Thomas Frank walks by the candy-cane-adorned displays of Old Navy, passing the sign exclaiming “priced so low, you can’t say no,” and into the chain’s San Francisco flagship store. The all-devouring Christmas rush hasn’t started yet, but it’s clear from the frown on Frank’s face that he’s not being seduced by the cheap but stylish clothes, the swirling neon and the bass-heavy hip-hop pounding in his ears.
“Oh God, this is disgusting,” Frank says. This reaction isn’t surprising. The bespectacled Midwesterner is a pioneering social critic — one of the first writers to document how, starting in the ’60s, American businesses have co-opted cool anti-corporate culture and used it to seduce the masses. His arguments in the Baffler, a pugnacious review Frank founded in 1988, and in 1997′s “The Conquest of Cool” read like sermons, angry wake-up calls for consumers who hungrily ingest hipper-than-thou (“Think Different”) marketing campaigns without ever questioning their intent.
Old Navy and other cheap but tasteful retailers provide perfect fodder for Frank’s critique. Their low prices and hip-but-wholesome branding strategy are supposed to present a healthy alternative to the conspicuous consumption of a Calvin Klein. But critics like Frank and Naomi Klein, author of “No Logo,” argue that the formula is really nothing more than the wolf of materialism wrapped in cheaper sheep’s clothing.
Consumers are being scammed, says Klein, arguing that stores like Old Navy and Ikea are duping millions, inspiring mass conformity while pretending to deliver high culture to the masses. “It’s this whole idea of creating a carnival for the most homogeneous fashions and furniture,” says Klein. “It’s mass cloning that’s being masked in a carnival of diversity. You don’t notice that you’re conforming because everything is so colorful.”
Klein and Frank say that few consumers recognize just how conformist their consumption habits have become. And certainly, it’s hard to argue that Ikea’s and Old Navy’s items haven’t become icons of urbanite and suburbanite imagination. Watch MTV, or rent “Fight Club,” to see Ikea’s candy-colored décor, then truck down to your local Old Navy flagship store. When you arrive, what you’ll find is that hordes of people have beaten you there. At virtually every opening of Old Navy’s and Ikea’s stores — in the New York, Chicago and San Francisco areas, for example — tens of thousands of people appeared in the first few days. Even now, long after the stores first opened, lines remain long.
What’s wrong with these people? Nothing, say defenders of the companies. The popularity of brands like Ikea and Old Navy, they argue, derives from the retailers’ ability to offer good stuff cheap. “They provide remarkable value,” says Joel Reichart, a professor at the Fordham School of Business who has written case studies on Ikea. “They’re truly satisfying people’s needs.”
Despite his irritation with the way companies like Old Navy market themselves, Frank acknowledges that businesses have always sought to offer cheap, relatively high-quality merchandise and concedes that there is some value in their attempts. He even admits that consumerism is good for the economy.
But he and other critics argue that in the end we’re only being conned into thinking that our needs are being satisfied. What’s really happening, they argue, is that clever marketers are turning us into automatons who equate being cool with buying cheap stuff that everyone else has. Under the stores’ guise of delivering good taste to the general public, any chance we have at experiencing or creating authenticity is being undermined. Ultimately, our brave new shopping world is one in which we are spending more time in the checkout line than reading books, watching movies or otherwise challenging ourselves with real culture.
“Shopping is a way of putting together your identity,” laments “Nobrow” author John Seabrook. And the “homogenized taste” of today’s Old Navy and Ikea shoppers proves, he says, that Americans either are consciously choosing to look and live alike or are determined not to notice that that is what they’re doing.
Consider the numbers. Old Navy now has 580 stores nationwide and is still expanding. The Gap, Old Navy’s parent company, remains convinced that people want more, and it seems to be right. In 1998, when Old Navy opened its first store in downtown Chicago, more than 10,000 people lined up hours before the doors opened. When the San Francisco flagship store opened in 1999, the rush was equally astounding. There were giveaways, rock bands and rabid, clothes-carrying crowds fighting their way to the registers. Never mind that Old Navy carries far fewer pieces of apparel than other comparably sized stores. And never mind that half the clothes are just knockoffs of items available at the Gap. After all, deals are to be had — and shopping at Old Navy is just so cool!
Ikea is an even bigger phenomenon. More than 320 million people worldwide walked through one of the Swedish company’s stores last year. That’s more than seven times the number of people who visited all four of Disney’s theme parks.
Shoppers can claim that they’re just being good consumers — that buying a $179 Poang chair at Ikea is actually ecofriendly. Old Navy shoppers might say they’re just frugal. Not so, according to critics like Christine Rosen, a professor in the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley. According to Rosen, people who fill their closets, homes and lives with Old Navy and Ikea — or Pottery Barn or a host of other slick stores — are simply new examples of the trend toward conformity that started when the first “brands” appeared in the 1910s and ’20s, says “We’re Pavlovianly trained to respond to this,” she says.
And we’re also just too damn lazy. That’s the theory floated by Packard Jennings, an anti-consumerism activist who says that stores like Old Navy are designed to numb the brain and remove all semblance of creativity from the purchasing process. “Ikea pre-arranges sets of furniture in its stores, thereby lessening individual thought,” he says. Once people are in the store, they can’t resist. “Entire households are purchased at Ikea,” he says.
Indeed, Janice Simonsen, an Ikea spokeswoman, confirmed that a large part of the chain’s demographic consists of “people who come in and say, ‘I need everything.’” Meanwhile, those who don’t want everything usually end up with more than they need, says Fordham’s Reichart. “The way they design their stores” — with an up escalator to the showroom and no exit until the checkout — “you end up going through the entire store,” he says.
Old Navy plays by the same sneaky rules. When Frank and I entered the San Francisco store, clerks offered us giant mesh bags. Ostensibly, this is just good service, but since the bags are capable of holding at least half a dozen pairs of jeans and a few shirts, it’s obvious that they’re also meant to encourage overconsumption.
Frank called the bags “gross” but not out of line with other state-of-the-art retailing practices. But according to Klein, the sacks, in conjunction with Old Navy’s penchant for displaying T-shirts in mock-1950s supermarket coolers, prove that the company is aiming to do something more. The idea behind this “theater for the brand” architecture is to commodify the products, to make them “as easy to buy as a gallon of milk,” Klein says.
“The idea is to create a Mecca where people make pilgrimages to their brand,” Klein says. “You experience the identity of the brand and not the product.”
Disney, which opened its first store in 1987, was the first to employ this strategy. And since then others have appeared. Niketown, the Body Shop, the Discovery Store — they all aim to sell products by selling a destination.
Old Navy and Ikea, however, are far more popular than those predecessors — and, if you believe the more pessimistic of their critics, more dangerous. Not only are the two chains remaking many closets and homes into one designer showcase, says Klein, but they are also lulling consumers to sleep and encouraging them to overlook some important issues.
Such as quality. People think they’re getting “authenticity on the cheap,” says David Lewis, author of “The Soul of the New Consumer.” But the truth may be that they’re simply purchasing the perception of quality and authenticity. “Because [Ikea and Old Navy] create these self-enclosed lifestyles,” Klein explains, “you overlook the fact that the products are pretty crappy and fall apart.” Adds Jennings, “Things may be cheaper, but you keep going back to replace the faulty merchandise.”
Then there is the trap of materialism. Survey after survey suggests that people who place a high value on material goods are less happy than those who do not, says Eric Rindfleisch, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona. The focus on bargains, incremental purchases and commodification plays to a uniquely American blind spot.
“We operate with a duality,” explains Rindfleisch, who has conducted studies linking materialism with depression. “Americans know that money doesn’t buy happiness, but most people somehow believe that increments in pay or goods will improve our lives. It’s a human weakness — particularly in America.”
The most insidious danger may be more abstract. The anti-consumerism critics argue that by elevating shopping to cultural status, we are losing our grip on real culture. We live in a time where college kids think nothing of decorating their rooms with Absolut vodka ads and fail to realize that they’re essentially turning their rooms into billboards. Meanwhile, museum stores keep getting larger, Starbucks sells branded CDs to go with your coffee and because Ikea and other stores now look like movie theaters or theme parks, we don’t just shop, “we make a day of it,” as Klein puts it.
This only helps steer us away from other endeavors. When people spend so much time buying, thinking and talking about products, they don’t have time for anything else, for real conversations about politics or culture or for real interaction with people.
Ultimately, the popularity of Old Navy, Ikea and their ilk proves that we’re stuck in what Harvard professor Juliet Schor calls “the cycle of work and spend.” Breaking that cycle may not be easy, but if one believes critics like Frank, it’s essential if we are to control our own culture, instead of allowing it to be defined by corporations.
The cycle may not be possible to break. Frank, for one, is extremely pessimistic about our chances for turning back the tide of conformity and co-opted cool. Maybe that’s one reason why he wanted to get out of Old Navy as fast as he could.
But I’m not so sure. When “Ikea boy,” Edward Norton’s character in “Fight Club,” watched his apartment and his Swedish furniture explode in a blaze of glory, I wasn’t the only one in the theater who cheered.
Ever since I first watched my dad drive his chocolate brown Datsun 280 ZX back in the early 1980s, I’ve been inculcated to believe that driving — true driving — can only be performed with a stick shift. From that childhood experience, I came to see the manual transmission as a birthright passed down from my grandfather, to my father, and eventually to me via a series of tense, stall-filled lessons when I turned 16. In my case, after ripping apart the transmission one too many times, my dad went barking drill sergeant on me, eventually teaching me that a stick requires a special kind of focus, and that I needed to ease up more slowly on the clutch in order to get into first gear on those damn inclines. Through the experience, I learned to consider my stick-shifting skill a special talent with transcendent value.
Yes, of course, in the intervening years I’ve had the chance to drive an automatic transmission. But that has always felt a bit like playing a post-Konami Code game of Contra — a bit too easy, a bit too idiot proof, a bit too, shall we say, inauthentic. On top of that, the automatic always seemed like a wasteful luxury because it always was more expensive and less fuel-efficient. That difference consequently added an ascetic populism to the inherent machismo of the engine-revving manual transmission.
No doubt, for stick shift enthusiasts, these factors have all conspired to create an alluring mystique around the manual transmission — one that, according to new data, is on the rise.
Last week, USA Today reported that while “the percentage of new vehicles with stick-shift gearboxes remains a small slice of the new vehicle market,” the “the first quarter this year manuals were in 6.5 percent of new vehicles sold, and that’s getting close to double each of the past five years.” The stick shift is back in a big way — but is that really such a good thing?
Upon hearing the news, my initial thought — for aforementioned reasons — was that, yes, of course it’s a good thing. In an ocean of bad drivers and wasteful vehicles, the news seemed like a distant island of hope. I thought that perhaps more motorists are being converted to the automobile religion (cult?) I first was exposed to in Dad’s Datsun 280 ZX. And maybe, just maybe, that’s a sign that American drivers are wising up, both stylistically and efficiency-wise.
Then I did a bit more investigation, and realized the news might not be so good, and that my quasi-religious fervor for the gearbox may have blinded me to my catechism’s new downsides.
In the past, the stick shift was an all-but-guaranteed fuel saver. But not anymore. As AOL Autos notes, computer technology has advanced to the point where “automatics have become so efficient that most of the time their fuel economy is on par with manuals — and in some cases even better.” USA Today notes that such a trend may eventually erase the long-term price differential between manual and automatic transmissions, meaning the manual will lose its frugal-chic appeal. Meanwhile, according to AOL, new technology also boosts automatics’ overall performance (read: speed), meaning many driving aficionados have come to prefer the automatic over the manual.
Thanks to all this, on the days I don’t bike to work and instead fire up my 11-year-old Saturn and shift it into first gear, I no longer feel so righteous or populist. I feel like part of the problem — not just because I’m driving a fossil fuel-dependent vehicle, but also because the manual transmission seems like a silly relic. Likewise, word that manual transmissions may be coming back no longer seems like such great news; it seems like more proof that when it comes to transportation, we’re still prone to making shortsighted decisions.
And yet, I can’t let go of my love for the stick — or maybe “can’t” isn’t the right word. Perhaps “don’t want to” is more appropriate. If the automobile is still one of the key chronological markers in a typical American’s life (and, unfortunately, it still is), the stick shift is a special symbol of our general heritage, and my specific family traditions.
That’s why I was happy to see that there remains one significant reason to still love the manual transmission — a reason that’s substantive, rather than just aesthetic or experiential. In the age of distracted driving, many believe the stick shift might encourage kids to stay focused on operating their vehicles, rather than operating their smartphones. The idea is that because a manual transmission requires special attention to operate, it doesn’t allow for as much multitasking as an automatic.
While there’s no science (yet) to prove the manual-transmission-as-deterrent-to-distracted-driving hypothesis, the memory of those first harrowing stick-shift lessons — with my dad imploring me to “really focus, goddammit!” — suggests to me that there’s something to the theory.
At least, that’s what I’m going to tell myself to justify my stick-shift fetish — that is, until the automatic fully surpasses the manual in every other way.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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The grand unifying theory of the American consumer has been that we are, first and foremost, low price fetishists. There’s ample evidence supporting this view: From Wal-Mart’s prominence to the fast food industry’s ongoing success, vast swaths of the economy are indeed built on the premise that buyers will prioritize discounts and quantity over premium prices and quality.
But ever so quietly, we are starting to see the rise and success of a competing vision, one that turns the old assumption on its head. In the technology arena, for instance, Apple is successfully challenging the PC world with a business model that convinces consumers to pay higher prices in exchange for better reliability, durability, efficiency and customer service. Likewise in the transportation world, more and more consumers are willing to pay higher prices upfront for hybrid and electric vehicles in exchange for the promise of lower long-term energy costs. This has encouraged companies like Philips to introduce more expensive light bulbs, in hopes that consumers will pay more for illumination that promises to use less electricity and last 20 years.
Nowhere, though, is the battle between the low-price/quantity business model and the higher-price/quality business model more clear than in the world of beer. In the fevered battle between the macrobrew behemoths and the craftbrew insurgents, both sides are digging in for an epic confrontation.
The history of the face-off is illustrative. For decades, the big brewers (Anheuser Busch, MillerCoors, etc.) have marketed their products less on the basis of taste or quality than on identity branding. What you drank subsequently became a statement not necessarily of what your taste buds enjoyed, but of your self-image. The Miller versus Budweiser wars and Old Milwaukee ads, for instance, were so often a pitch to guys looking for working-class street cred. Meanwhile, Pabst Blue Ribbon lately has been pitched as a retro-themed statement of hipster style.
This kind of marketing made a certain sense, because while macrobrew brands are certainly appealing, the actual beers in question are basically terrible. Produced through the macrobrews’ low-price, high-volume process, they don’t contain high-quality ingredients, they don’t contain much alcohol and, thus, they simply don’t taste good. Knowing this, the macrobrews have logically designed their marketing campaigns to focus on everything (the can, the type of people who drink it, the logo, etc.) but the actual product. Indeed, if there’s one ubiquitous reference that macrobrewing companies make to the beer itself, it’s usually one telling you how cold the beer is or should be — a temperature that, quite deliberately, helps hide just how bad the beer actually is.
The obvious assumption in this business model is that Americans generally reward low price over everything else, and specifically preference beer that is cost-effective to drink in mass quantities, rather than beer that delivers more alcohol or taste in less volume of liquid. In other words, the model assumes consumers see beer as a homogenized, undifferentiated commodity and that therefore less can never be more. In this view, more is always more, and since cheaper means more, cheaper is inherently better.
This is not a silly assumption, of course, in a country whose college binge-drinking culture teaches kids to prefer quantity at an early age. However, it ignored a potentially profitable market of beer drinkers with a different set of priorities. That’s where the craft brew industry came in.
In the last few years, small brewers have filled the vacuum left by macrobrewers, specifically marketing higher-priced products based on premium quality and taste. It’s been a wildly successful endeavor. 2011’s sales results tell that story: In a year that saw an overall decline in the beer market, the craft brewing industry increased its year-to-year sales by 15 percent and substantially grew its share of the total market. And here’s the key stat: according to the Brewer’s Association, “craft brewing sales share in 2011 was 5.7 percent (of the total beer market) by volume and 9.1 percent by dollars.”
That gap between share of total volume and share of total dollars generated is the high-price/high-quality/low-volume business model at work. Basically, craft brewers are generating a much larger share of beer revenue than they are contributing to the overall volume of beer in America — meaning that, contrary to previous trends, a growing share of consumers are willing to pay more for less, as long as the product is the comparatively higher-quality product that craft brewers provide.
Will this trend continue? Will the craft brew industry follow in, say, Apple’s footsteps and become the next high-quality David vanquishing the quantity-over-quality Goliath? It’s hard to say, but unlike in most other industries, the battle doesn’t look like it will be muddled by compromise — which makes it a hugely important test case.
Recall that in other major industries, the establishment’s low-price titans have typically tried to crush the high-price/high-quality upstarts by partially mimicking them — think Microsoft copying Apple or Wal-Mart partially pantomiming Whole Foods. In the beer industry, by contrast, it’s the opposite. Save for a few mini-brands like Coors’ Blue Moon line, which pretend to be a craft brew product, the macrobrew moguls are largely doubling down on their old low-price/low-quality/high-volume formula.
So, for example, Coors Light isn’t changing its watered-down product; it’s simply going with color-changing cans. Pabst is thinking about introducing not any higher-quality lines, but instead trying to brand its products to the military. And most blatantly, Miller has just launched this television campaign promoting a new can that allows the beer to be consumed as quickly as possible.
Though thinly veiled as a mechanism for better drinkability, the new “punch-top” can is obviously developed as the first specifically engineered to shotgun beer — that is, specifically designed to drink beer in a way that makes sure you don’t actually taste the beer. The unique selling proposition of the campaign is incredibly blatant in its embrace of the low-price/high-volume model: It is screaming at you to buy the cheap product exclusively because everything about it — the beer and even the can — is aimed at helping you pour it into your body without even having to taste or savor it. In this “punch top” innovation, Miller is effectively acknowledging that its customer base is those who drink only for volume — and it’s trying to thus convince more beer enthusiasts that speed drinking is a virtue.
The craft brewing industry, by contrast, is going in the opposite direction, trying to direct the beer-drinking population away from volume for volume’s sake. Visit a liquor store with a wide selection of microbrews and you’ll find an ever-more diverse selection of specialized offerings, from double IPAs to sour beers to barley wines. Notably, many of these products are sold in smaller sizes — four-packs or single pint-size bombers — making their price-per-ounce of beer far higher than the typical macrobrew. Additionally, what innovations the industry has made to beer technology tend to be fundamentally different from those of the macrobrew companies: They tend to be aimed at making the beer itself actually taste better (best example: Left Hand’s breakthrough creation of a bottled, widget-free milk stout on nitro).
In the competition for the future of drinking, both sides are obviously trying to exploit their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. The massive macrobrewing corporations are trying to take advantage of their size and corresponding ability to produce volume — all while playing down the fact that their beers have little local character or quality. The craft brewing industry, composed mostly of independent small and medium-size businesses, know they can’t compete in a volume game, and so they are trying to promote quality and diversity. It’s a straightforward fight — one that may seem only interesting to drinkers, but one that truly transcends the inebriation industry. It underscores both consumer shifts and questions about what kind of economy we want in the future.
Will we be a country of high volume and low quality? Or can we become an economy of quality and price premium? Whether it’s drinking, buying computers or choosing what industrial policy to support, we are in the process of answering those questions.
A Macrobrew Economy — a high-volume, low-price model — asks us to compete with other such economies throughout the world, and the problem is that countries like China will always have lower-priced labor, more lax environmental regulations and lower production standards to win a battle that rewards more and cheaper for more’s and cheaper’s sake. By contrast, a Craft Brew Economy — a high-quality, lower-volume model — is a different proposition. It follows the German model, which, as Time magazine notes, is all about being “committed to making the sort of high-quality, high-performance, innovative products for which the world will pay extra.”
The choice is ours — and it starts with the beer in your fridge.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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Two bursts of recent headlines here in Colorado had me feeling more than a wee bit conflicted. First came the news that the much-celebrated Trader Joe’s is coming to our state. Then came word that the Denver City Council had been threatened into ponying up $5 million in public funds to bring yet another Target to the Front Range.
Between my exuberant reaction to the first story and my disgust at hearing the second story, I wondered: Why did I feel psyched about one mega-chain coming to my area but disgusted at the news of another coming to the same locale? As someone aspiring to be an “ethical consumer” who cares about my community (if that’s not, unto itself, an oxymoron), aren’t I supposed to hate both bits of news? Or is it possible that not all national chains are created equal? Is it possible, in fact, that some are better than others?
Upon some hearty investigation, I think the answer is yes, some are better than others — and I’m not saying that (only) because it helps me avoid feeling like a complete sellout to the corporate machine.
No doubt, thanks to Wal-Mart and Target’s infamous record of sucking up public subsidies, crushing unions, destroying local economies, paying substandard wages and homogenizing supply chains to the lowest quality standards, the reputation of the national chain retailer is that of a pack of rabid wolves. We’ve come to believe that if you see suits from the national chains lobbying your local legislators and zoning board officials, everything you love about your community is about to become the red-meat entree in the pack’s next dinner. Invariably, by the end of that gorge-fest, your town will face economic wreckage, unemployment and, according to a new study, even a rise in hate groups.
But while they are all classified as national chain retailers, the differences between the Wal-Mart/Target business model and the Trader Joe’s business model are the differences between wolves and Golden Doodles — both may technically be canines, but the former are a helluva lot less cuddly and more dangerous than the latter.
Let’s start with size and scope: Trader Joe’s may be one of the biggest privately held companies doing business in America, but its stores are purposely designed to fit into — rather than take over – communities. As Businessweek notes, Trader Joe’s “stores tend to be on the small side — less than 15,000 square feet vs. 50,000 or more for conventional supermarkets.” Thanks to this antipathy to the “megastore” structure, Trader Joe’s can build its outlets in communities instead of on the outskirts of town — a geography that doesn’t suck commerce out of population centers and encourage driving-related sprawl, but adds to the commerce already happening in such population centers. Additionally, unlike Wal-Mart and Target, which sell everything from groceries to hardware to clothing, Trader Joe’s isn’t a one-stop-shop outlet aiming to siphon business from the entire economy, or even from one whole sector of the economy. It’s a specialty food store whose limited selection makes it less of a staple grocery store than a niche addendum to a town’s larger grocery ecosystem — and, mind you, not some elitist addendum just for rich yuppies with tons of disposable income, but an addendum that delivers “bourgeois products at proletarian prices,” as Slate notes.
This smaller-is-better approach has its analog in Trader Joe’s slower-is-better pace of growth. As Fortune reported in 2010, the company “has a deliberately scaled-down strategy,” opening only a few new stores every year. That stands in stark contrast to many competitors, whose blitzkrieg tactics of throwing open as many stores as possible seems more like an imperial strategy of economic conquest than an integrative business model. Indeed, whereas many communities now see grass-roots opposition campaigns mounted against proposals for yet more Wal-Marts in their vicinity, towns all but beg Trader Joe’s to consider opening a store in their region.
That gets to another admirable difference between Trader Joe’s and its national competitors: Many localities covet a Trader Joe’s specifically because the company compensates its workers at much higher levels than the industry standard.
According to Businessweek, the company’s original founder, Joe Coulombe, “wanted to make sure his employees were paid fairly, instituting a policy in the 1960s that full-time employees had to make at least the median household income for their communities.” That tradition continues under the Albrecht family, which now owns the company. Though the company is as union-free as its big-box competitors, Fortune notes that store managers “can make in the low six figures … full-time crew members can start in the $40,000 to $60,000 range” and the company “annually contributes 15.4% of employees’ gross income to tax-deferred retirement accounts.” And Businessweek points out that the company even “allows part-timers to earn health-care benefits” — a rare benefit in the cutthroat retail industry.
None of this, of course, is to imply that Trader Joe’s is inherently better than genuinely local businesses. Nor is it to suggest that Trader Joe’s is perfect. It’s not — not even close.
For example, even though the company ultimately agreed to make changes, it initially refused to listen to progressive organizations when they pressured management to make more ethical decisions. Similarly, there remain real questions about how much the firm’s stores are committed to local sources. While we know that for efficiency and distribution purposes, the stores’ proximity to product sources is an important part of the company’s site selection process, we don’t know how much that affects each store’s willingness to support local food producers. Same thing for its claims of sustainable practices: For every pledge that can be independently verified, there are others that can’t because the company is so opaque. And, as a personal grievance, I don’t understand why Trader Joe’s hasn’t prioritized opening more stores in food deserts where they are most needed, rather than in already-saturated markets.
This, in fact, raises the one overarching criticism of Trader Joe’s in comparison to its publicly traded competitors: namely, that its management uses its status as a privately held corporation to prevent transparency and keep its decisions cloaked in secrecy.
Before you fully scoff at that status, though, recognize that it is likely integral to many of the aforementioned reasons you can like a company such as Trader Joe’s, dislike its national mega-chain competitors, and not feel like a hypocrite.
To understand this key point, consider this Philadelphia magazine profile of Wawa, a mid-Atlantic convenience store chain with a corporate structure, cult following, and business model much like Trader Joe’s. The magazine notes that precisely because such companies are private and refuse to franchise, they can expand “at a consistent but sensible pace, avoiding Wall Street’s destructive imperative to grow at an ever-faster rate.”
When it comes to national chain retailers, then, ownership structure often explains the difference between threats and opportunities. When your town is accosted with huge conglomerates trying to exclusively please speculators in Lower Manhattan, your community is most likely under siege. By contrast, when your town is invaded by Trader Joe’s, Wawa, Wegman’s or any other family-held concern that has gone national but still emulates some ethical business practices, there may certainly be dangers — but there may also be more opportunities for symbiosis, because the parent company doesn’t answer only to the financial speculators.
It’s not an ironclad rule, of course — a private owner can be just as bad as management in a publicly traded corporation. The point is only that ownership is yet another critical factor complicating all the questions surrounding mega chain stores. As much as we’d like simple answers to such questions — as much as some would like to insist that they are all pure evil — nuance still exists. Sure, this may be an oligopolized economy, and we certainly should do everything we can to maintain local small businesses, but even among the big behemoths, there are still distinctions that matter.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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When I was a kid, you know what we called Legos for girls? Legos. When my own young daughters were small, you know what they called them? Legos. They came in blue and red and green and yellow. But lately Legos, like damn near every other object in the toy aisle, have felt the need to assert their gender.
It started when the company began aggressively marketing to boys back in 2005, offering up what BusinessWeek recently described as “spaceships and laser cannons … martial arts and supernatural powers,” a world in which “80 percent of the characters are boys.” But the extreme genderfication of Legos put the company in a self-imposed bind. How to respond to the demands of consumers who want a more daughter-friendly Lego? There was only one thing to do next – make some girly Legos!
Just in time for the holidays, the Danish brand rolled out a pink-themed line of Lego Friends last December, featuring curvaceous, pretty girls who play in pastel-themed, gently constructed cafes, beauty shops, puppy houses and their own little stages. That’s the life of a girl for you – looking pretty, “decorating your house” and eating cupcakes.
From the get-go, the Lego Friends were met with a not-so-friendly response. The International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals called the line “devoid of imagination,” and said it would “promote overt forms of sexism.” US News offered “5 Reasons Not to Buy Your Daughter Pink Legos.” In Time, Ruth Davis Konigsburg bemoaned that “With its emphasis on physical appearance and limited career choices — [is it] really any different from that of Disney’s princesses?” She continued, noting how the Friends sets require the barest of construction, “LEGO Friends doesn’t give girls the same sense of mastery and accomplishment that it gives boys.”
So it’s a hopeful sign that on Friday, members of SPARK (Sexualization Protest Action Resistance Knowledge) are sitting down for a meeting with Lego executives. The goal, as SPARK optimistically explains, is that “We want [Lego] to commit to dramatically increasing the female characters in their non-Friends lines. (The current numbers are pretty dismal.) We want them to consider female representation when choosing pre-existing material to adapt into new toys. And we want them to improve the Friends line.”
It’s a bold hope, especially when Lego reports that Friends line is “off to a very strong start” just the way it is. But it would be wise for a company founded nearly 50 years ago with the imperative to create toys for “girls and for boys” to remember that goal doesn’t mean “girl toys and boy toys.” We don’t need to ostracize our sons and daughters to the divergent wildernesses of ninja land and beauty parlors.
The conservative Christian group One Million Moms is angry. Angry like just-missed-an-awesome-sale angry. Sure, the down-home-sounding offshoot of the reliably right-wing American Family Association exists in a perpetual state of twisted knickers. It’s whipped itself into a frenzy of indignation at the not-quite-exclusionary-enough tactics of Macy’s, Levi’s, Jenny Craig and Oreos in just the past few months. But its outrage at JC Penney, the jeans supplier to at least 800,000 of those million moms, is especially intense of late.
At issue is the group’s contention that by hiring Ellen DeGeneres for a new campaign, the department store is “jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon” and turning away from “traditional families.” The organization warns darkly that “Unless JC Penney decides to be neutral in the culture war then their brand transformation will be unsuccessful.” There is so much to love in that sentence alone. Culture war! Brand transformation! Fearless disregard for the rules of comma usage after a subordinate clause! “The majority of JC Penney shoppers will be offended,” they continue, “and choose to no longer shop there.”
JC Penney, however, which recently declared that “We share the same fundamental values as Ellen,” has remained unmoved from its perch on a “pro-gay bandwagon” in the midst of a “culture war.” (I hope that bandwagon is reinforced.) Also unmoved: the woman at the center of the controversy.
On her daytime talk show Wednesday, DeGeneres cheerfully opened by talking about Proposition 8 being overturned in California, then segued into a riff about her partnership with Penney’s. “Normally I try not to pay attention to my haters,” she said, “but this time I’d like to talk about it.”
After announcing she was “proud and happy” that JC Penney was sticking by her side, she explained to America that “Being gay or pro-gay is not a bandwagon. You don’t get a free ride anywhere. There’s no music, and occasionally we’ll sing, ‘We Are Family,’ but that’s about it.” And she noted that “For a group that calls itself the Million Moms, they have only 40,000 members on their [Facebook] page. They’re rounding to the nearest million.” It was a witty retort to a campaign of hate, though frankly, not nearly as hilarious as the Million Moms’ depiction of DeGeneres as an “open homosexual spokesperson.”
On her show, DeGeneres read some of the hundreds of supportive messages that have been posted on the Million Moms’ own Facebook page since their campaign against her launched. DeGeneres has also received public support from, of all people, Bill O’Reilly, who said on his program Tuesday that the protest was “a witch hunt and shouldn’t happen.” When you’re too loathsome for Bill O’Reilly, you’ve really outdone yourself, loathsomeness-wise.
One Million Moms describes itself as an organization for people who are “fed up” and “tired,” one that devotes itself, seemingly exclusively, to complaining “on behalf of our children.” On her program Wednesday, DeGeneres said, “I stand for honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated, and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values.” Even the most die-hard shopper knows that values aren’t just reasonably priced furnishings from the Cindy Crawford collection. They’re how you live. And if you’re going to be on a bandwagon, who wouldn’t choose the one without all those angry people on it?
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(Credit: iStockphoto/Stratol) 
(Credit: AP/Damian Dovarganes) 
Ellen DeGeneres 
