This article was adapted from the new book "Against Thrift", from Basic Books.
We’re the most affluent people on the planet, us Americans — our choices among foods, ideas, clothes, schools, and destinations are almost without limit — and we love to shop. But we also know that consumer culture is bad for us. How come? In a word: excess. We’re afraid that we consume too many resources, that we save too little of our incomes, and that meanwhile we produce almost nothing of real value. We’re afraid that we can’t observe any limits on our consumption of goods, so that every substance, even food, begins to feel addictive, and every urge, even sex, begins to feel compulsive. When armed with credit cards, it seems, we’re unwilling to defer the immediate gratification of our desires, and we’re thus unable to “save for a rainy day.” We’re also afraid that we’re mere cattle — herded by corporations and “branded” by their admen. We’re especially afraid that consumer culture is making us fat.
So, yes, we love to shop, most avidly between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Still, we know that in the long run, consumer culture is bad for the economy, the environment, and our souls. We sometimes express this split in our personalities by complaining about the “commercialization” of Christmas, typically when we’re fighting crowds of last-minute shoppers. More often we apologize to ourselves, among others, for buying things we didn’t really need, or for indulging a child’s ad-induced desire for a molded plastic toy that will never decompose. Complaining or apologizing, we’re divided by very different orders of feeling. On the one hand, we experience the pleasure of buying, using, and giving away the things on the shopping list. On the other, we know without thinking that the same things already contain a barbaric history of exploitation — “Made in China,” the label says — and foretell an ugly future of mountainous landfills.
But consumer culture is actually good for the economy, the environment, and our souls, among other things. First, sustainable economic growth doesn’t require more saving by households and more investment by CEOs, bankers, traders, and fund managers. In other words, more consumption is the key to balanced growth in the future. That’s right: we need to save less and spend more. Just to begin with, a much larger dose of consumer spending is absolutely necessary to prevent the kind of economic catastrophe that still racks the domestic and international economies. That new dosage requires a redistribution of national income away from profits, which don’t always get invested, toward wages, which almost always get spent. This new course of treatment does more than invert the supply-side cure for our economic ailments — cut taxes on profits, let private enterprise prevail! — because it assumes, in view of the historical record, that profits won’t be productively invested. That’s right: higher profits almost never lead to more investment, more jobs, and more growth. In fact, there’s no demonstrable link between private investment and economic growth, so cutting taxes on corporate profits is pointless at best and destructive at worst. We might as well stop pretending that there is such a link.
Second, consuming goods is as morally complex and significant as producing goods. Making things — the work that requires tools and skills and time — is no more meaningful than buying and using things. In fact, work as such is less important than, say, buying and driving a car, or choosing and wearing that little black dress. (It turns out, in any event, that the kind of work we typically imagine as the obvious alternative to The Mall is what we do at our leisure, after hours: it’s already taken up residence in the neighborhood of consumer culture, where you don’t get paid for what you produce.) Consumer culture doesn’t siphon political energies and fragment social movements by “privatizing” experience: instead it grounds a new politics by animating both new solidarities and new individualities. In the same spirit, advertising — the headquarters of consumer culture — speaks the last utopian idiom of our time because it urges us to create identities unbound by work. I can’t explain the downside of thrift — or the morality of spending — unless I first convince you that the Great Depression and the recent economic crisis are comparable events, both of them caused by an excess of profits and a shortage of wages, or too much saving and not enough spending. It’s a hard case to make because everyone knows how and why to defer gratification. All adults — not just parents — have a powerful psychological urge to put their desires on hold, and that urge makes us receptive to the notion that we’d better be saving more and spending less, just like all the mainstream economists and reputable journalists keep telling us to. We know what will happen to our bank accounts, our waistlines and our marriage vows if we stop listening to their insistent voice of reason.
Even so, we’ve reached the point where we have to confront our fears about consumer culture, because the renunciation of desire, the deferral of gratification, saving for a rainy day — call it what you want — has become dangerous to our health. To heal ourselves, we need to spend more freely, to live less anxiously, more easily and generously, with ourselves and with Nature. (I, for one, don’t believe that there’s much left of Nature — merely planting crops changes the chemical composition of the original soil — but I’m willing to entertain the possibility in the name of an inhabitable environmental future, and, I think consumer culture is a promising path to environmental integrity.)
To save is to withhold earned income from what would otherwise be spent in consuming; to invest is to place that income where it will show a profit, produce a surplus: both acts reveal and develop an emotional capacity — or a psychological disposition — to delay the immediate gratification of spending on consumer goods. We praise this emotional capacity as foresight when it balances present desires and future needs; we condemn it as miserliness when it sacrifices the enjoyment of the present to the compound interest of the future. Either way we look at it, the question is how to make the distinction between our real desires and our genuine needs concrete, measurable, and useful. What emotional or psychological armature is required by the choices that follow?
These are the questions that any defense of consumer culture must raise. And they’ve now become pressing, practical questions for Americans as they grapple with the causes and consequences of the Great Recession — as they decide whether more saving/investment or more consumption is the cure for what ails the economy, and as they decide whether emotional frugality or expenditure is the proper structure of their souls. So when I urge Americans to save less and consume more as the solution to the economic problems they face, I’m also urging them to be less thrifty in the broadest sense, to withhold less and desire more, in view of the material abundance at their disposal. I’m urging them to see that saving for a rainy day — treating this life as austere probation for another — is a soul-crushing emotional trap as well as an economic dead end.
Marx showed that all commodities have two properties, a use value and an exchange value — a particular, subjective, mostly material meaning on the one hand, and a placeless, objective, monetary meaning on the other. Every commodity raises, or just is, a question that divides our attention: what is this thing good for, and what is its price? (The exceptions to this rule are of course paper money, the not-thing that’s valuable only if you can use it as a medium of exchange, and credit, the future tense of paper money.) Marx also showed that before the advent of capitalism, the consumption of goods was both the goal and the limit of production. He called that situation “simple commodity circulation,” and diagrammed its crucial circuit as C-M-C, where C stands for commodity and M stands for money.
At this stage in the development of markets, the point of producing and selling goods was not to accumulate ever more exchange value, more money in the bank, but to acquire just enough use values, just enough material goods, to validate your accustomed way of life. When capitalism emerged, labor itself became a commodity — now you had to buy the right not to die of starvation by working for wages — and the “formula for capital” reversed the relations of simple commodity circulation. The new formula looked like this: M-C-M1, where money, exchange value, wealth in the abstract, became the premise and the purpose of goods production, while use values—particular, material things, even human bodies — became the means to more exchange value, more money in the bank, rather than ends in themselves. The “cash nexus” accordingly became the site of every transaction, and consumption gave way to accumulation as the proper goal of the good life.
Students of Marx have invariably deployed these distinctions — between use and exchange value, or between simple commodity circulation and the formula for capital — to indict consumer culture for the crime of commodity fetishism. By this he meant what follows from our uniquely human ability to treat a chair, say, as both a particular, material thing, right here and now, and a symbolic property that transcends its local function and shape.
It’s when we endow dead matter with transcendent meanings that objects begin to stand in for sentient beings and the fetishism of commodities becomes the norm. Here’s how Walt Whitman explained this weird process: “When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the nightwatchman’s daughter, / When warrantee deeds loafe in chairs opposite and are my friendly companions.” But unlike almost every student of Marx, Whitman didn’t stop there; he went on to announce that he would craft poems from commodities: “I intend to reach them my hand and make as much of them as I do of men and women.”
When you buy a car or a jacket or that little black dress, you don’t expect to profit from it. In fact you know it becomes less valuable, except to you, the moment you buy it. In this sense, your purchase of consumer goods constantly reinstates the archaic circuit of simple commodity circulation. In the same sense, your purchase has removed the object of your desire from the domain of commodities: its significance no longer includes its price, even when others recognize how much it cost you, because everybody knows that if you put it back on the market, you’ll get less than you paid for it. Where the commodity once divided your attention between its price and its purpose, between its exchange value and its use value, the thing you’ve bought now has only a use value: it’s been “defetishized” by your purchase.
So consumer culture is a practical limit on the accumulation of wealth in the abstract; it resists the restless, expansive formula for capital, which sacrifices enjoyment in the present to the compound interest of the future, always in the name of growth. It urges us to acquire use values rather than exchange values, to save less and spend more, but it doesn’t sacrifice the future in the name of present enjoyment. In fact, it teaches us how to produce and preserve the things our children might want or need—the things they might use.
James Livingston is a professor of history at Rutgers University -- New Brunswick, where he has taught since 1990 on American economic, cultural and intellectual theory. He has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is the author of four previous books and is a regular contributor to the History News Network. He lives in New York City.
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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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Ellen DeGeneres 
