendant opportunities, accrue to those already privileged, and these become entitlements, protected by wider access to state power. And those lacking such fortuitous placement in the social hierarchy are consigned to a permanent underclass, all while being told they earned their place there. This is a recipe for political unrest, as the growing fears among the privileged classes of a rising tide of economic populism, heralded by 2006 election results, can attest.

So other excuses for income inequality are put forward. One is that it is an inevitable result due to the scale of the American economy, which allows small differences in talent to be leveraged to yield massive differences in resulting incomes. This yields a handful of superstars, reaping what appears to be a disproportionate income, and a mass of average earners falling behind them. So should we tax that disproportionate earning and redistribute it through lower tax rates for the lower classes or through the purchase of much-needed public goods (environmental protections, parks, services, transportation infrastructure, etc.)? Some say yes, but some argue this will discourage those uniquely positioned to have such superstar effects on the economy from making the maximum use of their talent. Then we all suffer: CEOs would less ruthlessly squeeze efficiency from their companies; Allen Iverson might take fewer shots; Tom Cruise might deliver his lines with slightly less gusto. The productivity gains yielded by superstars at the top of their game working their magic at the largest scale would ideally trickle down, raise all of our boats. The rewards given to the true innovators, the argument goes, provoke them to do and make things that ultimately benefit us all and increase our own purchasing power -- we get cheap TVs and computer chips, so it doesn't matter that we aren't making our fair share relative to the national increase in productivity (all economic gains, theoretically, derive from increased productivity -- we make more goods and services from the same total inputs, thus there is more to go around; in recent years, that surplus has been going disproportionately to the economic superstars). We're getting our share in barter, essentially. Gains are embedded in the cheap stuff we can buy more of. The message: "Be happy with your consumer goods, since really, what more do you want? What is fairness, anyway, but an utopian ideal that's caused nothing but trouble in this fallen world? Be glad that you can come home from your job, open a cheap beverage and turn on a technological marvel in your living room and experience top-notch entertainment to whisk you away from it all." We shouldn't worry that other people have more stuff, more leisure time, more opportunity. Such comparisons will make us needlessly unhappy. (Fortunately, we are so atomized by the workings of consumer capitalism that we have far fewer interactions with people outside our households. Unfrtunately, we compensate by watching TV, where we learn to make comparisons with even more unrealistic analogues for ourselves.)

An editorial in yesterday's NY Times broached this myth.

Conservative economists often argue that wage stagnation and income inequality are not as big a threat to Americans’ standard of living as they’ve been made out to be. In their view, how much one buys — rather than how much one makes — is a better measure of economic well-being.
In a recent article in The National Review, researchers at the American Enterprise Institute asserted just that, saying that when you look at how much the middle class is consuming, they’re “even doing better than the upper crust.”
Why make a fuss over other grim economic statistics if everyone manages to keep buying things?
Here’s why. The assertion — that the middle class has out-consumed the “upper crust” during the Bush years — is false, the result of rosy assumptions that turned out to be wrong.

What is in fact happening is this: "Overall consumption is growing. But the growth is unbalanced, consistent with the wide disparity in wages and income that has characterized the Bush years. Consumer spending by low-income households is way down since 2001. Over the same period, spending by high-income Americans has been robust, supported, in part, by generous tax cuts. In 2005, the top 20 percent of households made 39 percent of all consumer expenditures, the highest share since the government started keeping track in 1984."

This kind of statistic puts me in a bind. On the one hand, consuming less seems like a good idea; the hedonic treadmill of unsatisfying shopping and spending and consuming and rejecting goods seems like an enormous waste of energy. So it shouldn't matter that rich people are doing more of what I have generally argued is a counterproductive thing. But I think my arguments stemmed from a non-economic definition of consumption that excluded everything but retail shopping -- leisure, public goods, etc. Fold those back in, and then these statistics about consumption inequality seem to provide you a picture of what feels like is happening: The rich are getting more of the things produced by society that enhance the quality of life, and everyone else is getting better acquainted with the insecurities that rob us of it.

Starbucks as a cultural filter (22 October 2006)

The linkage of coffee and culture is not new. Coffeehouse was a byword for intellectual foment in 18th century England, and beatniks were widely regarded as skulking in coffee shops in their heyday. So It's not surprising Starbucks wants to be in the culture-distribution business, streamlining and sanitizing the coffee-culture linkage, debeatnikifying it the way it has de-Europeanized the cappuccino and espresso machine.

Today's NYT has a long article about "The Starbucks aesthetic" in the Arts and Leisure section:

the chain is increasingly positioning itself as a purveyor of premium-blend culture. “We’re very excited, because despite how much we’ve grown, these are the early stages for development,” said Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks. “At our core, we’re a coffee company, but the opportunity we have to extend the brand is beyond coffee; it’s entertainment.”

Much like Coca-Cola has proclaimed it is a media company selling brand impressions (as opposed to a beverage company selling sugar syrup, like many of us have naively believed), Starbucks is positioning itself the same way, selling its brand as a cultural filter, selecting highbrow coffee (latte hasn't replaced limousine in the epithet for self-centered liberals for nothing) and entertainments, to send the proper signal of gentility to the people who pay attention to such things. The coffee has established itself as the upper-class alternative to plebian coffee, and this presumably has a halo effect that hovers over everything sold in one of their branches.

The de facto music supervisor for the store in-house music, a former manager named Timothy Jones, says he looks for music that has “a believable sound that isn’t too harsh.” In practical terms, this means the sort of adult contemporary that you'd hear on a station like Philadelphia's (truly nauseating) WXPN: Sting, Natalie Merchant, Amos Lee -- dull and earnest, unlikely to disrupt a conversation or a nap. This is music that connotes authenticity while having all its edges smoothed by precisely the sort of compromises "authenticity" suggests one would reject. It's a lot like NPR (which connotes liberalism without espousing anything actually leftist), which is mentioned frequently in the article as the cultural touchstone Starbucks shoots for.

People who buy records and, who in the future will buy books, at Starbucks are likely to be fairly conformist in their outlook on culture, seeking to gain no distinction from discovering anything original. Yet they probably don't see themselves as part of the unwashed masses. They want to be familiar with the right things, and surround themselves with cultural product that will reaffirm their idea of themselves as an open-minded yet tasteful consumers of entertainment -- thus everything at Starbucks must connote sophistication and adventursomeness without actually being so. You can feel hip without any of the unpleasantness that actually comes from associating with hipsters: arrogance, greasiness, contempt, envy, fierce competitiveness over personality nuances, etc. Thus the predominance in their music stock of lite world-beat music and elevator folk.

Even if the consumer never flaunts his choices from the Starbucks cultural cornucopia, he may rest comfortably in his private enjoyment that he has placed himself squarely within the genteel matrix of the acceptable -- it's an efficient way to consume one's own class status as a pleasing and satisfying product. Says one satisfied customer quoted in the article: "It’s who I am -- baby boomer, upper middle class, a little hippyish, rockish. ..." Wouldn't you be proud of that pedigree? Wouldn't you want to be able to enjoy yourself, consume yourself, if that were you? Starbucks culture permits you to express your self-satisfaction through a shopping gesture -- the only gestures that matter in consumer culture -- and have a souvenir of the triumphant moment. Look, this Akeelah and the Bee soundtrack. It's who I am, and I'm wholly comfortable with it. The fastest-growing middlebrow chain endorses me and I endorse it.

What Starbucks gains from all this is a more effective way of shopping for the right sort of customers: "The more cultural products with which Starbucks affiliates itself, the more clearly a Starbucks aesthetic comes into view: the image the chain is trying to cultivate and the way it thinks it’s reflecting its consumer." These affluent customers reinforce the brand image and police it; for those who don't fit the demographic, the sonic barrage of Madeleine Peyroux serves as repellant, if the disapproving glances of the sort of people who hang out in Starbucks don't do the trick.

(See copyranter's screed on Gawker for a succinct retelling of the article.)

Self-checkout and self-importance (1 August 2006)

Ever since I first encountered a self-checkout line, at a deeply dysfunctional Pathmark on Gray's Ferry Avenue in Philadelphia, I've despised them with an intensity that even I'll admit is entirely unfounded. So I was cheered by this Consumerist item airing one of my fundamental complaints about them -- rather than getting service you pay for, you do the company's job for them, for nothing. I don't think it makes sense to discount the prices for those who check themselves out, though, to answer the Consumerist's poll. I just think the self-checkout lines are like those panic buttons mounted on stoplights at busy intersections that have no effect other than to mollify the impatient pedestrian. The self-checkout is basically a giant pacifier for people who can't stand the enfeebling passivity waiting in line forces on them -- standing in line, after all, is what the Commies made you do.

Of course, the intolerant who hate lines are probably the same people who when driving execute pointless lane changes that only exacerbate traffic congestion while heightening the danger for everyone on the road. Self checkout is basically about self-aggrandizement; it's about having a moment where you get to seize illusory control over your situation and triumph over others -- the fools too lazy to get out of the line. With the self checkouts the company stages a little farcical drama in which you get to be the hard-working hero, pulling up bootstraps and rolling up sleeves and making the system work to your own benefit through your own effort -- "Get out of my way, I'll show you how to run a register." It's a petty sham display of self-reliance, but a little of that goes a long way for most Americans. It's not like we're going to go back to nature and self-sufficiency for real: consumerism --a fragile, collective process implicating all of society collectively -- is how we get what's necessary for our lives, so we'd like to dress it up with as much of the trappings of rugged individualism as possible.

Anyway, it's not just the egocentricity involved but the logic behind these self-checkout lines that infuriates me. The company seems to be saying this: "We can't hire employees who can operate a cash register efficiently, but we are willing to let you do their work for them and subsidize their paycheck with your labor." So unless you refuse to shop at such places, the time you spend in their lines becomes a kind of indentured servitude that you are "allowed' to work off in the self-checkout area. Meanwhile, the cost of the labor you are replacing is already priced into the goods you are buying, so you are purchasing a service that you don't receive and helping build the disincentives from it ever improving. The cashiers certainly know that if they work slower, they'll be able to do less work for the same pay while driving the most unpleasant customers to deal with -- the impatient ones -- away. As they are already staging a permanent slowdown (at least at Duane Reade they are), this only sweetens their rewards.

Perhaps if the self-checkouts replaced cashiers altogether, it would be different. But it is not as though this would improve efficiency. If there is anyone likely to be more befuddled by a cash register than a cashier, it's the average customer. Every time I've been in Home Depot, I've watched customers suddenly lose all intuitive grasp of how this thing called commerce works and be reduced to having to follow directions on how to scan an item with a barcode reader. And then they founder helplessly, trying to crack the credit-card-swiping puzzle. Hmm. Maybe if I lay it flat on the touch screen it will work. Maybe if I jam it in like it's a hotel door key. Inevitably they have to ask an employee how to do it anyway, only now you've turned the cashier who was too incompetent to do the job in the first place into a teacher (proving the old adage) whose communication skills now will determine how fast you can get home with your wet vac or your bag of nails.

If RFID technology fulfills its promises, affluent shoppers most likely won't have to worry about any of this anymore. They'll register a credit card with a store, which will be detected by an EZ-Pass-like sensor along with all the goods they are taking out of the store on any given visit. This will fulfill the retailer's most ambitious dream of loss prevention, making shoplifting virtually impossible while eliminating the primary source of loss, the clerk running the register. At this point the line between shopping and surveillance will have virtually disappeared, and the activities will be understood to suit each other perfectly, to be natural consequences of each other. Of course you want the retailers to know all your preferences and predilections, otherwise how else could they tailor their messages to you and save you time and energy? Of course its good that all your belongings are tagged and trackable -- it's what made shopping so convenient and hassle free, no more of those annoying checkout lines.

Price targeting and apathy (5 June 2006)

Financial Times columnist Tim Harford in his recent book The Undercover Economist spends a lot of time discussing the retailers' practice of price targeting, by which they inflate their profits by duping customers to paying what they can afford for something rather than what it actually costs to make. Generally speaking, he argues, everything at Starbucks costs the company the same amount to make, they just dress their base product (espresso) with a bunch of inconsequential options that permit them to charge a bunch of different prices for the same thing and allow customers to self-select their price range, (dumb or dumber or venti dumb) -- if you mistake those little differences for significant identity-defining decisions, you're just that much more susceptible. Much of the economy in fact seems predicated on our finding mammoth significance in these inconsequential differences; advertisements systematically instruct us to take great pleasure in determining the difference between someone who drives a VW and someone who drives a Ford truck.

Harford focuses on customers' insouciant shopping. "Starbucks isn't merely seeking to offer a variety of alternatives to customers. It's also trying to give the customer every opportunity to signal that they've not been looking at the price." Part of that indifference would likely be Veblenesque conspicuous hauteur, but part of it is a consequence of deliberate deception, inculcated shopper ignorance abetted by such tactics as random pricing, illogical sales, exaggerated differences between similar products (if not the same product), misleading labels, sabotaging already finished goods to price them cheaper and so on. All these things are designed to confuse, to create situations of imperfect information which can then be exploited. Like a true economist, Harford sheds no tears for customers who are duped into paying more than other customers for the same product; he figures that they know better what they can afford (though the mountains of American debt and the existence of paycheck-loan kiosks and rent-to-own predators and installment-plan scams often makes me wonder, personally) and sees nothing unjust in a little enterprising duplicity.

Customers tend to feel differently. Some, when they discover these practices, perhaps engage in some guerrilla consumerism, turning bloated corporate policies against chain stores, capitalizing on slipshod return policies, buying sale items in absurd bulk, exercising iron discipline with price comparisons, and speading the news of these counterinsurgent tactics to anyone who will listen and who has the nerve to execute them. As Harford notes, price targeters must plug leaks -- must stop goods targeted for one group from selling to another. In other words, they have to stop middle class people from shopping at Dee & Dee or Dollar General. And retailers must stop people from reselling goods they've acquired at a discount -- this is why these strategies are mainly applied to services and perishables. Price targeting typically takes advantage of our willingness to pay for an experiential goods (rather than tangible ones) like first-class seating or to get competent attentive service from clerks. The hierarchy of customers that results makes customers think their opponents are other customers (who they need to best by being in a higher class, by being waited on first) rather than the retailers themselves who are gouging and duping them whenever possible.

Part of the way price targeting works is to have a sheeplike shopping populace to embarrassed to protest it, or to inconvenience themselves, the clerks, and other shoppers by insisting on refunds or price matches or spontaneously-negotiated bargains. Of course, even if you are aggressive in taking advantage of shopping loopholes, you are still shopping, which probably keeps retailers happy, no matter how much you shave their margins. Perhaps the best way to fight price targeting is to buy as little as possible, or at least spend as little time as possible thinking about acquiring stuff.

American Apparel and youth utopia (27 April 2006)

I've long been afflicted with a kind of reverse snobbery about clothes, inclined to boast about how cheaply I got something at Savers or Value Village, or to flaunt the fact I got my pants at Kmart, or to proclaim proudly my plans to reduce my wardrobe to a uniform, what I like call the Mormon missionary look -- short-sleeve off-white button-down shirt, tan khaki pants, brown shoes; or light-blue button-down, gray pants and black shoes. I have items in regular rotation that I've owned since Bush I's administration, and I'd be happy to freeze my closet in its current state and continue to wear these same clothes forever. I pretend to be baffled by any notion that wearing clothes can be anything other than utilitarian and aspire to a perfectly authentic existence entirely free of fashion.

Of course, I'm affected by fashion in more ways than I can even admit to myself, and one of the reasons I hate being photographed is an effort to prevent there being a documentary record of the incremental ways my style has changed. And my feelings about the subject aren't driven by a sense of superiority or any kind of contempt for frivolity or anything like that; it's driven by stark fear, fear of people like Dov Charney, the impresario responsible for American Apparel, profiled in this largely entertaining article from the NYT Magazine. Here's someone who lives entirely in the surface world of style, of snap judgments based on inexpressible and seemingly arbitrary gradations of charisma and hipness.

What Charney is seeking is an elusive quality he can refer to only as "style." When you have it, it's immediately evident; you're "on point." Among other things, people with style are good at sussing out other people with style, and Charney counts on a small style council to keep him apprised of good locations for his stores, to scout models and to help him know when and how to introduce new clothing items or modify existing ones.

In practice this means identifying this type: "In an updated 21st-century way, the American Apparel ideal is Charney's Young Metropolitan Adult, the hottie (male or female) from the 'hood, whom you might see walking down the street, at the local coffee shop or working behind the counter at an American Apparel store." Charney calls them Young Metropolitan Adults. I tend to call them hipsters, or something with expletives in it, because these people when they infiltrate a neighborhood you like to go or live in, make you uncomfortable there. They ruin the spontaneity of life by making spontaneity seem like a packaged product. They operate as if they are always on display, always being evaluated by the fashion police, the cool hunters Charney hires. Whether conscious of it or not, they serve to make others feel like losers (if not merely old and irrelevant); this gives them their own social purpose and value. Though you might be going about your business blissfully unaware of yourself, the presence of these YMAs make you feel like you are suddenly being scrutinized as well, they remind you of the essentially arbitrary unfairness of social judgment and how difficult it is to escape it and how it can really ruin your life despite being plainly unjust. (Is this injustice merely the inevitable fact of aging and mortality? Perhaps. But there are elder hipsters too.)

Think of those creepy ads American Apparel runs -- they are seductive and wholly repellent at the same time. Both smug and sleazy, the ads present hormonal youth as something strictly cynical and exploitational -- as though youth itself were created by marketing wizards. The world pictured is both preposterously intimate and totally exclusionary; you'll never be on that ratty couch with that sweaty girl in guy's underwear even though her expression beckons you -- or is that mockery? Who wants to be like these people? Who finds these people benign?

In my nightmares, the world is run by people like this, a fashion gestapo who decide who is in and out of society. Style becomes some kind of predestination, and culture is a quasi-Calvinistic realm where one must constantly display the grace you secretly hope God has granted you, which would make your grace then unquestionable. One must forever work hard to seem effortlessly natural -- to me this is the ultimate in anxiety, a spiraling abyss of self-analysis and shame and pretension and phoniness and endless humiliation. To guys like Charney and his youth goon squad, this is utopia.

Charney seems to believe that the style he markets -- the article's author calls it "pervy" -- is an expression of the liberating energy of the next generation that, just like the Boomers had, will change everything. At the end of the article Charney offers this manifesto: "This is the way the adult generation is going to live. They're not preoccupied by monogamy. Exciting things can happen. They're mobile; they can travel; they're willing to take chances; they're open-minded and ready for change. That's what the boomers presented for America, and that's what this new generation presents for us. I want to be in business with them." For this generation, as Charney imagines them in his ads anyway, everything seems to boil down to a sexualized offhandedness -- "Oh, I'm in my underwear? Whatever. Want to have a threesome?" -- that is supposed to pass for progressiveness.

My fear of fashion in general, which often wants to pass along the timeless rituals of sexual attraction as innovative novelty, as something that young people have a monopoly over, stems from this. Fashion relies on youth to enchant its wares with the allure of the impossible, with a desire that is unquenchable and ever-renewable -- we can't ever be young again or remain that way, but fashion continues to promise access to youth while configuring youth as superficial and sexual and at the same time entirely complete, itself without desire. Fashion is the means by which the old try to revenge themselves on the young, by turning young people into "youthfulness" and encouraging them to think of themselves as being without desire, as being sexual automatons. I want no part of that generational warfare, but when l'm confronted with fashion I start to feel like I'm already a casualty.

Confusion pricing (24 April 2006)

One of my main excuses for not having a cell phone is the byzantine way the service is priced -- it seems designed to generate maximum confusion and get people to pay different amounts for exactly the same thing, depending on how gullible they are. I don't want to be gullible, and I am somewhat risk averse, so I steer clear of this market. I'm not adequately compensated for the price of feeling stupid by having the privilege to chitchat with people when I'm walking to the subway.

But don't cell phone companies eventually want to sign people like me up? Why the opaque pricing?

Tim Harford's theory is that confusion pricing is a simply another way companies shop for customers and categorize them in terms of how careful they are about their money. Some customers -- let's call them the stupid ones, the ones who need branded luxury goods to feel significant -- allow companies to operate with high margins, others squeeze companies by being better informed, forcing companies to earn their money. By throwing out a bunch of confusing plans, cell-phone companies are filling the waters with chum, luring the idiot customers who'll eagerly pay more without thinking or understanding what they are really paying for. The rest of us, if we choose to have a cell phone, are forced to look past the illusion of customer service presented in these plans and log some unpaid time on a customer-service hotline waiting to be told the real facts. Of course the burden is always on the consumer to make sure he's not getting ripped off, but any industry that makes its business practices purposely opaque seems a good one to avoid. The perpetuation of confusion pricing suggests to me that there hasn't really been enough competition yet in that particular sector, which suggests that whatever is being sold isn't truly necessary. (Cell phones are luxury items for people with the time to burn figuring out what they cost.)

Harford seems all too trusting, it seems to me, that these reps will give you the straight deal and won't try to bamboozle you more -- he assumes that they'll conclude you're too smart for that just by virtue of having called demanding an explanation. I prefer not to do business with companies that force me to jump through hoops before they will treat me with respect. So I may be without a cell phone for a very long time.

Size double zero (15 February 2006)

As if size zero wasn't stupid enough, Banana Republic is reportedly rolling out size 00, which is apparently twice as null as size 0. If you are a size zero, does that mean you don't exist? that your waist is non-existent?

BusinessWeek does its best to keep a straight face, explaining that 00 is the equivalent of 31 inch bust, 20 inch waist, 32 inch hips. (The aim here is to make clothes for little girls without sullying the adult cache of the brand.) Hmm. I have an idea -- why not make size 00 into "31 inch bust, 20 inch waist, 32 inch hips"? When I go to a men's store (okay, if I ever went to a men's store), the tailors don't try to designate my shape with a single random number plucked from thin air with the intent of making me feel anxious and self-conscious. Instead, they take out a tape measure and get relevant precise data. Why aren't women demanding the same treatment? Why the occulting of the basic significant information necessary to have clothes that actually fit (which, by the way, is a fairly good indicator of social class). Are they afraid to face the facts about their real measurements? That seems a somewhat insulting conclusion to draw and a bit absurd -- but I guess the "retail experience" is all about absurd, useless pretend play. So I guess that means women will continue to pretend to be zeros.

Pleasures of spending (4 February 2006)

Recently Steven Soderburgh tried releasing a movie simultaneously on DVD and in theaters. This threatens the existing business model for fils, which require a window of time when theaters have a monopoly on access to a film and thus can guarantee the proceeds earned from those who can exhibit no patience and must see a movie right away, when its buzz is most intense. Of course this assumes that theaters add no value, they only capitalize on a rigged system -- in other words, no one who could choose where to see a film would pick a movie theater; they would pick their couch and big flat-screen TV. Considering how movie theaters have become these awful warehouses of surly teenagers where you can be assured someone will be talking on the phone during a movie, despite its being amplified to jet engine decibel levels, it's a fair assumption. But when I see "repertory cinema" at theaters like Film Forum and Anthology in New York, I get something more out of the experience than I would get sitting at home with a Criterion Collection DVD. Part of that is probably the ability to enjoy some nostalgic anachronism, to get to pretend I'm living in a time when films are necessarily social experiences, and one's experience of Godard, say, was necessarily shaped by the people there in the theater with you, their reactions and their laughter and the discussions overheard afterword. The church-like communal experience of watching a film like Au hazard Balthazar seems like a part of what the film is supposed to be about, the movies as a spiritual ritual, a purification of everyday life to its essence and a common recognition of those verities revealed. And in going to Film Forum, I'm nicely reminded that I'm not alone with my nonmainstream tastes; I see just how many people share my biases.


In this recent Slate column Daniel Gross writes, "Today, too many media executives regard their businesses as zero-sum games. And in their worldview, every person who watches a new movie on television for free is one less person who won't pay $9.50 to see it in a theater. But that's clearly not the case. As with many other products -- airline flights, clothes, hotels -- different consumers seeking different experiences will come in at different price points. Just because content is available for free doesn't mean somebody won't pay for it." He stresses the idea that consumers sometimes like paying extra for something, since it gratifies their egos or their sense of justice or because they believe their money is getting them something extra (as in my Film Forum experiences). Often simply spending money forces the spender to be more focused and more engaged with what he has spent it on -- in trying to get one's money's worth, one works harder at getting more from the experience purchased. This demonstrates Marx's contention about the nature of money, which begins as a place holder for other values, but soon seems to embody value itself. Then we need to spend it to lend its supposedly inherent value to the social experiences from which its illusory value is actually derived. Value independent of money becomes impossible to imagine; we demand that we spend money in order to authenticate our pleasures.

Purchasegasms (30 January 2006)

Another dispatch from the "experience economy" This item from BoingBoing.net links to a Japanese shopping site where you never get any of the objects you shop for, instead you pay for the experience of making exciting shopping choices via a video link.

This seems a harbinger. Shopping itself has become the product; the act of acquisition is replacing the object itself as retailing's crucial component. This is a conceptual shift that is in some ways long overdue -- it mirrors the shift made by advertising in the 1920s from descriptions of the products themselves to evocations of the person you'd be with such a product in your life. It figures that the natural next step from lifestyle advertising would be to dispense with the products and market the lifestyle directly, with the products reduced to props in the narcissistic drama provided for you. This also solves an associated problem, the fact that many people seem to believe that their living spaces are too cluttered and too full of stuff. This has become more pronounced as items have become in general less useful and purposeful and more mere signaling devices and therapeutic excitement fixes. We love the flash of pleasure that comes from buying something, but we've long since run out of stuff that we really need or places to store it. So this approach allows us the shopping thrill with none of the storage headache.

The paranoid shopper (23 January 2006)

My favorite kind of store to be in is a thrift store, and not only because they are cheap. (In truth, they aren't so cheap anymore, thanks to the eBay effect; afraid their goods will be resold by amateur retailers, many thrift stores have applied a price hike across the board in the last year or two.) What I like most about them is how no effort is made there to cater to the consumer. It's just a hodge-podge of random stuff barely categorized and distributed haphazardly on the shelves and racks. The real hard-core thrift stores don't even have shelves; they just have clothing massed in a heap and you sort through and buy by the pound. If there's music, it's often the worst species available on the radio -- religious music or smooth jazz (religious music for the soulless suburbanite?). They are often in some semi-industrial or abandoned neighborhood, retro-fitted in something that used to be a grocery store or a hardware outlet; often you can see where the aisles used to be because the floors aren't replaced or resurfaced. They aren't doing a thing to "shop for customers." They don't give a crap about who I think I am or who I want to pretend to be, and that's just how I like it.

No strategies have been developed to make an "experience" for the shopper or to give their trip to the store an implied narrative through well-choreographed signage and a carefully sequenced goods designed to prompt certain "should I buy" questions in the receptive consumer. Sociologist-turned-marketer details a lot of these ploys in Why We Buy, a book I found extremely interesting, albeit in a counter-intuitive way. It's good to know what retailers have learned about shoppers' tendencies and biases, in their attempts to lull shoppers into a comfort zone, so that one can systematically resist it. If you are "comfortable" while you are shopping, you're probably in trouble, as this means you've let your guard down at precisely the moment it's most important it be up. Also, comfort comes at a cost. If you are experiencing some mellow feeling in some store, you're probably going to pay for it in some way, or will very soon. Shopping is an ersatz experience, an experience substitute; if you permit retailers to gull you into thinking it's an activity in itself, you've surrendered already -- you've given up on real experience, on having an actual life. It seems imperative to resist that at all costs, especially as the buyosphere expands and engulfs more and more of the space we inhabit. So when retailers learn from Underhill that shoppers tend to veer right upon entering a store, you should remember to veer left and avoid the trap set for you there. When Underhill points out that shoppers don't notice anything until they've acclimated to the inside of the store, often 20 or 30 feet from the door, you should remember to try to acclimate yourself sooner, get yourself braced up. When a sign has been placed to amuse you while you are forced to wait in some predictable way, ignore it. If there's a promotional video playing, for God's sake, ignore it. Amuse yourself weith your phone if you must. By denying retailers the opportunity to cater to you, you gum up their works and you just might get to see behind the curtain, see through to real costs of things, real discounts available perhaps, and most of all, you'll be having a real experience instead of some bogus fantasia. Make yourself comfortable in your own way; don't let yourself be sucked into the stereotypes about what we prefer that marketers like Underhill make convenient for us.

Fear of haggling (17 January 2006)

Economics often assume consumers are driven by a very limited set of incentives: get more, pay less, and make the more be of the thing that will give you the most satisfaction. Built into these assumptions is the idea that the consumer will always be aware of and pursue his best interests. For example, he'll wake up in the morning, see that interest rates have fallen, and go right out and start that re-fi on his house. And he'll refuse to let money sit as cash when there is money to be made in a wide variety of tempting investments. And he won't pay ATM fees or overspend for coffee drinks and pressed sandwiches. But in truth, consumers don't do this, and some economists think there is something deeply wrong with them. Individuals can't be relied on to always make it the top priority to make a profit; they sometimes make the mistake of privileging some other priority. (Clever economists, however, can often bring any motive back around to maximizing marginal utility.) Fortunately, a corporation can always be counted on to pursue profit; it's the only motive it recognizes, and it serves to make extraneous any other motive the people who make it up might have, channeling only their "useful" profit-maximizing decision-making powers. Corporations are essentially people minus any of the impulses that aren't single-mindedly focused on growth and expansion.

In the most recent Economist, the "Economics Focus" column considers the problem, which may stem from the fact that markets are scary. "Consumers may doubt themselves, the products on display and the people flogging them." The president of the American Economic Association adds, "Opportunities for choice may be interpreted as opportunities for embarrassment and regret." Most Americans never have to haggle and would certainly shop a lot less if they did. Haggling puts the pressure on the consumer to be informed, and it makes overt the fact that shopping is not some win-win fantasy wherein they become kings and queens of the consumer-good fantasia, catered to with fun retail "experiences." Shopping is competition, and there are winners and losers. Consumers, generally, are the losers, as they typically lack the information necessary to compete (or they value their ignorance more than the cost it would take to correct it and don't mind overspending -- or they see overspending itself as a good, a sign of prestige). People need to be motivated to shop and given the "courage" to spend and make those heroic purchases; they need to be cajoled, prodded, harangued at every possible moment, from every possible perch -- look around, even on this page, at all the ads. No matter what they advertise, they all have this in common, they all think it's important for you that you are buying, they all communicate the message that you are no one if you are not.

So people aren't naturally inclined to want to see their entire public sphere turned into what Thomas Hine has called the "buyosphere" -- the place (mental or physical) where we understand who we are only in terms of shopping. We have the buyosphere foisted upon us, and our anxiety over the need to ceaselessly compete in it is defined away as something else. Soon we are told that shopping is natural, as fundamental to our happiness and as instinctual as sex.

What a consumer economy does is try to extend the competitiveness and the incentives of winning to all experience, to commodify it all and make the degree to which one "wins" be the primary measure of the satisfaction the purchase provides -- the "scoreboard" mentality that I've mentioned here before. But ceaseless competitiveness is exhausting and stressful, prompting indecision and evasiveness, attempts to avoid the market, circumvent its risks. The market has the effect of disincentivizing itself. But there are no alternatives to the market that we are willing to countenance. Thus as the article points out, economics, which used to take consumers as sovereign, now tries to figure out how to force consumers to fit the market system.

Ikea feeding trough (4 January 2006)

I've written before about how IKEA, with its family friendly day-care centers and cafeterias and all that, contrives a social-welfare aura that seems to transform their sometimes shoddy goods into highly marketable emblems of a better social democracy to come. Well, according to this item from German periodial Der Spiegel some people are taking the company's commitment to the social welfare quite seriously. "More and more people are starting to use the stores as an ersatz for social services and babysitting," the article reports, detailing how poor Germans use IKEA stores as soup kitchens. This leads to unlikely encounters across class lines: "The customers are a colorful mix of people: pensioners meet up with single-parents, managers with garbage collectors. 'The Ikea restaurant is a modern meeting point for all kinds of people. It's a sort of social living room,' says Gretel Weiss, who works for the magazine Food Service. Some people even celebrate their birthday in this 'social living room.' " So IKEA really is the town square for the consumer-driven social democracy of the future, where we all have balsa-wood bookcases and all the Swedish meatballs we can stomach.

Christian good(s) (9Decmber 2005)

Just in time for Narinimania, The December 3 Economist has a story on the bustling, hot new market segment in America, Evangelical Christians, who in their bottomless thirst for social recognition apparently enjoy being marketed to (the more proselytizing they experience, the better?) and make for "incredibly loyal" consumers. Churches are not houses of worship, per se, but a "ready-made distribution channel" and pastors are not spiritual leaders but "pyromarketers" looking to spread the word about some choice Jesus gear.

It seems that the merging of commercial and spiritual interests, rather than threaten the sanctity of the religion, merely serves to reaffirm its potential to take up a central place in every aspect of everyday life; it suits the evangelical dream of theocracy. So evangelicals don't find books like What Would Jesus Eat?, a diet book, or "praise the Lord backpacks" to be vulgarizing and insulting, they don't find it a travesty or trivializing; instead they likely see it as the inevitable conquering of the quotidian, and their religion assuming its rightful omnipresence. Such items are altogether appropriate devotional objects in a commercial consumer culture -- evangelical Christianity doesn't seek to change this quality of culture, it merely hopes to assimilate it, merge with it, spiritualize it. This may be why it is growing; it works well with the status quo economic organization of American society, it affirms what already exists and spiritualizes it. Christian commodities are an affirmation of the way spirituality can inform all of life's decisions. Hence in the South, certain billboards are marked with crosses to confirm their evangelical-friendly business practices. I always have assumed specifically Christian products are automatically inferior, because they are relying to some degree on your faith in their quality. You are not buying them for their inherent utility but for a faith-based nontangible quality added on by the means of its production. In other words, the companies who make this junk are exploiting one's Christianity, taking advantage of an established cultural identity and latching tokens of display on to it, trying to create the impression that you are not a "true Christian" if you don't have a Jesus backpack or a Jesus chain or listen to Jesus music. (Kind of like how I had to listen to the Cure to justify my bad haircuts in 1985 and prove my alternativity.) You have to display who you are on the surface of your life through consumer goods; that is the definitive tenet of faith of the consumer society. But really, buying Christian is not so different from buying NewBalances because you are against unfair labor practices. Now, I wouldn't personally see eating chicken sandwiches as an especially righteous act, but maybe those who eat at the thoroughly Christianized Chik-Fil-A fast-food restaurants (so pious they are closed on Sunday) do. Chik-Fil-A's "first priority...has never been just to serve chicken," according to founder Truett Cathy's book Eat Mor Chikin: Inspire More People, "It is to serve a higher calling."

It is easy to be cynical of such statements, and of the way evangelical Christians often preach profit-making as an emblem of righteousness. But those worried about church and state separation breaking down should also be worried about the commercialization of Christianity as well, not because it is trivializing faith, but because business is the State in America, and if Christians control the markets, they pretty much will control our lives.

Mail-in rebates (29 November 2005)

Stores use mail-in rebates for exactly one reason. They are hoping you won't follow through and redeem them. It is the company's way of having a pretend sale where you think you are paying $29 when at the register you are shelling out $49. The hoops and forms and receipt saving and coupon clipping and so on is all there for the sole reason of making the process so cumbersome that you won't go through with it. (In a great irony these methods are dubbed "fraud protection," though that the main fraud that euphemism protects is the one the company perpetrates on us by that very name.) It is one of the plainest situations where the customer's best interest is at complete odds with the retailer in a near zero-sum game, and one that invites the most hypocritical sloganeering, as though the rebate was for your benefit. So I shouldn't have been all that surprised or outraged -- though I was -- when I read in "The Great Rebate Runaround" in BusinessWeek that redemption services provider TCA Fulfillment used to make specific promises of how low they could suppress the customer's rate of redemption -- 90% unfulfilled on a $10 rebate, 65 % unfulfilled on a $50 rebate toward a $200 purchase. You know how that is accomplished: the company "loses" your paperwork or mysteriously misinterprets your handwriting or strings you up over some hidden codicil in the redemption directions. Or they might simply ignore you, hoping that you'll forget about it or be too lazy to demand it from them. These parasites, these redemption companies, suck out a profit by frustrating and misleading and stonewalling average consumers; that's the value they add to society.

BusinessWeek call rebates a "tax on the disorganized" but that's far too kind a description for what is really an expression of contempt for the consumer. They are more like a temp job that pays pathetically, $10 for who knows how much work and worry.

The Ikea cult (13 November 2005)

Business Week recently ran a cover story on Ikea, arguing that in its global reach, its obsession with low prices and its idolizing of its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish furniture chain was comparable to Wal-Mart. The article also stresses how Ikea attempts to sell a lifestyle as opposed to mere goods, linking Ikea shopping with a whole frugal, eco-conscious approach to life. My feeling has always been that shopping at Ikea gives a sacrifice-free inkling of what a social democracy/welfare state could be, both in its spartan sterility and its underlying sense of cooperation and sincere interest in the general welfare-- the methods by which they try to entice shoppers and encourage their loyalty seem akin to the ways ideally a society might gently manipulate the priorities of its citizens: stylize thrift so that the society can more fairly distribute its product. The store uses, according to a Harvard B-school study, "gentle coercion" to get customers to stay longer -- caring for their kids, feeding them, etc. These are what liberals like to imagine government could do, just as easily.

But the idea that everyone buys into the Ikea ethos is part of the fantasy visiting the store helps construct (making it easy to overlook its annoying traits -- that it makes you build all its cheap stuff yourself, and the incompatibility of many of its housewares with anything non-Ikea). All the faux rooms and the waferboard furniture with streamlined designs, its kitschy language of product names and its free pencils and measuring tapes and its Swedish meatballs, the orderly way you are guided through the maze of offerings, all these things tend to suggest the competence we hope for in government. But it is easy for Ikea to do this -- we aren't expecting justice from it, just cheap furniture. It's success is in suggesting that cheap furniture is all that matters in the world.

Ikea plays on the idea that style can redeem all things, and that a well-designed personal space is tantamount to a well-orgaznized life; that all the rest of one's life can fall naturally into place if you construct an effective enough room for it to happen in, perhaps with the jelp of Ikeas many model rooms you tour at the store. The superfluity of furniture, of cabinets and storage devices and chairs and so on really make it seem that you just need one more file cabinet and all your business will be taken care of -- if you just have the right place for something, the chaotic forces that displaces it will be forever held at bay. No one model room creates this effect, instead it is the overwhelming multiplicity of rooms that builds the fantasy -- that for every situation we can imagine ourselves in, we could have a room that would provide the appropriate stagecraft for us to act it out successfully. (The article notes that an actual play is being staged in an Ikea near Seattle. This is supposed to testify to the reality of the rooms, but shows instead that Ikea must have a healthy sense of humor about itself, since it is hard to imagine this play not using an Ikea setting to comment on the sterility of the lives of the play's characters.) The end result of an Ikea tour is the sense that style and design can rectify all of life's shortcomings and that design is a kind of functionality that strips the friction out of everyday life. This is potent fantasy, but dangerous -- stylized one's everyday life ultimately means subjecting one's intimate sense of self to the vagaries of fashion cycles; it means finding discontent in oneself for purely external and arbitrary reasons cooked up by designers, who's mandate who's reason for being. is to constantly work to convince people that the perfectly useful things they already have are completely inadequate. Perhaps the comfort we sense in the potentiality of design is the dream that we ourselves can escape the need to be useful, and that we can refine ourselves to a minimalist point free of wasteful thoughts and gestures. That we will become like our well-designed objects and will have a perfect place built in to our society for us that requires no effort of our own to fit into -- by surrounding ourselves with the appropriate design we'll automatically fit into a specific social niche. All shopping cults work this way; they convince consumers that the difficulties of maintain a position in society can be reduced to a series of shopping decisions that the store itself will make for you. You don't have to do anything, not even think -- it's wonderful!