Are Bookstores Being Too Censorious With Author Events?

Jennifer Weiner is a best-selling author. And while her latest novel, Best Friends Forever, proved popular enough to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, this didn’t stop a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Framingham, Massachusetts from raising a censorious eyebrow.

Some bookstores have begun instituting informal policies which preclude authors from using four-letter words during a public reading. And even dependable draws like Weiner are being asked to hold their tongues. These developments — reflected most recently in the Weiner case — raise new questions about just how much an author is allowed to get away with in the 21st century and whether bookstore policies that are understandably intended to protect children are going too far.

The trouble for Weiner began when she playfully announced the “potty-mouthed” nature of her Best Friends Forever book tour on Twitter. Shortly after her Philadelphia reading, Weiner later tweeted that she had received a warning:

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Weiner carried on with the Framingham gig without setting off any F-bombs, and applied her saucy language instead to the inscriptions. (After tweeting about the Framingham event, the organizer of a subsequent off-site event in St. Louis encouraged Weiner to be extra raunchy.)

“I can’t imagine it’s a blanket B&N policy,” said Weiner. “I kicked off the Best Friends Forever tour at the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Triangle in New York City, and I said ‘cock’ like nine times and told a story about a Hitachi Magic Wand, and the manager seemed perfectly okay with it (my poor editor, who brought her parents to the reading, not so much). As much as I’d like to turn this into a ‘corporate stiffs censor freewheeling lady writer because the world hates it when a lady succeeds’ story, I honestly think it was just this one bookstore, that one afternoon, making a not-unreasonable request.”

A list of questions was sent to Mary Ellen Keating, Barnes and Noble’s senior vice president of corporate communication and public affairs. But there was no response. I was able to reach Margaret Moore, the community relations manager of the Framingham store, by phone. But she was extremely nervous, even when I assured her that I was merely determining questions of policy. I did receive a return phone call from Maddie Hjulstrom, a regional community relations manager at Barnes and Noble, who was gracious enough to talk with me.

Hjulstrom informed me that the email had been sent by Moore when Moore had “learned that Ms. Weiner’s language was colorful at her discussions.”

According to Weiner, the Framingham controversy arose out of concerns that the reading area was adjacent to the children’s section and that Weiner’s scheduled reading time — 3:00 PM — would be too early to account for the hallowed ears of tots.

“Because the event was on a Sunday afternoon,” said Weiner, “I think the bookstore managers reasonably expected that there would be kids there, and felt that they could reasonably ask me to tone down the cussing.”

This was confirmed by Hjulstrom, who told me that the objections had to do with the microphone’s close placement to the children’s department and the possibility that Weiner’s amplified words might drift like cigarette smoke into a 1980s restaurant’s nonsmoking section.

“We want to be respectful of young families and children,” said Hjulstrom. “We don’t regulate where children are in our store. At 3:00 PM, it might be a problem.”

Had Barnes & Noble ever received any customer complaints because of an author or a poet using salty language during a reading? Hjulstrom told me that she couldn’t give me an example of the Framingham store having received a single customer complaint, but that the region, as a whole, had received a few complaints.

The Barnes & Noble “no salty language” policy is, according to Hjulstrom, “not a written policy, just common courtesy.” It is something that is determined on a case-by-case basis.

“All we can do is ask,” said Hjulstrom. “We don’t enforce. We don’t kick them out of their store. We just ask them to respect the children who are in the stores.”

I asked Hjulstrom what might happen if an author used salty language, but did not receive a single customer complaint.

“I’m not comfortable going into what ifs,” replied Hjulstrom. “I just want to deal with the facts.”

But the prohibition causes one to wonder why bookstores — even with the possibility of a child lurking around a bookstore late at night — would be so offended by a monosyllabic exclamation that anyone who has ever stubbed a toe is quite familiar with. Were there efforts by Weiner and Barnes and Noble to broker a last-minute deal?

“We didn’t try to broker a compromise mostly because there wasn’t time,” explained Weiner. “The best solution would have been either to hold the event somewhere else, or after dark, and with just over twenty-four hours, on a weekend, to either reschedule or relocate, that just didn’t seem feasible. And again, once I got over my reflexive ‘the MAN is trying to SHUT ME UP’ paranoia, it didn’t seem like a crazy thing to ask. I’ve got little kids, and if I took them into a bookstore on a Sunday afternoon to pick up the latest Sandra Boynton or ‘Junie B. Jones,’ I probably wouldn’t be thrilled to find some lady standing behind a microphone talking, as I tend to, about ‘wall-to-wall cock.'”

Still, independent bookstores such as San Francisco’s The Booksmith have conducted numerous author events in its children’s section, closing the section off to make room for the audience to sit down. Booksmith co-owner Praveen Madan informed me that, while there are generally no kids around at the time of the event, his bookstore doesn’t make any concessions if an event takes place in the middle of the day.

“We take freedom of speech very seriously and even the suggestion of us laying down any kind of censoring guidelines for authors makes me cringe,” said Madan. “And the issue here is more than freedom of speech. We believe it’s important for authors to be authentic and credible, and sometimes being authentic requires saying things that might end up offending some people. I would rather shut down the bookstore and sell falafels than try to engineer an author’s talk to make the author more palatable for a certain audience. You should be clear about what business you are in. We are in the business of intellectual discourse and opening people’s minds to new ideas and possibilities. If you want to be in the business of reinforcing people’s existing belief systems, than you should run a religious institution or radio talk show, not a bookstore.”

It’s also worth observing that prohibitions on what an author can say at a reading can sometimes have unexpected side effects. As Tayari Jones observed on her blog recently, the author can feel oddly shamed when contending with a complaint.

Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, formerly of McNally Jackson and now working hard to open the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene this autumn, says that there was never a policy prohibiting language or controversial topics at an author event when she worked at McNally. But she did mention that she hoped to be more sensitive to such matters at Greenlight.

“We don’t intend to set any blanket policy,” said Bagnulo. “I think for the most part we will trust our customers to know whether an author is going to be inappropriate for their children or potentially offensive to their own sensibilities. As long as we make clear from the outset what the event is likely to contain, we won’t try to restrict or prohibit authors from anything they’d like to say.”

Even if the event is scheduled in the middle of the day?

“Not unless it’s an event specifically geared toward kids,” replied Bagnulo. “For example, at McNally we held a Halloween event that had kids programming earlier in the day, and some adult authors reading later that had lots of graphic blood and gore.”

Before the Framingham incident, Weiner had never received any complaints from a bookstore for her act. But censorship issues aren’t limited to the big box stores. Weiner alluded to an incident that came from an ostensible independent:

“In 2001, when Good in Bed came out, I did hear from one independent bookstore somewhere in the Midwest that an older gentleman had objected to a cover featuring the book’s poster (naked legs and cheesecake) in the window. But that’s as close to censorship as I’ve come.”

For what it’s worth, Weiner did say that she would do an event at the Framingham bookstore again: “I’d just make sure it was an evening event, or that it was held somewhere far, far away from the innocent ears of children.”

“In general, we feel that authors these days have become rather conservative and risk averse because they are trying to become bestsellers and are afraid of stirring controversy,” said Madan. “I wish more authors would pick topics that might be controversial and not worry about offending people. There are important topics being ignored and we all tend to surround ourselves with people we agree with and we like.”

“I think that indie bookstores work to create an environment of mutual respect between authors and audiences,” said Bagnulo, “where what is controversial is taken in context as part of the conversation, and there’s enough transparency of intention that people are unlikely to be offended.

“It’s not a bad idea to mention ahead of time, ‘Hey, I work blue,'” said Weiner, “but it’s never been a problem in the past, and I don’t really expect it to be a problem going forward.”

The Bat Segundo Show: J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennon appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #300.

J. Robert Lennon is most recently the author of Castle and Pieces for the Left Hand.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating his surprising longevity after 300 shows.

Author: J. Robert Lennon

Subjects Discussed: Ending sentences with nouns, how location affects character description, objects and places as the territory of a story, how the land in upstate New York inspires narrative, objects that regular readers can relate to, lost childhood, lost parents, more isolated characters in Lennon’s later novels, meals in fiction, antipodean metaphors within Castle, working with a narrative juxtaposed against a cultural-historical symmetry, Stanley Milgram, Vietnam and Iraq, whether Loesch’s actions are exonerated by historical injustice, the white symbols and black redaction throughout Castle, cutting down on pre-planning novels and trusting the subconscious, whether we’ll ever see the full version of Happyland, restarting a writing career multiple times, dealing with marketing forces, accessibility, Stewart O’Nan, New York publishing biases against small towns, the unexpected American publication of Pieces for the Left Hand, how naps permitted Lennon to finish Pieces for the Left Hand, relying on anecdotal culture for narrative, long thin environments within Lennon’s novels, survivalist novels written in dark, evil writing labs, the “gray”/”grey” controversy, and batty character surnames close to specific words.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

jrlCorrespondent: You seem to veer between these really lonely tales and these outright satirical tales. After the whole incident where your novel got serialized at Harper’s, I’m curious if there’s some hesitancy on your part to pursue satire. Is that why Castle‘s so dark?

Lennon: No, no, no.

Correspondent: Why bounce around tonally?

Lennon: I had written Mailman and Happyland in sequence. I was in that antic black comic mode for a while. Which I think is kind of my default mode. I like to think that I go away from it for a few books. I do something very different. And then, whatever I learn there, I bring it into default mode. I mean, right now, I’m writing a book that has a large cast of characters with some manic satirical elements. And, in fact, it’s a family book. Except it’s the opposite of the other family books. It’s not that family members are missing. It’s that there are too many of them. It’s a big ad hoc family that has come together in spite of the unlikelihood of that happening.

Correspondent: It’s interesting. Because I thought you were going to give me the James Ellroy line for this book.

Lennon: Oh?

Correspondent: You know how he says, “It’s fun for the whole family…if you’re the Manson family.” He does this every time he sells a book.

Lennon: (laughs)

Correspondent: But I mean, that’s interesting. I should also point out with Eric, there is nevertheless a strange absurdism to his need for having things in place. And, in fact, and I’m sorry to just throw a bunch of things at you at once, I wanted to ask about the two meals he eats, which are essentially bipolar. You have this really greasy cheeseburger. And then he goes and he eats this vegetarian meal. So it’s almost as if his choices are reflective of not being able to fit into the middle of these two antipodean ends. And I’m curious how much this was a part of devising the character. Having specific locative places like this that he couldn’t inhabit. The middle ground.

Lennon: Well, I think the problem with him is that he can’t inhabit the world. And I wanted to have a scene with him twice, where he had to go and eat something, and he would take that opportunity to sit and think about things for a few minutes. And it occurs to me, “Where does this guy eat?” He’s so abstract. He’s so detached from human life — or this is how he presents himself anyway — that the notion of him eating a cheeseburger is just ridiculous. And it was only later I realized, there’s nothing I could have him eat that would seem right. Because he’s not the kind of person that goes to a restaurant. He’s the kind of person that exists in this sort of dark, violent abstraction as a dark, violent abstraction. I mean, this isn’t an explicitly comic book by any stretch, but I found these scenes to be kind of funny to write. I mean, he’s at the Vegan place!

Correspondent: Well, there’s also this notion too of him fixing the renovations on his house under time, which is interesting in light of the fact that you do mention Iraq in this book. And, of course, Iraq has no timetable. So I’m curious again about these points of disparity throughout the book. How many of these were designed along these lines? There’s also the symmetry, of course, of his very predicament. Here he is. Something terrible has happened to him. And he, in turn, has become someone who has done something terrible as well. So I’m curious. At what point during the conception or the writing of this novel were you aware? Or did you design such symmetry?

Lennon: The Iraq thing came first. And it was only after my wife was reading an article in Weird NJ — the magazine — about a guy who finds a castle in the woods while walking through the woods that it occurred to me that this should be the setting for this book that I had in mind. Like she was the one who told me that that was the setting for the book I had in mind.

Correspondent: Really?

Lennon: Yeah, and when I started thinking about this guy, I was reading a lot of Kazuo Ishiguro. You know, how his narrators are — they’re liars really. Nothing dishonest, but they’re creating a reality for themselves that’s appealing to them. They’re justifying their actions. They’re justifying the things that are happening around them in a very self-serving way. I’m just going to write a first-person narrative like that. Not unreliable, per se. But it’s the sound of a guy who’s done something wrong convincing himself that there isn’t any ambiguity about it.

BSS #300: J. Robert Lennon (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #299.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Life, Inc.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Surprised to discover someone more contentious than he is.

Author: Douglas Rushkoff

Subjects Discussed: The wage labor system established in Portugal in 1253, Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages, whether the day laborer can stand up, children and branding, people who attend Wealth Expo, the real estate market, pyramid schemes, The Secret, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the relationship between self-actualization and helping other people, social interaction, Rushkoff publicly announcing his “anonymous” good deeds, Rushkoff’s anger and crazed speculations on whether or not the Correspondent is a journalist or a Colbert-like persona, why Rushkoff couldn’t just walk into a Westchester school and drop off some comics, the WTO and Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, whether Ricardo (and Paul Samuelson) is applicable to individuals and small businesses, the applicability Nash equilibrium, game theory and behavior, the meaningful life metric, cultural values of the 19th century and the home as a fiefdom, most of the world population now living within cities, New York City’s development, whether or not regular people can afford to live in the city, Birkdale Village, NC and New Urbanism gone awry, Rushkoff’s judgment on places for community, tangents about whether a Mickey Mouse watch purchased at Disneyland is real, what “real” is now about, whether brands represent a legitimate common connection, the consequences of viral marketing and Rushkoff not striking it rich, why Rushkoff opted to publish with a corporation, whether or not the Correspondent is “mean,” and whether or not this is the worst interview Rushkoff has done.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: You write, “A kid’s selection of sneaker brand says more about him than his creative writing assignments do and is approached with greater care.” Let me ask you something, Douglas. Do you remember the brand name of the high school sneaker that you wore?

Rushkoff: I do.

Correspondent: Really. What was it?

Rushkoff: I wore Keds. And then I wore this JC Penney brand. But by high school, I was in Scarsdale. And everybody else wore Pumas and Adidas. And we just wouldn’t spend the money We couldn’t spend the money on it. Because my parents had spent everything they had to get us into that neighborhood. And I was teased actively and relentlessly. Because I had a fox on my shirt instead of a little alligator.

rushkoff2Correspondent: But the writing that you did. The times that you had. Surely now, decades later, you remember those times. They matter more to you than the brand name on that sneaker. And not only that. But it seems to me that you had a situation. I had a similar situation in terms of having hand-me-downs and that kind of thing.

Rushkoff: But I went to high school before MTV. I went to high school before this hyper-branded universe even happened.

Correspondent: But such a statement is a bit of a generalization. Do you think that this applies to everybody? Every high schooler?

Rushkoff: No.

Correspondent: Okay, well then why….

Rushkoff: Why do you pull out a single sentence from a book and try to say that my entire argument is based….

Correspondent: I’m trying to figure out where you’re coming from in terms of how this branding….

Rushkoff: I’m saying that if you talk to most high school kids about the amount of effort that they put into a paper and how much they thought about it — try and have a deep conversation with them about a paper — and then have a deep conversation about which brand of tennis shoe they bought and why. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid. It means that they have more depth of knowledge and experience and thought into who is Nike, what does Nike mean, what is the brand image mean than what did Abraham Lincoln do with the railroads in that paper I just wrote.

Correspondent: Even inner-city kids, you would say? Or kids who have parents — like your situation growing up — that don’t have the option of putting hundreds of dollars out for a high-brand sneaker.

Rushkoff: I don’t think. I think in many cases the poor have more relationships with those brands than the wealthy.

Correspondent: I ask this question in light of other examples that you use in this book. You attend a Wealth Expo at Jacob Javits.

Rushkoff: Right.

Correspondent: And you conclude that a lot of the people who attend this expo were there to essentially improve their circumstances. They were almost rube-like.

Rushkoff: Right. I don’t think that the people going to Wealth Expo are spending the two or five hundred dollars to have a cynical entertainment experience, or to laugh at Trump. I don’t think they really are getting it as, “Look at this funny bizarre cultish situation.” I think they are there in earnest. I think they want to make money by going.

Correspondent: But I’m wondering. Wouldn’t your scope have been broadened if you had followed, say, Charles and Sandra two or three years later to see if someone actually got money out of these DVDs that were thrown into the audience? I mean, I didn’t see in the book any positive results from Wealth Expo and I’m wondering if you were able to determine any over the course of your peregrinations and your inquiries.

Rushkoff: I was more interested in the Wealth Expo as a phenomenon. I was more interested – I mean, it’s true. We should follow The Secret. It is possible that the people who are using The Secret are developing a spiritual path through which humanity is going to be saved. It is possible. You know, and it’s not — I think that the probability of it is so low that I don’t want to dedicate my life to pursuing that. I think that it is such a blatant scam that it doesn’t even deserve that long-term sociological study. But anyone who wants to go do that, I welcome them to do that. I was more interested in the fact that even after the real estate crisis — now it is my belief and you don’t have to buy this either — it is my belief that it has been revealed that many banks and many Americans made some mistakes in the real estate industry and in mortgage banking. And you can argue this one. But I think that it has been almost proven that there’s a crisis of foreclosures and mortgage-backed loans. And those kind of things have turned out not to work the way they were planned to. And I think that’s almost accepted.

The Wealth Expo that I went to, which was happening after the mortgage crisis, was trying to teach people how to take advantage of other people going into foreclosure. Most of the people I spoke to at the Wealth Expo were people who were in foreclosure. So they were looking at how to try to make money off of people who were about to go through the same thing that they did. And at an event that had fairly accepted charlatans with Jack Canfield and Donald Trump and, you know, get-rich-quick real estate DVD schemes that you see on TV at night. You know. Flip that house. That they shared the stage with Alan Greenspan was fascinating to me. Because I feel that he understands that this really is the real estate market. And maybe it will work. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the way to get through it is to scam. Let’s join Amway. Let’s join Mary Kay. Let’s create pyramid schemes and MLMs. Let’s flip this house. Let’s build something out of nothing. And maybe there’s another few laps in that horse yet. Okay. Go for it. If you believe it.

Correspondent: Well, it seems to me…it seems…

Rushkoff: I think the opportunity rather is to consider whether there are Americans who might choose to create value with their work. To make something. To provide a good or service to someone. And that there’s still time to build an economy on the exchange of value between people rather than pyramid schemes.

Correspondent: But this pyramid scheme. The Secret. The Wealth Expo. Whatever. Amway. People are still going to these things. They’re flocking to these things. This may, in fact, stand against your people-based economic solution that you’re suggesting here and at the end of your book. But…

Rushkoff: Why is that? I don’t understand. So you’re saying — so that lots of people in a country end up killing other people. So that stands against the logic that people might have fun not killing each other.

Correspondent: Maybe you could…

Rushkoff: Well, what are you saying?

Correspondent: Well, what I’m asking here. Perhaps you could explain why people continue to flock to things like The Secret while the 600 years that you document in this book demonstrate that corporations are essentially in control and exploiting….

Rushkoff: The Secret is corporate! What do you think The Secret is? You think that The Secret is a bottom-up, home-spun, let’s hold hands and reclaim America movement? No. What The Secret is is a set of instructions for people to assume the same posture as corporations. To create wealth by thinking it. I think the reason. The very reason why people do flock to a pyramid scheme supporting philosophy like The Secret is because they have internalized the logic of corporatism. Because they think that the idea of actually doing something for someone, of actually lifting, is obsolete.

Correspondent: You go after Maslow in this. Do you think Maslow’s a pyramid scheme?

(Image: WNYC)

BSS #299: Douglas Rushkoff (Download MP3)

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The Bat Segundo Show: China Mieville II

China Mieville recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #298.

China Mieville is most recently the author of The City & The City. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #105.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Searching for the Mieville and the Mieville.

Author: China Mieville

Subjects Discussed: When The City & The City was written, speculating on the novel’s setting, ratty technology and shambolic modern cities, passenger policy, comparisons between The City & The City and “Reports of Certain Events in London,” subconscious intent and conceptual framework, police procedural dialogue vs. melodramatic dialogue, whether an author’s voice is “reigned in” because of genre, the myths of genre constraints, steps taken in advance to alter voice, the dangers of reading while writing, maintaining two sets of momentum while writing two different books, the enabling qualities of thematics, multiculturalism in Canada, satire and political engagement within fiction, resisting critical labels within a cultural framework, Jacques Lacan, metaphors in fiction, Mieville’s frustrations with perceived author endorsements, readers who cling to rigid interpretation, disappointing mystery novels, designing endings as moral dilemmas, circumstances in which you can exonerate the author, Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, uneasy books, the dangers of unease as an abstract concept, not distinguishing between aesthetic and emotive qualities within text, resisting post-structuralism, seeing text as part of social totality, and keeping people turning pages.

VIDEO EXCERPT:

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

mievilleMieville: Fundamentally, what this is about is taking the logic of everyday borders — the logic of political boundaries — and extrapolating them just a little tiny bit. But the logic is the same. It’s an exaggeration, but it’s not a radical break. So in terms of the rules of physics and all that sort of stuff, it is at least 96% sure that they are the same as in this world here. This is not a magical realm in that sense. That’s not how this works. And that’s quite a big difference. Because that short story [“Reports of Certain Events in London”] was very much about the kind of implicit dream logic of the psychogeography of London, and literalizing that metaphor and the city as an uneasy beast. This is slightly different. In some ways, this is much more to do with a genuine juridical legal reality of the world. As I said, it’s extrapolated. But to that extent, it’s very realistic. The logic of the strangeness is actually a logic that exists in the real world. It’s a little bit exaggerated, but that’s all. So to me, they feel quite different. But that’s not to invalidate your point. Because like I say, it has much to do with reception and subconscious stuff. But at a conscious level, they felt different to me.

Correspondent: Yeah. But you’re also dealing with a conceptual framework here with the two cities. And this leads me to wonder — since, of course, the last time we talked, you talked repeatedly about your notion of monsters and the way your imagination works — if this is very much extending into creating this giant world. Here you have a situation in which on a dialogue standpoint — just on that alone — you are now dealing with procedural dialogue, as opposed to what we have seen in your previous books, in which you have dialogue that is very intense and dramatic. Because, of course, there are giant monsters that are terrorizing the landscape and ripping things up. And, of course, people are going to want to get other people’s attention in this. But I’m curious if going to this procedural dialogue was a bit of a challenge — because you had to possibly restrain the natural inventiveness that definitely crops up in the dialogue as well as the narrative — or if the conceptual framework was just enough to even things out. Or if there any difficulties in the procedural dialogue whatsoever.

Mieville: Well, it didn’t feel difficult. Now that’s not to say it’s done well. I mean, I’m not the right person to judge. It’s up to readers. They might be saying, “Well, of course, it didn’t feel difficult. Because you totally fucked it up.” You know, I don’t know. I mean, for me — can I swear? Sorry.

Correspondent: Oh yeah. You can say whatever the hell you want here.

Mieville: Alright. Okay. But, no, in the writing, it didn’t feel difficult. Because for me, it’s always a question of trying to get into the voice at the start. So it wasn’t a question. Like I don’t think I have a default voice as people possibly think. Because the Bas-Lag books have a baroque meandering voice. So that’s obviously what I’m known for. And I understand that. But I think it’s more that each of the voices was got into as part of the project. So, for this, because this was always a book that was conceived of as a noir — as a noir set in what is, brackets, very, very nearly, close brackets, the real world, it felt completely different from the word go. And so people ask the same question of Un Lun Dun. Did it feel difficult to get into a slightly more playful child-friendly voice? No. Because that’s the mode you’re in when you’re starting the writing. I was reading a lot of noir. I was reading a lot of crime. I was thinking in terms of telling a story to my mum, who read a lot of books like that. So that was the voice that that demanded. So, no, it wasn’t a question of reigning yourself in. It was a question of indulging the voice that you had got into for this job. If that makes sense.

Correspondent: But still, you are dealing with limitations here in a way that you’re not in any of your other books. Because you don’t have those giant monsters. Literal monsters. Metaphorically speaking, we can go into that too. But you have to reign yourself in. Because even though, as you argued in your Scalzi piece, you don’t believe mystery novels to represent any kind of realism, there is nevertheless a verisimilitudinous plane that you have to meet with this. It’s a little bit different.

Mieville: They pretend to be realist.

Correspondent: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Mieville: Yeah, that’s true. There is a limitation. But there’s a limitation in all forms. Genres are both constraining and enabling. Now one of the things I wanted to do when I was writing this book — it was very important to me that this was a book that was faithful to crime. That somebody who was interested in crime, who read a crime novel, would not feel that this is some outsider who doesn’t get the rules, who doesn’t play fair. I wanted to be completely respectful and have total fidelity to that paradigm. So you’re quite right. I can’t magic them out of a difficult situation. You don’t have the recourse to that sort of thing. But at the same time, you have other things that are potentialities. Like I know a lot of readers with the best will in the world, without any snobbery, who simply cannot proceed with a book once they’ve had too much of a strong eruption of the fantastic.

(Photo: Mattia V)

BSS #298: China Mieville II (Download MP3)

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Review: Lorna’s Silence (2009)

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What follows are the notes I took during Lorna’s Silence, which opens in limited release this Friday:

Shuffling of notes under window. Pan up to woman. Counting. 340. Appointment. A loan. Will be Belgian soon. Against yellow wall at beginning. Green. Red counter. Blue. Talking. Telecom. Hair. Roommate. One euro ten. Close the curtains. Moving the bed. Told him no. (No cards.) Turn the music down. Music. Not so bad. Hide her. Hold on. Lorna — calls in the night.

Have to be up at six. Not going. Quit. Look in. Must resist. An addict. Cloudy. A mess. He’s quitting.

A cop. Give him. Will police pursue it? Just when you leave Belgium.

Buscopan.

Does bell ring?

Drug dealer. Buscopan for cramps. Selfishness. Paid to marry. Not divorce. Number 3. Phone calls. Water. Selfishness vs. selfishness. Cloudy Moreau. Two days. Going down stairs. Will somebody take care of me? Computer address.

Returning stuff when done. Bug. Blinds in hospital. Divorce. No. We picked a date to avoid divorce. Sokol — the Russian. If he DJs now, it’ll be weird. Couple behind dating. Need to be a widow. Sokol — kissing him. Race to set. Will she fuck him? Almost 20,000 in the account. Wait for the Russian. Banker with addresses. Walking around. Tea held with both hands. Turning a light off.

Hitting arms against doorway. Bruises. Police. Her arms. Not enough for a fast-track divorce. Bruising — self-inflicted. Junkie and thief. “I’ve never hit a woman.” Playing of cards. Five stacks. Bridge? He didn’t turn violent.

Parking lot. Cars. You don’t go to the cops. First deal with the Russians. Lorna I know. Guy at the station. Sokol beard shaved. Cleaners. Getting the divorce. Making dinner. Celebrate getting out. Her getting out. Fabio — waiting. Russian won’t wait. Two weeks after divorce.

Taxi cab driver. Paid 5,000. Red pants. Red jeans. Russian agrees. Real violence. Stripping down. Sex. Naked crying. Attempt at play. Finally emotion.

Running after him. In love? I’d handle the dirty clothes. Funeral costs. WTF? See him one last time. Real? Yellow walls. Sure you won’t stay? Running away. CO player. Thank me instead. Extra cont.

Heroin dealer. Duped him from buying it. Was that action part of the deal? Money nothing. Cleaning woman. See her at moments. At work. Drinking. Selling money.

A junkie prefers drugs to life. Three rooms and a garden. Yellow tables. With Russians. Long take. A carton of cigarettes in Moscow. Snack bar. Garden — even trees. Second floor bedroom. Wants money. Hides the money. Pregnant — saw this coming. Havent’ eaten, low blood pressure. Same as hour. Account for baby. Pregnancy. Miscarriage. Not pregnant. Too late to accept it. X-ray. Leopard shirt. The loan. 7,000 Euros. Stay. Need to set. Don’t be hard. With cock. We’ll keep running. Cabin in the woods. Talking to herself. I won’t let you die. Disappointing myth.

You Can’t Write About It

You can’t write a deeply critical piece on Obama and patiently explain that you’re a liberal. You can’t make fun of the homeless or the disabled or the flawed, and yet you also can’t bring yourself to condemn Governor Schwarzenegger’s callous slash and burn, which will hurt many people. You can’t write against a popular position and be considered anything less than a predictable contrarian. You can’t take chances. You can’t express your feelings in this foolishly rational age. For you’ll lose your precious sinecure at the newspaper.

You can’t write about certain people because they might be able to throw you some work. You can’t publicly question some of your more sensitive friends, the advertisers, or the executives. You can’t find the time to quietly encourage someone. You can’t write about the dumbass who gets the work you so desperately need simply because he has a book and you don’t. You can’t write the truth, but you always claim you stand for it. You can’t criticize your heroes or praise the noble qualities of your enemies.

You can’t reveal how men really feel about breasts or what women think of biceps. You can’t write about how much you want him and the whiff of desperation they all smelled on you after so many lonely return trips home without the ephemeral human trophies. You can’t write about the guy you fucked when she was out of town on business and how you never told him and how you fucked him again. You can’t write about the girl you knocked up and the day you called in sick to spend the day at the abortion clinic. You can’t write about your prevarications. You can’t write about how you ignored the struggling friend who needed work so that you could get ahead. You can’t write about that last atavistic impulse you have towards those with darker skin or a sexual orientation you consider peculiar, if not outright sinful. You can’t write about that one time you stepped hard on the gas and almost killed the son of a bitch, the time you didn’t hold the door open for the old woman, the night you drunkenly pissed on the man who asked you for change, and the cruel afternoon in which you told many children that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny didn’t exist simply because you were bored.

You can’t write about joy or something filling the world with so much good.

You can’t write about these things. Because it will reflect poorly on you. Because, oh dear, you’ll be judged. If only you could take a chance.

Small wonder the newspapers aren’t interesting.

RIP Merce Cunningham

New York Times: “He went on doing so almost to the last. Until 1989, when he reached the age of 70, he appeared in every single performance given by his company, Merce Cunningham Dance Company; in 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater. And in 2009, even after observing his 90th birthday with the world premiere of the 90-minute ‘Nearly Ninety,’ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music he went on choreographing for his dancers, telling people as they went to say farewell to him that he was still creating dances in his head.”

(via Books, Inq.)

Did the New Yorker Make Nicholson Baker Elitist?

Last year, the New York Review of Books had the bright idea of commissioning Nicholson Baker to write an exuberant essay about Wikipedia. Beginning with the simple sentence, “Wikipedia is just an incredible thing,” Baker’s piece went on to chart his participation and subsequent obsession with the well-known website. Baker expressed his genuine horror at cavalierly deleted articles and depicted the many communal surprises he found along the way. It was a journey of self-discovery that permitted many who had used Wikipedia to rediscover the collective pixie dust selflessly sprinkled in the pursuit of knowledge. The essay was widely cited and linked. Here was the man who had once tapped his life savings to preserve newspapers now mining unexpected nuggets from a rich digital deposit. And Baker, under the moniker “Wageless,” continued with his Wikipedia contributions for some months after the article had been published.

Fast forward to today, with The New Yorker — a publication that not a single writer can afford to say no to — commissioning Nicholson Baker to write about the Kindle. But where The New York Review of Books managed to subvert expectations, the New Yorker has applied a marketing team’s craven predictability, with Baker corrupting his voice in the process. Baker’s essay is laden with cheap shots and clumsy generalizations. He’s not interested in seeing the bigger picture, even as he attempts some slapdash journalism when talking with Russ Wilcox on the phone. I’ll defer to Teleread’s Robert Nagle for Baker’s gross technological oversights. The more troubling betrayal here — one I hope that is merely temporary — is that the man who once unapologetically expressed his passion about John Updike, Wikipedia, and the use of “lumber” is nowhere to be found in this piece. He has been replaced by a brazen elitist who — in this essay at least — is closer to Lee Siegel in temperament than the man who once wrote gently and eloquently about card catalogs, or the writer who has devoted his career asking us to find the magic within the quotidian. The man who has subtly beseeched us to commiserate with the lonely and misunderstood people toiling in offices and talking on phone sex lines has momentarily transformed into a cavalier ruffian who scoffs at regular people for having the temerity to express their enthusiasm on Amazon and who likewise suggests that all blogs are “earnest and dispensable.” (That last comment echos a regrettable stance that can also be found within an inexplicably meanspirited passage from Baker’s forthcoming novel, The Anthologist: “You have to hand it to those podcasters. They keep on going week after week, even though nobody’s listening to them. And then eventually they puff up and die.”)

For a writer who has been so careful with his sentences, it’s astonishing to see Baker capitulate like this.

I’d be willing to accept Baker’s assaults on Jeff Bezos and the authors who appeared in the Kindle promotional video if Baker wasn’t so fixated on kicking down the average Joe like this. If Baker is going to go after Michael Lewis, Toni Morrison, and Neil Gaiman, then you’d think that he’d cop to the fact that he’s betrayed his own endearing populism for the New Yorker‘s lucrative word rate and prestige. (It should be observed that this is Baker’s first appearance in the New Yorker in nine years.)

The essay’s apologists will probably point to Baker’s defense of the iPod Touch (via Eucalyptus, ScrollMotion, and Stanza) later in the essay as a pro-technology concession. But aside from Baker’s inherently subjective position (indeed, one that doesn’t seem to consider other viewpoints), there’s Baker’s more troubling elision of class. How many unemployed types can afford either a Kindle 2 or an iPod Touch (costing $70 less than the Kindle 2) right now? Oh yeah. Baker hasn’t bothered with that. I guess one of the deals you make when you now sign on to write for the New Yorker is to act as if any thinking or feeling individual making under $30,000 a year doesn’t exist. Or that anybody who puts long hours into a blog or a podcast, or who uses a Kindle to read, can’t possibly be of societal value.

That’s a far cry from the man who once celebrated the “strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose” and who marveled at the capacity for people to build grand things with merely a keyboard and a desire to help. I hope that the old Baker comes back. But this new guy who can’t be bothered to laugh at a wasp passage because it appears on a screen? He sounds like a guy at a house party who can’t laugh at the Seth Rogen movie because it’s not playing in a movie theater.

[UPDATE: I will let this article stand unmodified and uncorrected as a reflection of how I felt at the time. But after some thought, I believe that I jumped to several needless conclusions, some of which have been cleared up by Nicholson Baker himself in the comments. (This update, incidentally, is not motivated by Baker’s appearance. I should point out that I was all set to respond to several comments before he arrived. But propinquity being what it is, the timing has worked out accordingly.) The upshot is this: I suspect that the rather grumpy tone of this article came about because I wrote it just after coming off a particularly terrible six-hour bus ride spearheaded by an unpleasant authoritarian driver who was screaming at random passengers and who did not know how to drive. My girlfriend and I, both in the early leg of this rather hellish journey, had acquired the article through email and read it on a cell phone. Perhaps these reading conditions prove Nick Baker’s point that the medium and the circumstances in which one reads can indeed factor into how one perceives the article, I detected several sentences as troublesome, interpreting them in an emotional way. I presented my findings in rather persuasive terms to my girlfriend, who was somehow persuaded. (I have a regrettable tendency to be able to persuade people of things even when I am wrong.) And the writing of this post occurred not long after we finally decamped from the raving lunatic driving the bus. I still believe that Baker should have used his writing talent for more enthusiastic purposes, but it was wrong of me to suggest some Svengali-like collusion between Baker and Remnick.]

A Taxonomy of Book Bloggers (2009 Edition)

Since the book blogging world changes so frequently — with its first waves and second waves, its stormy internecine battles, and its endless capacity for argument over trivial subjects — I thought the time had come to identify the many different types presently occupying the online literary scene. I need not state my own expertise and qualifications on this topic. I have been a litblogger for six years and I possess such an uncontrolled ego that I have been engaged in some kind of skirmish with every known person writing about books on the Internet. (In fact, Maud Newton and I have been trying to fight a duel for the past eighteen months because we got into a heated conversation over some passage in a Rupert Thomson novel. Alas, our respective calendars have been overbooked with other literary activity.) And I don’t need to tell you how many book bloggers have been killed so that other book bloggers might obtain satisfaction. Let’s just say that corpses have been thrown into the East River.

writeapostBut it occurs to me now, after six years of brawls, gunshots, and angry tears, that these skirmishes have resulted in needless deaths and much in the way of hurt, and that some documentation must be duly presented before the book blogging community to avoid such tragedies in the future. So what follows is a brief (and by no means complete) breakdown of the types of book bloggers you are likely to encounter in the book blogging world.

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The Bitter Ex-Newspaperman: The Bitter Ex-Newspaperman has either been recently fired from a newspaper books section or is about to be fired, and wants to understand the medium that has decimated his goddam livelihood. He is often cranky, but sometimes comes around to the format. Perhaps by turning to blogs, he might find some brief flicker of his former authority — which has been usurped by the new “authority” found at Technorati that he simply does not and cannot understand. The Bitter Ex-Newspapermen who blog longer often mellow out over the course of time and sometimes morph into one of the other types of book bloggers, often waving an elder statesman’s finger at “the way things used to be.”

The Caped Crusader: The Caped Crusader, who sometimes wears a spandex costume while typing, often writes needlessly angry posts about the evils of various newspapers, the inadequacies of the publishing industry, and can often be witnessed frightening rational people when discussing literary matters in a social setting. The caped crusader is often wrong and doesn’t know nearly as much as he thinks. But he doesn’t let that stop him from writing indignant 2,000 word takedowns that are then picked up by other bloggers, where the circlejerk of words carries on as long as this “passionate” coal feeds these flames of resentment.

The Dedicated Troll: You aren’t going to find the Dedicated Troll at BEA, for most Dedicated Trolls are agoraphobic and too cowardly to show their faces in public. But you will find him frequenting the comments section of every major book blog, often leaving nasty and vituperative comments because he so desperately needs attention. Sometimes the Dedicated Troll may have his own blog. But more often than not, he doesn’t. After years of such activity, some Dedicated Trolls eventually confess privately that all they really wanted was a hug in the first place. But such candor comes only after the Dedicated Troll has alienated every person in the literary community.

The eBook Evangelist: The eBook Evangelist owns both a Kindle and a Sony eReader and is often seen throwing hardcovers into a public conflagration to celebrate the “forthcoming digital revolution.” Never mind that an independent third party might easily confuse such symbolic activities with a Nazi book burning. The eBook Evangelist is often so busy bitching with other evangelists about Amazon pricing and digital ubiquity that he often forgets to reveal his thoughts and feelings about what’s actually inside the books. The most frequent word you’ll find used on an eBook Evangelist’s blog is “clueless.” And yet despite the eBook Evangelist’s adamant protests, you’ll still find him patronizing and celebrating the likes of Amazon. An eBook Evangelist then is both an anarchist and a conformist, and contradictory ideological positions can often be found within the same paragraph.

The Literary Solipsist: He has a book coming out in a year. And that’s his sole reason for contacting you. He really doesn’t want to know you at all. You might even say that he doesn’t have much in the way of people skills. In some cases, the literary solipsist is a sociopath. But the Literary Solipsist genuinely believes that you should be honored to touch his cashmere topcoat in a public setting. He will brush you off at a function to talk to people who he deems more important and he will stomp on heads as his perceived stature grows. Then again, his ego might be so enormous that he’ll be perfectly happy if you polish his boots while employees from Graywolf happen to be watching. Because he can then videotape this act of obeisance with his Flip Mino and upload this to YouTube for others to dissect and write blog posts about.

The Sanctimonious Genre Booster: The Sanctimonious Genre Booster wants her genre to be understood, and that’s fine. But the “understanding” comes front-loaded with endless political correctness. Topics that were originally discussed in a thoughtful and necessary manner often veer down impractical rabbit holes, with words like “fail” attached to the end of a controversial noun. Specific authors in the genre community are often held up for derision and damnation. Never mind that these authors might actually have talent or that they’re a bit busy trying to write books.

The Social Braggart: You’ll often find this sad type at a literary cocktail party, standing alone in a corner and typing details that nobody really cares about into her smartphone. She’s the type who often reports who’s attending a party on Twitter. She believes herself to be an operator, but what she doesn’t know is that most people ridicule her behind her back. Which makes her more of a sad case who people tolerate, only because they hope she’ll get a life at some point down the line.

Where’s the Money? The “Where’s the Money?” blogger is mostly harmless. Just don’t expect much in the way of socialization. Here’s a typical conversation with a “Where’s the Money?” blogger.

A: Say, what’s that book you’re reading?
B: Where’s the money?
A: Where’s the Money? That’s an actual book?
B: I blog. Where’s the money? 3. Profit!
A: Well, I blog too. But there isn’t any money.
B: There’s got to be money. There’s got to be a revenue stream. Where’s the money?
A: Uh, can I buy you a drink?
B: Where’s the money?

And so forth.

Very often, the “Where’s the Money?” blogger can be weaned off of his relentless pursuit of cash and be made to understand that he has a dormant love of writing.

The Visceral Realist: The visceral realist has read The Savage Detectives at least twice, believes Roberto Bolano to be a genius, and secretly harbors the hope to punch out anyone who would read or dwell upon such “lesser” books as romance, science fiction, mystery, or other ghettoized genres. Unfortunately, the visceral realist is too cowardly and passive-aggressive to do so. The visceral realist is often quite humorless and has failed to understand that The Savage Detectives was, in a large sense, a warning against a certain type of literary obsessive. Some visceral realists set up online literary journals featuring 6,000-word essays about obscure Venezuelan writers that nobody reads.

Get the Pitchforks! The Mermaid Has Breasts!

realmsoffantasyThe cover for the Realms of Fantasy reboot (pictured at right) has generated a number of prissy blog posts from the likes of K. Tempest Bradford — truly inhabiting a teapot — and Jim C. Hines. The charge? Because the cover features a mermaid who has bared breasts, it is somehow sexist. Never mind that the image in question here does not present the mermaid as a sex object. (Surely a pair of extended gumdrop nipples, a sexist “Fuck me” pout, or some dreadful violation from a satyr would have done the trick. But the star on the mermaid’s right shoulder here is far more prominent than the mermaid’s scaly and subdued torso.)

The line of reasoning by these two sanctimonious pinheads is that, by featuring a topless mermaid, the magazine is, in the words of Hines, “worshipping at the Altar of Big Breasts.” This assumes, of course, that any human being who sees a Big Breast is going to immediately have sexual thoughts about it. But if the cover’s intent was mammary allure, then surely it has failed. For if the cover wanted to emphasize the breasts, certainly it would have made the glands in question ginormous. Never mind that the breasts being depicted here do not possess nipples, are asexual, and are completely occluded by the mermaid’s rather ridiculous New Wave haircut (truly deserving of the pitchforks!). Does one truly need to dredge up the many breasts that have appeared in numerous paintings, sculptures, and artistic representations over the course of human history? We’re in the 21st century.

What makes these protests any different from former Attorney General John Ashcroft installing blue drapes to cover the Spirit of Justice’s bare breasts at the Justice Department? Or those craven Christians who were “shocked” by Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction a few years ago?

Are the numbskulls who object to the breast even aware of the women who have fought battles against Puritanitcal forces to breastfeed their children in public? Do they truly not understand how objecting to an artistic depiction featuring a breast is the equivalent of confessing in public that some realities are just so gravely offensive that it is necessary to shower with one’s clothes on?

Personally, I’m wondering if Bradford and Hines will direct their energies at the Venus de Milo. After all, that sculpture actually has nipples! Should some generous soul establish a fund that would send Bradford and Hines on a trip to Paris, where they could then furrow their dour and humorless brows in a manner reflecting the significance of their offenses, I would happily donate a few dollars, if only to see the French put these two Pollyannas rightfully in their place.

Broke

His life broke weeks before he became eligible to run for President. Not that he wanted the job, although if the country suddenly decided to employ multiple Presidents, he’d happily take the annual four hundred thou. Hell, he’d even take a pay cut if it meant four years of job security. Surely, the free market forces that had taken over the government many decades ago would welcome that. But he understood that they weren’t filling the position for another three years. And there were more immediate concerns, such as his inability to pay the rent and his failure to find any form of employment despite diligent efforts. He was beginning to run out of the oil that would ensure that he wouldn’t make a squeaky mistake when begging some restaurant to hire him as a busboy. He could get important people in esoteric circles to call him back, but he couldn’t shimmy his way into a temp agency and grab a few weeks of office work, despite the fact that he typed over 100 wpm. He waited for the inevitable July morning in which he would wake up as a cockroach, learning to dodge pesky slaps from the humans who never seemed to have exemplary hand-eye coordination.

brokenglassHe pulled out the birth certificate, carefully protected in three sheaths of plastic, that he had brought with him from California and examined this important document for the twelfth time that day. Alas, his parents had not opted for the warranty option. But he figured he would try to get his life unbroken anyway. After all, he had taken his ancient glasses into eyewear franchises several times, claiming that he had purchased them nine months ago, so that he could get the comp adjustments and the cleaning that came with the assumed deal. Nobody had asked any questions. Surely, if his life was broken, he could likewise present himself to a specialist and receive similar treatment, claiming to be manufactured from another province and remaining mum on provenance.

He thought he might try the hospital, but then realized that he had three dollars in his ratty leather wallet and no health care. So he began calling friends, asking around for a referral on how to get his life unbroken. But his friends didn’t return his calls or his emails. Their lives were also broken. And while it was sad for everyone to know that so many friends braced the burden of broken lives, you had to have broken lives around. The economy needed broken lives in order to function. You could always hide the broken lives by not speaking of them. Certainly he had not spoken of his own broken life, except in the baroque social code that had been established so many years ago by Adlai Stevenson. If he did mention that his life was broken, he would then lose out on several opportunities to unbreak his life.

So he called to order a large pepperoni pizza that he could not pay for.

“Is your life broken?” asked the upset pizzeria proprietor.

“I plead the fifth.”

“Do you have enough money to pay for it?”

“Not right now. But it’s just possible that I might in the future. And your delicious pizza might help me to unbreak my life.”

“You are unbroken!”

“You got me. I’m sorry that I deceived you.”

“Don’t worry. Everybody else has.”

“It’s difficult to find opportunities to unbreak my life But I figured a pepperoni pizza might be the first step in improving my present circumstances.”

So he began to explain about the baroque social code. And he had to inform the upset pizzeria proprietor just who Adlai Stevenson was. And the proprietor became less upset. A few other unbroken lives had called the pizzeria under similar circumstances. And the assembled throng decided to split the pizza with a few other people suffering from unbroken lives, figuring that they could avoid some of the needless taxes. They decided to call the pizza, “Main Street, not Wall Street.” And for ten brief minutes, hope was restored over a few slices gnawed under harsh fluorescent lights.

Those Who Resist the End of Racial Profiling

It didn’t take long for the gutless Washington Post writer Neely Tucker to chicken out on the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrest. Beginning his article with the lame certainty of a Duck and Cover film, Tucker wasted no time suggesting that the conformist maxim “Don’t Mess With Cops” was “one of the common-sense rules of life.” Tell that to the 320 people who complained of racial profiling in 2007 to the Los Angeles Police Department, only for the LAPD to report back in April 2008 that not a single case had merit. Tell that to Zakariya Reed, a Gulf War veteran in Toledo who retired from the U.S. National Guard after twenty years of service, and who, like many Muslims and Arab Americans, was interrogated at the Canadian border because he had converted to Islam and because he had changed his name.

henrylouisgatesarrestThere are more truths to be found in this eye-opening ACLU report released last month, which demonstrates that racial profiling is alive and well in the United States. And you’d have to be more sheltered than a stray Samoyed hoping to woo an owner before getting the gas not to know that the color of one’s skin often remains more suspicious to a police officer than hard evidence.

But if you’re Neely Tucker and you’re a privileged white guy living in “a predominantly white neighborhood” and you cleave to the naive notion that even the bad cops can have their corrupt actions halted by a next-door neighbor, and if you’re “thrilled” to have the police search your entire house without considering that they might be overstepping their authority, then I must ask in all sincerity just how vanilla your understanding of human nature really is. I must ask whether you even have a basic understanding of American history.

The Fourth Amendment’s beginnings, as Leonard Williams Levy’s Origins of the Bill of Rights helpfully informs us, emerged by linking the right to privacy in one’s home with the Magna Carta maxim that a man’s home is his castle. In 1589, a clerk by the name of Robert Beale asked why agents could “enter into mens houses, break of their chests and chambers” and carry off any evidence that they felt like taking home. Beale was the first figure to suggest that the sanctity of a man’s castle applied to everyone. And over the next two centuries, the English propensity for warrantless searches would draw numerous protests.

Here in the colonies, in 1766, the writ of issuance would face protests from Daniel Malcolm, who allowed customs officials to search all parts of his film save a locked cellar and defiantly responded to these efforts with a set of pistols and the threat, “Try it and I’ll blow your head off.” (A crowd had formed. The officials abandoned their quest. Malcolm and the crowd shared the cask of smuggled wine that he had, after al, hidden in the locked room.)

But the writs of assistance, which gave tax collectors a remarkable degree of powers to violate Beale’s egalitarian link between privacy and the sanctity of home, restricted free speech with the case of John Wilkes and were famously derided in a blistering five hour defense by James Otis. The seeds for the Fourth Amendment were sown. But the fledgling federal government wasn’t exactly upholding its principles. To cite one of many abuses that came in the United States’s first decade, in 1777, six Quaker homes were violently violated, with numerous papers confiscated. Legislation, such as Frisbie v. Butler (1787), was enacted to limit any search which there was reason to suspect. This set down the flagstones for “the right of the people to be secured in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” and the Fourth Amendment’s ratification.

These incidents created an ongoing dialogue — helpful in an emerging nation that valued vital rights and liberties — about what searches and seizures were acceptable. But incidents like Henry Louis Gates’s needless arrest outside of his own home, in which the arrest is motivated by race, the abuse of police power, and police reaction that is incommensurate with the incident being investigated, must likewise cause the dialogue to continue. Gates was fortunate to have the charges dropped, but how many others in this nation don’t have such a luxury?

The complicity of knee-jerk authoritarians like Neely Tucker, who are better suited devoting their limited talents to writing about forgettable two-part TV movies, is part of the problem. It is part of what Martin Luther King once identified as the “almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions.” Progress begins by identifying a different form of resistance — namely, those who perpetuate grave injustices by endorsing them with their silence. There once was a time when people drank from different fountains or were forced to sit at the back of the bus. And there will eventually be a time in which people will scratch their heads, wondering why the police went around arresting people for irrational reasons.

(Image: Demotix Images)

Regretting the Error

Early this morning, a piece appeared on these pages that took to task Neely Tucker’s article in the Washington Post. I used a historical example from 1766, but neglected to point out one minor but pivotal detail — indeed, one that I had forgotten, until two readers pointed it out to me — that pretty much destroyed my thesis. Therefore, I have removed the piece from these pages and apologize for my error. I thank the readers for pointing out this indiscretion and I will endeavor to pay closer attention to prevent such mishaps in the future.

[UPDATE: Due to popular demand, I will find some time later today to rewrite and revive the post.]

[UPDATE 2: The article has been revived.]

Understanding the General Audience

On the morning of July 21, 2009, Washington Post books editor Ron Charles expressed some concerns about book reviewers on Twitter:

roncharlestweet1

roncharlestweet2

At the risk of clearing my own throat (and with all due respect to Mr. Charles), I’m wondering if the 2008 winner of the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing really has a handle on the type of writing that is likely to attract readers to his newspaper section.

Mr. Charles’s editorial sensibilities call for clear and direct writing. But his other entreaties are problematic. He asks that a first-person perspective or a sense of playfulness through reference — vital variables that might permit readers to get excited, interested, or enthused about a book — be omitted from the equation. Mr. Charles cannot seem to corral the idea of grabbing an audience with each graf with the possibility that readers may be interested with what a particular voice has to say (see, for example, the rise of litblogs over the past six years). Indeed, if Mr. Charles is desirous of a more objective journalistic approach, should not the ideal reviewer be someone who permits a reader to make up her own mind? Mr. Charles’s sentiments appear to reflect a newspaper culture in which personality or perspective — those indelible human traits that make us interested in people on so many levels — don’t get a hot seat at the formal table. Unless, of course, the reviewer is “truly famous,” which connotes a troubling elitism that runs counter to Mr. Charles’s seemingly egalitarian-minded agenda.

We should probably ask ourselves whether there is even a “general audience” for books. I think a case can certainly be made, provided you keep in mind that a “general audience” doesn’t just consume the type of pretentious literary fiction involving suburban asshats and cricket bats. We have seen millions of people get excited over the Harry Potter books (and their cinematic counterparts; see the box office bonanza in the past week). As I discussed with Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan in a recent podcast interview about the romance genre, over 64 million people claimed to read a romance novel in 2004. If Mr. Charles is genuinely committed to a “general audience,” surely he would open up his books section to more romance coverage. (Certainly, Mr. Charles’s coverage of Nora Roberts is a start.) And if the Washington Post is sincerely devoted to attracting a “general audience,” they may wish to do away with the annoying and obtrusive registration prompts that pester us for personal information.

But let’s examine a typical lede for a Washington Post review. Let’s take, simply at random, the first fiction review on today’s Washington Post books page: Mke Reed on Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. Here’s the lede:

As the narrator of Colum McCann’s new novel sees it, Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 triggered a quietude generally unknown to New Yorkers.

We can do away with the superfluous opening clause. There’s no need to inform the reader that this is a review about Colum McCann’s latest book. We already know this. So this leaves us with:

Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 triggered a quietude generally unknown to New Yorkers.

Okay, we have a few interesting concepts to play with here. There’s the exciting prospect of Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk, which is rendered remarkably cold and objective through the bland reportorial phrasing. There’s the more intriguing concept of “triggered a quietude generally unknown.” That phrasing is clumsy, hardly as “clear” and “direct” as Mr. Charles demands. (Is the “triggering” a reference to 9/11? Were New Yorkers really quietly in awe for the first time in 1974?) But there’s some poetic potential here. Perhaps if we take the metaphor and front-load it at the beginning of the sentence, we might have a more compelling lede:

His high wire walk between the twin towers triggered an explosive awe among New Yorkers.

Okay, this isn’t perfect, but it’s an improvement. If the reader is unfamiliar with Petit (or familiar with the 2008 Petit documentary Man on Wire), she’ll be compelled to move onto the next sentence. By switching “tightrope” to “high wire,” we not only provide cultural context for a reader (“Hey, isn’t that the Man on Wire documentary?”) who soaks up art more from cinema than from books, but we also neatly foreshadow the “explosive trigger” metaphor later in the sentence. (Do you cut the red wire or the green wire?) By removing the subjective “generally unknown” assumption about New Yorkers, we do away with a superfluous aside that has little to do with the paragraph’s main purpose here.

With a few modest editorial changes, not only do we have a lede that is more of interest to a general audience, but we also don’t insult the audience’s intelligence by littering their attentive bin with the detritus of clinical phrasing.

Of course, one can avoid these disastrous results by daring to write in the first-person. Ernest Hemingway once wrote an essay about writing in the first-person — which can be found in A Moveable Feast — in which he suggested, “When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you.” Hemingway was referring primarily to fiction, but the advice nevertheless points to one primary deficiency among the newspapers — namely, an ability to give the reader a sense that he is a colleague, not some peon to be dictated to, and that literature is something to be experienced rather than cheerlessly discussed over tea and scones.

Critical Ass

From the latest National Book Critics Circle newsletter:

Eric Banks then spoke about the blogging committee. Our blog visitor numbers, he said, are down sharply. We’re getting only 10,000 visits per month, with an average of 250-500 each day. One of the problems is that Google is misdirecting people to the old blog which is no longer forwarding reliably to the new one. It was suggested that we create a wikiprofile and Jane Ciabattari underlined the importance of blog visits when it comes to our application for NEA funding. Everyone, Eric Banks urged, needs to help by thinking of ideas for new posts, even if they are only a few sentences long. One idea in the works is a series of interviews with editors about the move toward on-line reviewing. Laurie Muchnick suggested a sort of six-question template for editors, the answers to which we could post periodically.

How do I put this delicately? Perhaps the numbers are down because the content put up isn’t exactly scintillating. Perhaps the failure to link and include other bloggers, whether NBCC or non-NBCC, might be one of the reasons why nobody cares to visit the site. Perhaps nobody really cares about what stuffy and humorless book critics have to say about $27 hardcovers that regular people can’t afford to read because the unemployment rate is rising and the job market now sees 200 people applying for a busboy job and there are pedantic matters such as figuring out which relative you can ask to loan you the money to pay the rent and keep food on the table. Assuming you are even that lucky.

There are endless possibilities here. And it’s certainly not going to be remedied by a six-question template for editors or a wikiprofile. I don’t believe that James Wood has ever required a six-question template for editors or a wikiprofile. But if decent blog stats can get you NEA money to survive, just where in the hell is the bailout money for the bloggers?

The History of Verizon, Part Four (November 2000 to December 2000)

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This post continues my comprehensive history about the expansion of Verizon. This most recent installment takes the story through the end of 2000. Part One, which concerns itself with April to August 2000, can be found here. Part Two, which concerns itself with August 2000, can be found here. Part Three, which concerns itself with September and October 2000, can be found here.]

forsaledcLike any mushrooming company hoping to discharge its spores upon every square mile in a new field, Verizon had its lobbyists. In 1999 and 2000, Verizon, BellSouth, and SBC gave more than $7.1 million to political parties and federal campaigns, ensuring that they were among the top 25 donors. The funds were well-timed, arriving in Washington just as Congress was in the process of loosening restrictions.

AT&T perhaps had the most to lose from attempting to influence the reordering of the telecom guard. Faced with the October surprise of splitting itself up into four parts, AT&T alone had contributed $4.3 million during the 2000 election cycle. It was facing complaints from its investors.

Meanwhile, the telecommunications companies were beginning to enter more long-distance markets. Verizon, of course, knew when to steer clear of federal legislation or, more accurately, precisely when to time its actions in relation to governmental and competitive developments. Near the close of 2000, it withdrew its application for Massachusetts long-distance services. (Verizon was then under scrutiny from other telecom providers. In April 2001, it would receive federal approval in Massachusetts, where the competition would heat up.)

stockmarketdudeBy the end of October, Verizon may have been doing okay in the stock market. But its third-quarter profit was flat. The money that Verizon had spent to dominate DSL and long-distance markets with discount pricing had remained the same from the year earlier. Verizon profits in Q3 2000 were $1.99 billion, whereas Bell Atlantic profits had been $2 billion a year earlier. The m.o. involved spending and undercutting. But this seemed enough to assuage Wall Street.

Profits needed to come from somewhere. But there was also the matter of eager consumers trying to find the cheapest possible price on DSL. Local telephone service was the logical place to start jacking up prices. On November 1, 2000, while Verizon New Jersey proposed to double basic telephone rates from $8.19 a month to anywhere from $15-17 a month, regulators called a hearing. Elderly customers complained that they would be saddled with undesired expenses and undesired services. Verizon’s argument was that it cost them much more than $8.19 a month to provide basic telephone service to its customers, but Verizon spokeswoman Soraya Rodriguez did confess that there wasn’t much in the way of competition for local service

These sentiments were in sharp contrast to the Bell Atlantic days. In 1992, Bell Atlantic had brokered a deal with Trenton. They would rewire Jersey lines if the state loosened Bell Atlantic from a regulative loophole that forced it to lower rates if it made an unreasonable profit. In 1997, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities had stood its ground. The result was that Trenton had managed to get its line rewired and New Jersey customers had experienced some of the cheapest local telephone service in the country. But Anthony Wright, the program director for New Jersey Citizen Action, would organize opposition to the plan and score a victory later in the year. This was, however, not the end of Verizon’s efforts to squeeze profits out of local telephone service, as subequent 2004 efforts in the Northwest would eventually reveal. (Indeed, in early 2008, Verizon would play this card again when telephone deregulation was on the table. Regulation was retained, but, by 2011, local Verizon telephone service in New Jersey will be set at $16.54 a month. Verizon, as it turned out, could fight just as hard as New Jersey Citizen Action could.)

Verizon had, by this time, seemingly escaped from the lingering smoke wafting from the August strike. In New York State, the backlog for new lines had been eliminated by October 23, 2000. Or so Verizon claimed. In November, there were still reports of new apartments waiting for service in a 33-story tower declared “The Ultimate in Brooklyn Heights Luxury.”

Verizon continued to expand. Verizon Communications owned 40% of Venezuela’s national telephone company. And there was the $1.5 billion acquisition of Price Communications Wireless, which served the Southeast, but also faced $550 million in debt that Verizon also took on. And, as previously documented, Verizon backed out of the NorthPoint deal.

vendorfinance

But what was particularly interesting was the amount of debt held by seven major telecommunications companies. In August 2000, Lehman Brothers analyst Ravi Suria wrote a report titled “The Other Side of Leverage,” which pointed to the weaknesses of vendor financing. Vendor financing was precisely what Verizon specialized in. It was a practice that permitted customers to buy their own equipment through unseen financial burdens managed by the company. Suria pointed out that the telecom companies had increased their share of the convertibles market from 5% in 1998 to 20% in 1999. (A convertible is a type of security that can be converted into another form of security — such as a share in a company.) Verizon had managed to pass off much of its debt through their convertibles, because there was no way to squeeze out significant profit from the networks at the time and there was no way to cover the interest payments on accumulating debt. Over the course of four years, the combined debt and convertible bonds of the seven telecoms that Suria was studying had dwarfed to $275 billion. As the New York Times‘s Gretchen Morgenson observed, this was a significant change from the $160 billion in junk bonds generated between 1983 and 1990.

And yet even Suria seemed convinced that there were promising possibilities in the telecom industry. Perhaps Verizon’s faith emerged from the possibilities of keeping customers on-board for life. After all, if you could wipe out the competition, eventually the customer would have no other choice but the Verizon network. And if you could lock a Verizon Wireless customer into a two-year contract, you could then tell your investors that convertibles were merely a “temporary” high-yield debt taken on while waiting for the almighty profits. Perhaps vendor financing represented a new method for Verizon to utilize Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory.

jamesluskThe equipment vendors buying into this infrastructure had to be somewhat concerned about this high-stakes gamble, but the possibilities of profit seemed to negate financial pragmatism. In Lisa Endlich’s Optical Illusions, Endlich reports that, in 1996, Lucent’s Controller was initially skeptical about expanding on such a significant lending risk. Jim Lusk, the Controller at the time, was an old-fashioned finance type who needed to see how the money was going to pay out and who believed that Lucent should stick to selling equipment rather than lending money, even he turned around for a contract that secured 60% of Sprint PCS’s contract. The cost? $1.8 billion, with payment of principal deferred for four years. Small wonder then when, four years later, Lucent was in bad shape, with the CEO replaced and investors demanding an overhaul. But then, by the end of 2000, the nine largest telecom equipment suppliers had a combined $25.6 billion in vendor financing loans to customers.

While such measures of financing may seem extraordinary from the perspective of 2009’s deep recession, keep in mind that such actions came shortly after the unprecedented economic boom of the 1990s. But, as we shall later see, Verizon’s investments in other properties were predicated on these companies, in turn, subsisting through additional vendor financing strategies. (By August 2001, Verizon was forced to write off half of its $5.9 billion investment portfolio.)

verizonfoundationVerizon also established the Verizon Foundation, with the intent to distribute 4,000 grants of $70 million, through an all-online process. This, of course, replicated the funds and the efforts of the Bell Atlantic Foundation. (Not counting for inflation, this figure would remain more or less consistent throughout the years. In 2008, the Verizon Foundation awarded $68 million in grants, roughly 6.4% of its profits from Q1 2008. The Verizon Foundation’s financial statements can be examined here.)

There were also advertising costs. The tab at Draft Worldwide and Zenith Media was $500 million.

The now ubiquitous practice of SMS text messaging was, near the end of 2000, not widely practiced in the United States. This was a bucolic and more innocent time in which people ate dinner with each other and actually had to wait several hours before telling other friends who they were hanging out with. You might say that before 9/11 “changed everything,” SMS “changed everything.”

While businessmen in Japan and Europe texted each other during meetings, it was not until the fourth quarter of 2000 that telecom communities began rolling out two-way SMS service, and cell phone customers could send text messages to each other of no more than 160 characters. The problem, in the United States, involved conflicting and competing standards.

It is necessary to begin at the beginning and briefly (but, by no means, sufficiently) explain these developments. In the early 1980s, emerging cellular telephone systems were creating numerous incompatibilities and frustrations. Enter a group of fussy European telecommunications administrators determined to solve the problem with a compatible system called Global System for Mobile, or GSM. At the risk of skipping over some vital SMS/GSM history and leaving out a good deal of important and interesting figures, let’s just say that they sorted everything out. (I hope to expand this section in the future.)

On December 3, 1992, in the United Kingdom, the first SMS message was sent by engineer Neil Papworth through the Vodafone network (before it was merged into Verizon Wireless). It read MERRY CHRISTMAS. But it would take seven years before the phrase, “Text me,” would enter into the lingua franca.

It took some time. But upon establishing a cost of about 10 cents per message, text messaging became popular in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, where many of the GSM originators resided. In October 2000, 157 million European wireless customers were SMS-ready. 9 billion SMS messages were sent every month. The price point created a premium that seemed affordable to teenagers and doctors alike, but this was a lucrative markup that remains a source of controversy today. (Indeed, in October 2008, Verizon Wireless had plans to tack on an additional 3 cents per text message.)

chatboardThe SMS standard used in Europe was GSM, but the US used three separate standards: TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access), CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), and a GSM variation that, much like the American NTSC television standard abandoned in 2009, was incompatible with numerous global territories. A Verizon Wireless customer in 2000 could not send a text message to a AT&T Wireless customer. And this lack of global SMS compatibility, together with the then-awkward requirement of typing an email address before sending a text, didn’t exactly win customers over.

AT&T Wireless got many of its customers hooked on text messages by offering SMS for free through February 2001. (AT&T would initially charge $4.99 for 500 messages a month, a considerable bargain compared to Verizon’s text message rates today.)

One unexamined consideration is whether Verizon, which owned and maintained all the pay phones in the New York subway stations, deliberately let these pay phones fall into disrepair. After all, why not move these disgruntled pay phone customers onto cell phone plans? And why not work with the city to establish a cell phone network within the cavernous subway system? Verizon, as it turns out, was better at repairing pay phones in 2000 than the year before under Bell Atlantic. According to the Straphangers Campaign, 18% of subway station pay phones were broken in October and November of 2000 (compared to 25% in August 1999). Whether the drop came from reduced crime or reduced pay phone use, it is difficult to say. But as Farouk Abdallah of the Straphangers pointed out at the time, Verizon’s contract with the MTA called for 95% of the pay phones to be “fully operative and in service at all times.”

payphonebellPay phones, however, were on the wane. When the City of New York announced that it would construct 2,262 new public pay phones, a number of Upper East Side residents, who presumably possessed the expendable income needed to pay for a cell phone, complained about the 1,000 pay phones appearing in their neighborhood. Never mind that only half of New York residents had cell phones and 20% of residents in poorer neighborhoods didn’t even have regular phones. The pay phone kiosks would be an eyesore. Verizon, interestingly enough, did not apply to operate the new phones.

Three months before the United States would enter a nine-month recession in 2001, shares in Verizon fell $3.94 on December 20, 2000 to $51.88. Despite the 3,500 DSL lines that Verizon claimed it was installing daily, Verizon seemed more interested in promulgating financial projections for 2001 and 2002 rather than coughing up any data about the present. (Lucent, that seemingly dependable equipment vendor who had bet the farm on vendor financing, announced two days later that it would lose more than it had anticipated and that layoffs were forthcoming.)

And the customers wanted more. They wanted nationwide coverage that wasn’t lossy. Analysts suggested that the infrastructure wasn’t there and couldn’t support the dramatic uptick in customers. Could the customer understand that a cell phone was entirely different from a landline? Did they know the difference between an analog and a digital phone? Did they understand that using all those minutes in the package was a trap to get customers reliant upon cell phones? Did they consider that maybe it was the telecom companies who held all the cards in the relationship? Or perhaps increasing and often unreasonable demands were a way for the customer to feel that he had some power or confidence?

New Review

My review of Chuck Barris’s Who Killed Art Deco? appears in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. And truthfully, the review is far crankier than I remember it being when I filed it. Indeed, the piece is more than a bit ridiculous with some of its pedantic quibbles. I don’t know how many reviewers would actually confess such qualities, but I am committed to candor. This is a Chuck Barris novel, for crying out loud. Not a Donald Westlake novel. But it was an annoying book with homophobic conceits.

RIP Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite died on Friday. He was great and irreplaceable. The last living newsman that America could trust, save perhaps Jimmy Breslin. One views the above clip in our present age of “journalists” relying on unconfirmed Twitter feeds and green-tinted avatars, and TMZ staffers shredding every form of privacy and decency to take cred for some haphazard scrap of dirty underwear, and it is almost inconceivable for any network television anchor to now state, as Cronkite once did, “This is a rumor. This we do not know for a fact.” As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald observed yesterday, one wonders why today’s “journalists” lack the basic ability to question the present government actions (the job now falls on guys like Matt Taibbi, venturing into onyx territory that those on the Goldman Sachs payroll will work very hard to keep unlighted). One ponders the paucity of courage among present newspaper editors — that failure to pursue a vital story that an executive might shoot down because an advertiser or another interest declares it “unprofitable.” Gutless men like David Bradley are now in the business of defending sick and sleazy occasions for egregious payola, which are canceled not because of inherent standards or basic decency, but because the publicists are tracking popular opinion.

Walter Cronkite’s death should not be a time for treacly tributes. It is a wake-up call. We must do better.

For Cronkite defied these Bernaysian impulses not because of pride, but because it was his duty. In Cronkite’s time, it was the journalist’s job to question everything, provide dependable veracity, and present vital information for the public to consider. But today’s anchormen and editors are more concerned about money. When there’s a mortgage and a college tuition to pay off, the “journalist” knows damn well where his bread is buttered. He knows precisely who to keep from the spotlight, and he knows precisely how to maintain those banalities that Jimmy Breslin once called felonious and that are now commonplace. Small wonder that the papers are dying. They can neither be read nor trusted.

So let’s forget all the speculative vapidity about who the Walter Cronkite of the blogosphere will be. Let’s forget all this trite talk of broadcast network news’s ostensible “golden age” during the 1960s and the 1970s. Cronkite’s gone. Why should we have to settle for halcyon pipe dreams when our many problems demand golden journalism today?

The Bat Segundo Show: Ellen Ruppel Shell

Ellen Ruppel Shell appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #297.

Ellen Ruppel Shell is most recently the author of Cheap. The book was also featured in an in-depth five-part discussion with several thoughtful people, which you can investigate here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.

segundo297

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Bargain hunting for alcohol.

Author: Ellen Ruppel Shell

Subjects Discussed: Pinpointing the phenomenon of discount culture, Edward Bernays, bargain hunting, game theory, Gresham’s law, fixed pricing vs. elastic pricing, John Wanamaker and the price tag, haggling, thought experiments concerning the powerless buyer, mattresses and reference prices, discount pain medication and less effective treatment, the placebo effect, Jason Furman, Jerry Hausman, and the underestimated price benefits on Walmart, not accounting for quality when considering working-class Walmart benefits, iPhone pricing, dishwashing liquid and the pennies price trap, manipulating public opinion, Whole Foods and the decline in demand for luxury goods during 2008, Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption,” outlet malls, buying one more thing because of a shopping cart, shrimp’s move from a delicacy to a cheap and ubiquitous food, IKEA’s illegal wood-cutting, “out of sight, out of mind” business practices, the Chinese “luxury” of human rights, Henry Ford’s virtue of a worker owning his own car, the rise of disposable employees in the 1990s, at will employment, the lost social contract between the company and the employee, labor aristocracy, workers monitored by the corporations, deficient pencils, T-shirts that work, thought experiments about minimal manufacturing standards, the collapse of the Second Bank of the United States, Andrew Jackson, and the financial panic of 1837, globalism, Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, and Douglas Rushkoff’s Life, Inc..

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

ersCorrespondent: You bring up Gresham’s law a few times in the book. That principle in which bad money drives out the good. Your example involves watered down milk over purer milk. But as you point out both in the book, with the idea of Americans having less spending money for T-shirts and lettuce, and in this particular idea that you just said in your last answer about looking for the ultimate bargain, if we have indeed become accustomed to our watered down milk, why then would we start accustomizing ourselves to purer milk? Or this higher aspect of craftsmanship? If there is no economic incentive for us to do so, then surely are we trapped in this cycle of bad money driving out the good?

Ruppel Shell: Well, that’s a really good question. And Gresham’s law is a very important concept — I think — for us to keep in mind. Gresham’s law — the so-called bad money driving out good — was illustrated, as you mention, with this milk example. And that is, if there are merchants or retailers selling watered down milk at 80 cents a gallon. And this is just theory. We know we don’t pay 80 cents a gallon anymore for milk. But if they’re selling watered milk for 80 cents a gallon and full milk for $1.20 a gallon, and they write down the label, “This is watered down milk. This is pure milk,” people who want a bargain or who want to pay less buy the watered down milk. And there’s no problem there. They know what they’re getting. But if it becomes the case that watered down milk gets sold as milk — just milk, okay — both cartons were sold as milk and were charged 90 cents, it seems that we’re getting a bargain when we buy this watered milk. Because we just assume it’s milk, okay? And those who try and sell full milk at $1.20 a gallon will go out of business because of this low price. We’re driven by price, not quality, right? We’re looking at the price. And they will go out of business. So pretty soon, everyone is selling watered down milk at 90 cents, and we all think we’re getting a bargain. And this is the metaphor I use for American retail culture today. Many of us are buying what I consider to be — including myself; I include myself in this — watered down milk and paying a low price for it, and thinking we’re getting a bargain. But we’re not getting a bargain. We’re getting watered down milk at a somewhat higher price than we might be paying if all the actors were transparent. If we really knew what we were getting.

And another thing I say in the book is that knowledge in the marketplace is probably the most valuable thing. Actually knowing what you’re getting. But in global retail culture, it’s very, very difficult to know what you’re getting. It’s very difficult. The Internet hasn’t helped us all that much. There’s all sorts of tricks that retailers use to hide the product’s background and the manufacturing techniques that go into building up products. It’s very, very difficult to know. And I go into the many tricks in the book. And I won’t bore you to death today with all the tricks. But so many of us go into retail stores not knowing what we’re getting. So what we are is price-driven. Since it’s the only thing, the only so-called objective factor is price and that’s how we make our comparisons. And one of the things I point out in the book is, in fact, pricing is not objective. It’s probably one of the most subjective factors in purchasing. But we think it’s objective and so we use it as a marker.

Correspondent: Well, there’s also the innovation of the price tag, and the fact that you no longer have a scenario in which the buyer can in fact haggle with the seller. That relationship has completely changed in the last 120 years. And I’m wondering if you feel that, if we were to restore that particular impulse, we might perhaps drive out this additional impulse. This present impulse. I mean, we go to Kayak to get the best flight deal. We go to Google Shopping to find out who’s selling that iPhone, that iPod, or what not at the lowest possible price. And yet at the same time, price is elastic, as you point out in the book. The common example used is: when the iPhone initially came out, it was marked $200 more than what it was two months later. And a lot of people were upset by this. So if the buyer has no control over the price, then I’m wondering if offering some kind of return to haggling in some sense might be part of the solution here. Or is our relationship with, for example, Third World Labor so interdependent upon cheap labor and cheap goods that it’s impossible now?

Ruppel Shell: I think haggling over price has become quite difficult for the very reasons I cited before. We have real difficulty knowing what things are worth. And you talk about the price tag, that’s true. The price tag is a more recent innovation than I think people realize. It’s about a 120 year old invention, as you say, invented by a retailer named Wanamaker, who was actually among one of the first people to buy the notion of sales. He was actually a really good guy. His idea was that his own employees should be able to afford the things that he had. He devised the wholesale model. The low-cost model. He kind of popularized that model. And after that, the model was kind of perverted by a colleague of his — Frank Woolworth, who many of us have probably heard about historically — who believed that the way to keep prices low was to pay his clerks as little as possible and to deskill the position of clerk. That means that they had very little knowledge. Very little authority. And he would pay them $2-3 a week, which forced them to live at home with their parents and allowed them very little latitude. So the Woolworth model is a more typical model in some of the discount empires today — the most famous being Walmart, in which employees are paid quite poorly on average and there’s a very, very high turnover. So that’s the model. The Walmart model was actually a very old model that was started by Frank Woolworth.

But to respond to your question about whether I think unfixing the prices, freeing the prices, allowing them to haggle over price would be helpful, it’s an interesting idea. And I could imagine it happening. I think certainly when we buy a used car, for example, we apply that method still. There are still things we do haggle over. When we go to a flea market, we can haggle. But in general, I don’t think we’re going to lose the price tag. I don’t think we’re going to go back. What I’m suggesting that consumers do is think a lot about the object and less about the price.

BSS #297: Ellen Ruppel Shell (Download MP3)

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Ellen Ruppel Shell’s CHEAP — Part Five

(This is the fifth of a five-part roundtable discussion of Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Other installments: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.)

(A podcast interview with author Ellen Ruppel Shell will follow this afternoon. Thanks to all the roundtable participants for their input, Penguin Press for providing us with the books, and for Ms. Ruppel Shell for her time and generosity.)

Erin O’Brien writes:

cheaprt5I thought one of the most stunning aspects of our conversation was how emotional many of us became over a fairly straightforward work of nonfiction. It just goes to prove what I’ve always believed: money is a character in each of our lives. It has a point of view. It reacts to how you treat it. Just like pets and their owners so often look alike, a person’s money is imbued with their persona. When anyone starts talking about how we spend it or how we should spend it, we take it personally.

Now for a few musings:

The tighter you hold your money, the more you poison it.

To a man waist deep in quarters, fifty cents means nothing. To a thirsty man standing in front of a vending machine, it means everything.

Each one of us participated in this exercise freely and without compensation. We didn’t even have to shell out $25.95 for the book, which Penguin sent to us for free.

Think of a dollar bill. In your pocket. Slipped under a coffee cup on a diner counter. Floating in a filthy puddle. What does it mean to a Chinese laborer working to produce little plastic pink flamingo key chains or a shrimp farmer in Vietnam?

Now imagine that bill was a one hundred dollar bill. In God We Trust.

If there were a followup work of fiction for all this, my recommendation would be Frank Norris’s McTeague.

To close, I offer an image. Behold the looooong underwear rack at the Unique Thrift Store on Lorain Avenue in Cleveland. Although I did not purchase any of the used underwear, I dare say I felt at once obliged and uncomfortable taking a picture of it. For more on this subject, see the following blog post.

erinfinal

Robert Birnbaum writes:

I believe that at the heart of this back ‘n forth is a shadowy sense of economic justice and environmental rationality.   We have heard much about or are  quite aware of the beast we are up against. Remember even in the mid-19th century, while he was way off about communism, Marx’s analysis of capitalism was pretty acute.

The recent spate of microeconomic analysis books promulgate strategies and tactics employed to advance the moneyed class’s interest(s) — which is the increase/accumulation of capital. So if most of us are exploited and alienated along the way, well, we have, uh, freedom. I’d place more value on these books if I could tease out a viable call to action — which I haven’t to date. 

It occurred to me, since there was some discussion of bookshelves — meaning most of, if not all of us, are book “consumers” — that there was no mention of one of the most valuable community resources found in most Western communities — the library. Why do we saddle our selves with these bulky weighty objects that have little monetary value? Particularly in a mobile society. Books are a burden when we exercise that mobility.

Why do we hobble ourselves in that way?

Peggy Nelson writes:

It occurs to me that we have the material here to create a great mind-map from all the points brought up in this discussion, from the abstract overall theories that contextualize the analyses to great practical suggestions for how to actually do it (live cheap(ly), that is) at the ground level.  Mind-maps, while not the solution to everything, can be a great tool for thinking about and remembering wide-ranging discussions.

Miracle Jones writes:

This whole discussion got me pretty wound up thinking about crappy bookshelves, the price of eBooks, well-crafted objects, and the future of publishing.  How do you make books worth the price (keeping writers fed) while still accepting the inevitable, that books are now completely free to copy and distribute?

Anyway, I wrote this as a response.

It’s probably not useful for the actual panel discussion about Cheap, but I figured it was worth sharing. 

Amy Riley writes:

I may be way too late to get in on the conversation, but I have finally finished the book, and in the process learned just how much longer it takes me to read non-fiction!

For me personally, the book was quite eye opening. While I could certainly recognize some ridiculous consumer behavior in my life, and there have been times when I’ve had to talk myself out of poor choices because they seem like a good deal when they really aren’t, I’m not sure I ever put it all together as a national sickness with such a long history!

So all of the psychological elements about fairness and getting a good deal and the detailed history of discount stores was helpful in giving me an overall picture of the situation. I think there are probably a lot of people like me, who have some vague ideas that all of this isn’t good, but don’t nkow the complete story or rather, enough of the story to begin to understand why it isn’t good and how it’s affecting our nation and our personal lives.

In regards to what can be done, this is perhaps the most difficult aspect. So now I’ve read this book, and I can understand how the products I buy aren’t necessarily good quality or a good deal and the food I eat has serious issues. But what can I do? Maybe for a while, I’ll be hyper-aware of everything. But can I really pull out of this seeming addiction? After all, a good portion of the book seems devoted to explaining just how it is an addiction. I think it would require a series of ongoing hard choices and the surrender of choice in fact.

shipmentFinally, about books, I have often considered how Amazon (the devil to many of you!) made book ownership possible. I never bought brand new books before I bought them on Amazon. Feeling like I wasn’t paying full price certainly led me to buy more. So it always confused me when people railed against Amazon on behalf of independent bookstores. Amazon didn’t steal my business. They just created some for itself. And yet truthfully, here I sit with so many books surrounding me, many of them unread, and realize that owning books, especially the number that I do, isn’t something that I need. Maybe this is something that is actually bad…for the environment, for the economy, and for publishing. Giving up book ownership is not something I want to do. It would be a “hard choice” and it’s honestly not one I’m willing to make at the moment.

I do think it’s interesting in relation to digital books, how high the demand for “cheap” and “now” is! Especially considering the response to Sourcebooks’s decision to delay the eBook edition of a popular forthcoming title due to the low price of Amazon’s eBooks. There definitely seemed to be a mentality: “We deserve this the way we want it and at the price we want it when we want it.” After reading Cheap, I do have to wonder what the real future of books will be.

And hey, thanks for letting me share a few thoughts so late in the game.

Ellen Ruppel Shell responds:

ersI am humbled and honored to have such a thoughtful panel with which to discuss Cheap‘s vagaries. Thanks to Ed for inviting me. I’ll do my best to keep up with you all.

Allow me to open by clarifying a few points, beginning with Ed’s Boar’s Head meat sandwich example. Ed lives in a sort of village, where he regularly patronizes merchants whose merchandize he knows and values. So when the new deli in town undercuts competitors by a quarter, Ed can make an honest decision—and all things being equal, he is perfectly within his rights to decide on the less expensive lunch. However, were Ed to find out that one merchant was using not Boar’s Head but advertising Boar’s Head and using some inferior no-name brand, or that said merchant was abusing his employees or pouring toxic chemicals into the street each morning, there’s a good chance Ed would be willing to pay—would indeed want to pay—the extra 25 cents to avoid patronizing that merchant. My point of course is that in the era of Cheap, we are not really in our home neighborhood. Rather, we are tourists in a strange land—often we don’t know where our purchases are made or who made them or with what. So price becomes the one “objective” determinant of value—and low price trumps almost every time. But as I hope that I make clear, price is not objective. It is highly subjective, and prompts a strong emotional response. (Speaking of Amazon, which many of you do speak of, recall how pissed off customers became when they learned that Amazon was charging some of us more than others for the same book! Huge emotions were raised by this—mostly anger– yet far less anger is evoked when we pay a discount price for very bad books.)

Another point — I went to great lengths to avoid the inevitable charge of elitism. It is for this reason that I went to IKEA (which, by the way, took me a full year to get into-it is a very private company.) As you all note, I also take on Whole Foods. I hope I’ve built to an argument that the 100+ year old concept of Frugalism is a reasonable antidote to Cheap — when I quote near the end from the 1907 work of Simon Nelson Pattern of the Wharton School of Business:

The typical capitalists are lovers of power rather than sensual indulgence, but they have the same tendency to crush and to take tribute that the cruder types of sensualism possess. The discipline of the capitalist is the same as that of the frugalist. He differs from the latter in that he has no regard for the objects through which productive power is acquired. HE does not hesitate to exploit natural resources, lands, dumb animals and even his fellowman. Capital to such a man is an abstract fund, made up of perishable elements which are quickly replaced… The frugalist…stands in marked contrast to the attitude of the capitalist. The frugalist takes a vital interest in his tools, in his land, and in the goods he produces. He has a definite attachment to each. He dislikes to see an old coat wear out, an old wagon break down, or an old horse go lame. He always thinks of concrete things, wants them and nothing else. He desires not land, but a given farm, not horses or cattle and machines, but particular breeds and implements; not shelter, but a home…. He rejects as unworthy what is below standard and despises as luxurious what is above or outside of it. Dominated by activities, he thinks of capital as a means to an end.

This is very far from elitist. I’m trying to show through gradual, level headed, heavily researched and cited evidence that “cheap” undermines us by lulling us into believing that our world and our lives are better thanks to cheap goods—when reality shows that the spiraling down of prices has led to a new norm in which the “China Price” becomes the price to beat. We cannot beat the China price, we cannot even approach it and survive as a democratic nation with a functional middle class. I support this view with evidence from history, psychology, economics — and lighten it a bit with personal experience that led me to ask and seek answers for questions raised by my own self defeating behavior as a bargain maven.

As for Janet Maslin’s review — it is everything that my book is not. Maslin begins by suggesting that I am not to be trusted because I describe the same experiment differently than did another author, Chris Anderson. But had Maslin done her homework — or had she truly read my book — she would have known that the experiment I describe is not the one described by Anderson. These are two completely different experiments. (You, dear readers, should have been tipped off by her Dan/Daniel beef — are you friggin’ kidding me?) Also, I’m afraid that at least one of you seemed to have read Maslin’s review more carefully than you read my book. I have never in my life stepped foot in a Red Lobster. The scene that Maslin scares up and bungles was a birthday dinner I enjoyed with friends at a funky little place that I do not name. During that dinner, I asked the wait person where the restaurant sourced their shrimp, and she smirked — telling me that, like most restaurants, the shrimp there was imported from Thailand. I had just learned where and how Thai shrimp is “farmed” — and could not stomach the idea of eating it. But as I say, my friends ordered it — and loved it — and I’m trying to show how difficult it is to know — to truly know — what goes into what we buy. I was attempting a bit of irony here…but perhaps it fell flat?

Finally, I’m sorry, but the charges of “We already know this” ring hollow to me. Yes, you may have had some strong ideas that cheap goods were problematic — but did you know how the invention of the shipping container, the bar code, and the price tag made “cheap” possible? Did you know the history of the shopping cart? Or how and why it snuck into discount stores? Or that its very presence makes us buy on average, one more thing per trip to Target? Did you know how very little we spend on consumer goods, and how the percentage of income we spend on fixed costs has skyrocketed in recent years — making said cheap goods all the more seductive? Did you know that low price per se had become a lens through which so many of us make our buying decisions? Or understand the high/low problem of cheap goods making quality goods so much more expensive? Did you know Gresham’s Law of bad money pushing out good — of Americans no longer being able to determine the quality of what we buy — and therefore spending too much on low cost goods, thinking we’re getting a “good deal?” Did you know that we spend 80 percent more in outlet malls than in regional malls, that IKEA designs to price and does whatever it takes to get to that price, and that the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai lobbied against workers rights in China? Did you really know how low price works to trigger the hedonic response in the brain? Did you know, for example, what agricultural economist Michael Morris said in the book — that no matter how the “slow food” movement romanticizes the abstract notion of “the good peasant,” the planet cannot survive without agribusiness? Yet at the same time, we need more small farms. We need both small farms and huge farms to survive. On a planet that is on its way to 9 billion souls, the idea that we can all sing campfire songs and survive on locally farmed food is a pipe dream. On page 171, I make a very clear argument about how low food prices in the West led to the food crises of 2007 and 2008 that starved millions around the world. Can you honestly say you all knew that?

Come on, we all knew that fast food wasn’t good for us, and we’d read of the horrors of the slaughter houses before. But Fast Food Nation galvanized millions around the world — especially the young. We know that local food is better food, and we have heard for decades about the dangers of agribusiness (see Mark Kramer’s excellent Three Farms, for example, published many years ago). But Michael Pollan’s message nonetheless resonates — and is no less important than it would have been had it been entirely new. The goal of this type of book is to illuminate what’s right in front of our face — to get into the guts of the thing, to analyze it and explicate it.

Like most journalists worth their nickel (and I do mean nickel), I believe that knowledge is power. If it weren’t power, vested interests wouldn’t work so hard to keep it from us and wouldn’t strive to hide the provenance of their products, for example, or work so hard to make it difficult for us to determine how they arrive at their prices. I wrote Cheap to empower consumers — which is to say everyone — with deep understanding of the history, politics, economics and psychology of low price — and what it means to us as individuals and to society at large. I offer an alternative strategy — the frugalist concept backed up with a few examples — and stand by it. I urge readers to vote both in the voting booth, and with their pocketbooks — and give some idea how these ideas have changed my life for the better.

Thanks again for the opportunity.

Ellen Ruppel Shell’s CHEAP — Part Four

cheaprt4(This is the fourth of a five-part roundtable discussion of Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Other installments: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Five.)

Edward Champion writes:

I’m going to attempt to address as many of these interesting points as I can, even as we await Levi’s answer with book before him and take up Miracle Jones’s sensible advice on how to live cheap.

Early into the discussion, Peggy mentioned that she thought Ruppel Shell hadn’t entirely considered the idea of community-based commerce.  I’d like to go further and suggest that the fault doesn’t entirely lie with Ruppel Shell, but with Nicholas Kristof’s blunt sentiment (quoted in the book) that “anyone who cares about fighting poverty should campaign in favor of sweatshops.”  For anyone who’s curious, and to partially answer Whet’s question, Kristof’s entire piece can be read here.

kirstofIn her endnote, Ruppel Shell points out that Kristof’s been pro-sweatshops since the late 1990s, co-authoring articles titled “Two Cheers for Sweatshops: They’re dirty and dangerous.  They’re also a major reason Asia is back on track.”  (Rather interesting, this attention-seeking and extremely callous subhead appears to have been expunged from the New York Times’s archive.  But it’s also worth observing that Ruppel Shell is careful to call Kristof “a generally insightful and sensitive reporter.”)

The workers who toil for long and dangerous hours in such hidden economies are very much on my mind, for I am presently doing my best to work my way through William T. Vollmann’s massive Imperial.  It isn’t just a matter of time always being reframed as a monetary value.  It’s the way in which we defend our lifestyles, whether it’s assuming that a book attempting to plunge deeper into an important issue is “telling us what we already know.”  And it’s evident in the way Kristof writes such pat summations as:

This is not to praise sweatshops. Some managers are brutal in the way they house workers in firetraps, expose children to dangerous chemicals, deny bathroom breaks, demand sexual favors, force people to work double shifts or dismiss anyone who tries to organize a union. Agitation for improved safety conditions can be helpful, just as it was in 19th-century Europe. But Asian workers would be aghast at the idea of American consumers boycotting certain toys or clothing in protest. The simplest way to help the poorest Asians would be to buy more from sweatshops, not less.

Our enviable lifestyles would appear to trump any and all inquiry into those who toil to sustain it.  We think that, if we mention a sweatshop, we can purport to comprehend what it is like to toil and suffer in that sweatshop.  But how are we any better than Kristof in our assumptions?  To what degree does contributing to the labyrinthine network of cheap cut-rate goods produced in exploitative situations actually help the Third World?  Should we be concerned with our Faustian bargain?  And did Ruppel Shell, as Peggy has suggested, not adequately represent these many labor categories by degree?  No, the Walmart worker can’t afford to shop at Whole Foods.  But then the sweatshop worker can’t afford to shop at Walmart.  Does consumer confidence help the worker who is below us?  Or is this all part of the same Shell game?

Which brings us to the issue of necessity, both real and fabricated, initially raised by Colleen and expanded upon by several others.  Like Miracle Jones, I too admire Ruppel Shell’s personal honesty.  And I think that understanding and vocalizing the ways in which we spend money are just as important in understanding the bigger economic picture.  If such an approach amounts to “telling us what we already know,” then I would say this:  If I asked each of you to publicly report the annual income that you entered into your 1040, then chances are you wouldn’t do it.  That would be an invasion of your privacy.  If I asked each of you to tell me precisely how you spent your money over the last week, complete with an itemization of costs and expenses for each day, chances are that you probably haven’t kept track.  And yet, thanks to those dependable Gruen transfers, we’re happy to cling to a remarkably shifting sense of the deep discount deals we’re getting.  To the point where Amazon consumers have been tagging eBooks with $9.99 tags because that’s the price they now want to pay.  Never mind that, as Publishers Weekly reported back in May, Amazon actually loses money at that price point.  Does Amazon get a fair pass, as Miracle Jones suggests?  Yes and no, I think.  One could make a similar case for Starbucks.  On one hand, I wish that Ruppel Shell had delved into Amazon’s parasitic stranglehold on the industry.  But at the possible risk of comparative oversimplification, I think it could be argued that IKEA’s ubiquity falls into more or less the same rub.  As documented by Ruppel Shell, like Amazon, IKEA spends a tremendous amount of time framing the message, whether in the form of a twee Spike Jonze commercial or a slick and colorful catalog.  More questions to the group: Should we look at discount culture on a case-by-case basis?  Or is this all monolithic?  (Yes, Amazon is online and caters to convenience.  IKEA, on the other hand, is a big box store.  Should it matter whether we physically or virtually participate in these Gruen transfers?  The labor is still unseen, whether it’s Amazon workers being exploited, as the London Times reported back in December, or IKEA’s illegal cutting.)

nikeoutletTo address Erin’s track suit dilemma, after thinking about this a bit, I’m inclined to agree — particularly in light of Our Man in Boston’s provocative remarks about elites and elitism.  But I’m wondering if Ruppel Shell’s stereotypical descriptions are somewhat defensible, because outlet stores, discount stores, and shopping malls are, by way of their respective designs, spaces that prey upon our cognitive abilities to process numerous aesthetics.  I don’t want to let Ruppel Shell off the hook on this point — and certainly Janet Maslin didn’t by suggesting that Ruppel Shell needed to “bring a professor of marketing to a Nevada outlet mall to tell her that bargains are phony,” although I think this anti-intellectual assessment isn’t entirely fair to what Ruppel Shell dug up.  Much as casinos are specifically designed to keep us gambling (no clocks, no windows, lots of lights, free drinks), I’m wondering if outlet stores might be working in a similar way.  Consider this 1998 article from Retail Traffic, which outlines very specific design decisions to convince the customer that she’s getting a good deal.  It’s quite possible that this may be just as vital, if not more so, as brand name manipulation.  And so I ask some of the pessimists in the peanut gallery this: If the book “tells us what we already know,” then just how aware are you of a store’s aesthetics when you go shopping?  Bargain hunting may very well be a harmless American pastime for some, but if we’re more concerned with price and acquisition (instead of say the human souls who work at the store or the way the store is designed), then it would seem to suggest that we don’t know as much as we think.

Good Christ, I’ve been a wordy bastard.  And I’ve only just begun to address all the interesting thoughts on the table.  So I think I’ll stop for now, see what others have to say about all this, and return later, possibly after Levi has offered his informed answer to Colleen’s question (which I certainly look forward to hearing!).

Colleen Mondor writes:

I did want to point out one thing about bargain hunting. A lot of people bargain hunt at garage sales and thrift stores (I have seen some amazing things scored this way), which is another deal altogether and not at all related to bargain hunting at IKEA or Walmart. There can, in fact, be different types of bargain hunters and I don’t think they should all be grouped together in one large mass.

There’s one other interesting idea to think about as we consider poor in this country: how you live poor depends on where you live. Miracle’s rules would certainly not work in Alaska where poor folks eat King Crab and catch wild salmon, shrimp etc. — food that would be considered beyond the reach of the poor and/or middle class in the Lower 48.

And many middle class and rich folks love their pit bulls too. I’m just saying.

Robert Birnbaum writes:

Books like Cheap, et al raise the question that subsumes the pretext for the traditional liberal education (i.e., “knowledge is power”). By the way, David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College 2005 oration is worth looking at on this point.

The relentless (some might use the banal modifier “24/7”) chimes of commerce create such a shitstream of noise that whatever we think we know is disabled in the face of the symphonic chord (think Mahler’s 10th): BUY THIS, BUY NOW.

Some of you all sound like you think you are immune. Good for you. I’m not. Not that I am siting on a pile of junk. But I am sitting on a pile. Did I mention the hoodies, the socks, and the caps?

The only antidote I have found effective is exhibited here:

Also, for those of you unaware of John Crowley, his new opus Four Freedoms should, if there is a modicum of reward for good works in this disinterested universe, gain him a proper audience.

Erin O’Brien writes:

(1) “Sex, conversation, art, and games are what actually make people happy.”

“Become cheap. Don’t fight it. Go so deep into cheap that you become competition for these eeeeeevil discounters. Become so cheap that you are affordable to everybody in all your favorite activities (sex, conversation, games, art), both rich and poor alike. You will have a good life.”

Miracle, I see that you are a genius like me. Remind me to send you my zucchini soup recipe. And as a side note: DO NOT purchase inexpensive marital aids. Just trust me on this one. Contact me off-list for more specific information.

A related Erinism: Buy your plates for $0.50 a piece at a garage sale. You’ll never have a matching set, but, once in a while, you may be able to afford to plop lobsters on them.

pokerchips2(2) Ed, regarding casinos, the poker chips are a trick as well. Your money has been subtly taken from you from the get go and you’re left with piles of inane plastic disks that go up and down with each spin of the wheel.  To me, credit cards are a not-too-distant relative: a thin piece of plastic that magically gets you stuff, stuff stuff!

(3) Her Amazon comments aside, Ruppell Shell didn’t poke very hard at the implication of the Internet price comparison and the way it’s changed price shopping forever.

(4) On bookshelves:

So I’m on one of my endless walks and I pass some guy’s garbage pile. There’s two bookshelves in it.

“Shit,” I say, because they’re pretty good books shelves.

I keep walking, hoping that the bookshelves will be there after I’ve walked the 2.5 miles back home and returned with my Mini Cooper in order to heist the cast-off loot. As luck would have it, a buddy of mine is drives by and pulls up next to me to say hello. He’s in his pickup.

So, yeah, I have cheap bookshelves.

IKEA? I’ve never been to IKEA. Why would I drive all the way to Pittsburgh to go to someplace called IKEA?

Levi Asher writes:

I’ve now carefully reread the IKEA chapter, and I’m ready to respond to Colleen’s question from last week.

First, I think Janet Maslin scooped my answer when she wrote this in her mostly negative review of Cheap:

At the end of a chapter largely devoted to the horrors of Asian shrimp farming, she describes being in a Red Lobster restaurant with friends and being enlightened enough to eschew cheap shrimp in favor of chicken. Yet cheap chicken-farming isn’t any less ghastly. It just doesn’t happen to be addressed by this book.

I consider myself a very socially aware person. And I definitely think it’s important for me to make personal choices that are not harmful to others, or to the planet’s ecosystems.  Of course, this is easier said than done.  We each have our own ways of dealing with this uncomfortable truth.  My own brand of social awareness places heavy emphasis on issues of global politics, war, and genocide. These are probably my own “pet topics,” and I think it’s interesting that the last time Colleen and I disagreed about a book, we were discussing Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.  I felt Baker’s book presented a very powerful argument that the Roosevelt-Churchill strategy in World War II led to far greater death, destruction, and genocide than was required to defeat Hitler, while Colleen (I hope that I am remembering correctly) did not feel the book presented a solid argument.

I also vividly remember one of the biggest disagreements I’ve ever had with Ed Champion.  I thought Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine presented a solid and important argument about the insidious underlying purpose of the American misadventure in Iraq, whereas Ed had nothing but criticism for Klein’s work.  So it’s funny that now Ed and Colleen seem to be bowled over by the arguments in Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap, while I stand here saying, “What?”.

cabinI don’t think Cheap is a bad book, and I like Ruppel Shell’s basic mission in making us aware of the choices we make when we shop.  But her case against IKEA, like many of the cases presented here, feels underdeveloped.  She writes of declining forests and environmental sustainability problems, but this is a problem for all woodworking industries.  She ends the chapter by swooning over a heavy (non-IKEA) oak bookshelf, but this bookshelf was also made by cutting down a tree. And even though it will last longer, Ruppel Shell knows there are not enough antique bookshelves around to furnish the world. Sure, if IKEA is committing environmental offenses, then these ought to be addressed and stopped. But Ruppel Shell only hints (and never establishes) that these offenses take place more at IKEA than at any smaller furniture provider.  She also shows us that IKEA does try to be environmentally conscious, that they “use every part of the tree”, monitor their suppliers, etc.  I see innuendo weaved into these sentences. But I find no clear case, no smoking gun.  And Cheap is not a book about the environment or about the problems of an overpopulated world. So the environmental points especially come off as half-baked and incomplete to me. 

What I was trying to point out in my earlier post here is that IKEA has an appeal beyond dumb cheapness.  It is a positive lifestyle choice for people like me — mobile adults who like to travel light.  If IKEA has problems — environmental problems, labor problems, quality problems — than these problems should be addressed and solved.  But nothing I read here seems to add up to a call for a wholesale rejection of everything IKEA represents. I could take Robert Birnbaum’s suggestion and build bookshelves out of spare planks and bricks — but, Robert, have you ever seen photographs from the Chinese and South Indian infernos where bricks are produced?  It’s not a pretty picture.

Finally, I have to complain about some shoddy work on Ruppel Shell’s part in this IKEA chapter.  On pages 126 and 127 she goes on at some length about the Spike Jonze commercial that reminds consumers that furniture has no feelings, and then points to the irony that IKEA tries to create an emotional attraction to furniture by giving its pieces pet names.  Then, on page 140, she repeats the exact same point, as if we’d never heard it before.  “Doesn’t a name connote intimacy? Of course it does, and IKEA knows well the power of intimacy to move us.”  It’s hardly such a powerful point that she needs to fully develop it twice in two separate parts of the book.

Often, when I read Cheap I felt as if I was being filibustered.  Going on about the trivial issue of IKEA giving cute names to its objects, Ruppel Shell specifically mocks the store for “naming a wok after a girl”.  But, reading the notes for the chapter, I discover that the wok in question is called “Pyra”.  Clearly, this wok is named after the Greek term for fire, as every consumer who sees a wok named “Pyra” will understand. Ruppel Shell couldn’t find a better example than this?  I don’t understand why she didn’t at least pick a better example (say, a bookshelf named “Billy”).  It’s ironic that a polemic against “cheap” should have such problems with quality control.

I also feel personally put off after reading and rereading Ruppel Shell’s lush paean to the sturdy oak bookshelf “groaning with books” that her friend bought after rejecting the IKEA lifestyle.  My cheap bookshelves “groan with books” too.  Ruppel Shell’s poor friend will spend the rest of her life lugging that heavy piece of furniture around. This book absolutely fails to inspire me to want to follow her example.

Nina MacLaughin writes:

In response to Robert’s point about immunity to the chimes of commerce. It’s impossible to be immune; even if you’re a conscious shopper, sensitive, responsible, the siren song (or “shitstream of noise”) penetrates.

pricegougeA quick example (and I’m on the side of folks who appreciated Ruppel Shell’s personal anecdotes): There was a Whole Foods located less than a 10 minute walk from my house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I passed by the store on my walk home from work. It was where I bought my food. I knew it was more expensive, but it was a matter of convenience. Time and money. It was worth it to me to spend the extra bucks to save myself some out-of-the-way trip to a cheaper spot. About three months ago, I moved to Somerville, and the closest supermarket is an expansive, always-crowded Market Basket. It’s got all the same brands as Whole Foods. My first time inside the store, buying the same combo of foods, and more or less the same brands that I would at Whole Foods, I was staggered at how much less it cost. What would’ve been $18 at Whole Foods was a little over $7 at Market Basket. Unbelievable. There is definitely a delight in that. And yet, somewhere in the back of my head, there’s been a gnawing sense that the veggies are saturated with pesticides, that the yogurt is rife with hormones, and that it’s cheaper at Market Basket because the food is poisoned (obviously a little overstated, but you get the idea). And I’ve been sort of wowed about this, in the sense that, holy shit, Whole Foods has done a pretty powerful job marketing themselves. It also speaks to the the complications of price and worth and quality and value that Ruppel Snell explores. Would I rather pay $3.49 for a pint of cherry tomatoes at Whole Foods? Or $2.10 for the same pint at Market Basket? I’d rather pay less, but it does put a doubt — a completely irrational doubt — in my head. Am I getting something that isn’t as good (or, in the case of food, something that isn’t as safe)? Is this doubt borne from the power of Whole Foods’ marketing (and my action buying into it) or the mysteries of price and quality? Or a combo that is hard to know? Whatever it is, it’s certainly interesting to consider.

Edward Champion writes:

To respond quickly to Levi:

(1)  Maslin actually got that detail wrong.  She was never in a Red Lobster restaurant with friends. I’m surprised that not a single fact checker at the supposed Paper of Record got off his ass to grab the book, flip to the “Red Lobster” entry in the index, and confirm that Maslin was indeed quite wrong.  (Damn those bloggers sitting in basements in Terre Haute!)

(2)  My problems with Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine had more to do with her assumptive approach to the subject — specifically, tying nearly every one of her investigations to the “shock doctrine” brand name after the fact.  As Richard Flanagan suggested in his novel, The Unknown Terrorist, journalism is not a sudoku puzzle. It was not unlike Gladwell’s “tipping point” or Anderson’s “long tail.”  Ruppel Shell’s book, on the other hand, demonstrates substantive journalism, as can be gleaned from the solid and often detailed endnotes.  (I mentioned, for example, the fairness she gave to Kristof.)  I do have problems, as others have pointed out, with some of Ruppel Shell’s quasi-elitist descriptions.  But if we look to the facts, the findings, the quotes, and the data, I believe that there’s much here in this book to consider, whether you think you know where you stand or not.  And as Birnbaum said a few messages back, some of you think you are immune.  (I’m sure as hell not.)

booksandbookshelves(3)  The many problems with IKEA, and it is all thoroughly documented in the “Death of a Craftsman” chapter (and I would suggest consulting the endnotes), is that it represents one of greatest manifestations of discount culture.  IKEA’s founder is Ingvar Kamprad. He is the seventh richest man in the world, but he still haggles with vegetable vendors and he still flies coach. IKEA has single-handedly altered Western ideas of interior design, perhaps to the same degree of Postrelian plaudits rightly derided by Jackson.  Let me tell you a story.  When I moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn, I had to leave behind all of my bookcases.  These bookcases were hand-built by a team of craftsmen in the Castro.  A place I highly recommend, if you’re ever in the market for bookcases in San Francisco, called Books and Bookshelves.  The guy would custom-design them for you.  And these shelves were built like houses.  They wouldn’t wobble or fall apart like the IKEA bookcases.  I was able to store a considerable amount of books, while ensuring that I had some wall space in my apartment that wasn’tt occupied by books. When I moved cross-country, I was forced to get rid of these shelves. I initially put up a Craig’s List ad for $50 a pop, which was a little less than one-third of the price that I paid for them.  Very few people wanted them. And some people emailed me thinking they were IKEA bookcases.  They literally hadn’t experienced bookcases built out of real durable wood.  When I couldn’t get any buyers for the last few, I gave them away on the street.  And again, people came up to me — in a seemingly civilized city like San Francisco, no less — asking where I had obtained these bookcases.  They pounded the sturdy wooden sides.  And I told people that they could store their DVDs in there if they wanted to. 

The upshot is this.  These people were mystified by real oak bookcases.  Yes, the bookcase was made by cutting down a tree.  But the difference is this.  These bookcases last decades.  An IKEA bookcase, by contrast, falls apart within a few years (at best) and the amount of wood is wasted.  Furthermore, the discount culture keeps IKEA running around the world and engaging in illegal and decidedly non-eco friendly cutting practices.  You tell me how that’s a positive lifestyle.  Would you rather spend $200 on a sturdy bookcase that will hold thick Vollmann books and last a lifetime?  Or $90 on a Billy bookcase that will fall apart because its not made to hold anything other than thin mass-market paperbacks (at best)?  If your main complaint, Levi, is that Ruppel Shell’s poor friend is going to be lugging around a heavy piece of furniture every couple of years, well, that’s a specious position to take, given all the interim years of sturdy quality.  But if you’re happy with your paper-thin particle boards, Levi, by all means, sing a song to IKEA.  At the end of the day, we’re all singing hymns to the corporate empire.

Robert Birnbaum writes:

A quick question: Are the IKEA shelves actually made of wood or particle board?

By the way, in between Eddie’s elitist custom book shelves (suitable also for CDs) and the IKEA items,  are the inexpensive unfinished pine shelves that I’m sure are available in every city in the mainland USA. You can even paint them colorfully so as to distinguish your self as artsy. Or is it craftsy?

Erin O’Brien writes:

“But her case against IKEA, like many of the cases presented here, feels underdeveloped.”

And when you consider that some event references in Cheap happened just a few months ago, it’s obvious that book was turned around at lighting speed. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it as I read it, but Cheap felt dense and rushed at the same time, perhaps because Ruppel Shell is very smart and Penguin wanted her to write very fast. I suspect Penguin didn’t want to wait around too long only to see the recession cool its heels, along with the sales of this book.

Peggy Nelson writes:

I will have to strongly disagree with the voices who argue that books like this are hypocritical luxury items, preaching to the converted readers who have enough disposable income that they can indulge themselves in a little passive system-bashing before bed.   I disagree.  The work of demystification is lengthy, heterogeneous, and necessary. And it has taken, and will take, many books, many websites, and a significant amount of talking so that we can see clearly what we are dealing with.  This work does not take the place of social/economic activism, but doesn’t delay it or prevent it.  Demystification runs parallel to activism, and is just as necessary.  Empowering people without a clear analysis of exactly where they are in the system only paves the way for greater misery, and perhaps does more harm than good as people become discouraged, decides that the culprit is greater awareness itself.  
 
I have been trying to stay abreast of the economy and our respective places in it, ever since I was a labor activist in the late ’80s. But there are still things I do not know — for example, the historical trajectory of retail commerce, its philosophy, and its pervasiveness — that I learn from books like this one.  Cheap doesn’t go as far as some other books, either in reportage (like Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed) or in systemic analysis (like Rushkoff’s Life, Inc.), but it does occupy its role well.  My only qualm was the book jacket. That fast-food yellow is repellent.  I know it’s about cheap, but does having it look cheap further its aims?
 
In terms of Kristof’s pro-sweatshop arguments, we heard a lot of those arguments in my union days too.  “Well, they’re better off than they were.” Or words to that effect.  This was not made to justify a $12 hoodie purchase, but as part of a global labor discussion. Should we be reaching across national borders to organize? (Yes.) And did we? (No.) (I was with the UAW organizing clericals during that time.) 
 
profitmagI think that this is a difficult argument to combat within the framework of a growth economy.  Companies need to get bigger. Companies need not only profit, but profit that’s greater than the last quarter, and a profit rate that’s continually increasing.  Buy more, spend more, acquire more, consolidate more, grow more, more, more.   This philosophy of “More” (maybe that’s the next catchy title in this series!) does not align itself well, if at all, with other values — like preserving and maintaining limited resources on the planet — and accommodating, perhaps even promoting, other types of values, such as community, creativity, being loved, and playfulness (with kids or just generally).
 
I credit the environmental movement with giving this analysis greater scope by demystifying systems on Planet Earth, including global and regional and micro, and showing not only the interconnectedness of natural systems, but the interconnectedness of natural, economic and cultural systems.  Without a general framework of sustainability (instead of “More”), I think the way out is not possible.  But within sustainability, I think discussions like this can be actively fruitful.   Levi, you are right in pointing out that, despite following the IKEA supply chain back to China and Romania, Ruppel Shell does not fully explore or incorporate the environmental angle here, and that she needs to.  I think that’s part of her not addressing the larger overarching points, as I’ve mentioned before.   Even smaller, more spotlight-style books like Cheap need to set themselves up correctly in relation to the larger themes, indicating where they fall within a larger spectrum of analysis and action.
 
(Re: my personal experiences with IKEA. I too move around a lot and don’t want some giant antique monster as a bookshelf.  But I also dont’ want to support clear-cutting even in places I can’t see.  I’m going to have to do some investigating of my own when it comes time to get my stuff out of storage again.)

Levi Asher writes:

Ed, you’re correct that Janet Maslin slipped up in describing Ruppel Shell in a Red Lobster when she decided to solve the problems of the world by ordering chicken instead of shrimp.  It was a seafood restaurant, not a Red Lobster.  BUT … the spirit of Janet Maslin’s point remains completely valid.  The only reason Rupell Shell was able to feel comfortable ordering chicken instead of shrimp is because she had been studying the problems with shrimp instead of studying the problems with chicken. 

And, Ed, that’s nice that you like heavy furniture so much.  I also know that you like heavy hardcover books, and that you don’t mind lugging around heavy video equipment book conferences.  Milan Kundera wrote eloquently of the choices we make between “heavy” and “light” lifestyles.  I am decidedly a “light” person, and I will indeed continue to sing songs of love to IKEA.  We haven’t even talked about the great Swedish meatballs and lingonberry jam yet.

Jackson West writes:

Well, apologies for my strident tone.  Ed has a way of managing to time these roundtables to my mood and frame of mind rather ruthlessly. Last time, with the Human Smoke roundtable, I was literally in the process of losing my last family link to the era described in the book with the death of my grandmother.  This time, I’m essentially living with my parents off in the hinterlands after finally drowning under the cost of living in San Francisco and figuring I needed to get out of the pool long enough to let some invoiced checks arrive for a breath of fresh financial air. (Good news. It seems I’ll be selling microwaves for General Electric soon, if a tad indirectly. But I digress.)

I think what I was trying to get across is that in a book like this, which attempts to elucidate a history to explain contemporary reality, a teleology is implied.  In this case, the implied argument is this: In a society where everything is easily commodified and competition becomes one of quantity over quality, invariably there will be a race to the bottom in terms of both pricing and marginal profits. Environmental and social degradation hijinks ensue.

This is, in Ruppel Shell’s estimation (and many of our estimations), a bad thing.  Of course, there was a guy way back in the industrial revolution, a student of capitalism if you will, who also noted the trend.  What was his name again?  Something German.  Got a lot of people worked up. Led to some bloodshed (though, of course, not nearly as efficiently as that wrought by capitalism). Now he’s pretty much persona non grata in the wake of a bunch of nationalist revolutions that ended in autocracy, but cloaked their intent in his ideology.

Hence, like the Kristof example above, there are those who would defend the depredations of a sweatshop because they believe, “Hey, at least it ain’t feudalism!” (And of course, they’re not the ones sweating.)  This is a sentiment which, oddly enough, the likes of Lenin, Friedman, Trotsky, and Rand would agree. It’s like the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers getting together on the issue of gun control.  Counterintuitive, but true.

The problem is, when an industrial capitalist society bent on growth at all costs essentially runs out of room to grow — as it has now that it is truly global — then what’s next?  Well, for starters, it seems that wages stagnate even as productivity grows.  Because “sweatshops for all!” really means just that — an equilibrium in which which the working class works for crappy wages to produce cheap shit to sell to the rest of the working class, with the difference accruing to the owners of the means of production.

Progress!

But in America we still have the luxury of sitting on the fat side of the trade balance, meaning our working class can maintain the delusion that they’re actually middle class because just look at this sweet bedroom set I just bought on my credit card even though I’m underemployed and lack health insurance.  A delusion that we’re only too happy to perpetuate, to misquote Dick Cheney as Malcolm X, by any means necessary.  Again, Ruppel Shell lays this all out (and succinctly so). I’m just paraphrasing.

In all this aspirational class alienation, however, a petit bourgeois strain of thought persists. And I felt that this impulse formed the crux of Ruppel Shell’s concluding arguments.  Namely, that if we return to the somewhat sentimental capitalism of our forefathers (and they were all fathers), we can turn back to a Jeffersonian ideal of libertarian utopia.  The argument goes something like this: “Capitalism isn’t bad, per se. Just industrial capitalism. And if it weren’t for the state colluding with certain corporations to corrupt the market, we wouldn’t be in this unsustainable clusterfuck that we’ve now found ourselves in.”  Also: Sex slaves.

The funny thing is that my homelessness brought me to the family cabin as very much the prodigal son. I’ve actually found myself in what I imagine to be something near the image of postindustrial capitalist utopia that Ruppel Shell and her peers seem to be pining for — a small scale organic paradise with broadband Internet.  A sort of info-agrarian mash-up of self reliance, sustainability, and all the free porn you can stand.  For those who’d like to stay in the cities, well, you’ll be making the porn (natch) and selling the advertising in order to pay for the delicious goats and tomatoes that rural types bring to market.

Perfection!

To go back one last time to my original entry, the question that’s bedeviling me (and, to Ruppel Shell’s credit, it would probably not be so damn devilish if I hadn’t read her book and instead was rubbing myself sore with the porn and such) is whether there are enough cabins to go around, or whether this enlightened and entrepreneurial information age that our best and brightest are so eagerly striving for will simply be crushed under the weight of peak oil and slums and drought and war and all the sins of the industrial age which we (and I mean we, us here, and presumably Ruppel Shell’s intended audience) love to hate.

But I think trying to answer that is my book to write, in which case I may milk the middle class for my piece of the pie and buy a garden of my own to tend. And maybe a shotgun to keep the hungry hordes off my garden. The freeloading Commie bastards.

Subway

“Subway” — the fourth installment of my “Anthropological Film” series — was shot and edited on July 14, 2009. For some unknown reason, I took my camera with me for a job interview. Since I had arrived at the Times Square station early, I began shooting to pass the time and satiate my fascination with what I was observing around me. I figured that this was a film that I could work on later, possibly “anthropological” or not. But that evening, I became haunted by the subway and felt compelled to finish the film. So I rode the subway for a few hours and, to my surprise, it all came together. For those noting the absence of rats, I should point out that I did go out of my way to look for them, but my quest for vermin proved unsuccessful (at least in relation to this film’s more human emphasis). And since the film is more about the human relationship with the subway system, I don’t feel that (for this film anyway) rats were entirely necessary.

Ellen Ruppel Shell’s CHEAP — Part Three

(This is the third of a five-part roundtable discussion of Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Other installments: Part One, Part Two, Part Four, and Part Five.)

Jackson West writes:

cheaprt3Sadly, like Kathleen, I wasn’t particularly surprised by many of the examples used in Cheap.  However, unlike Kathleen, I’m a bit of a bargain hunting hobbyist — mostly in the realm of clothes, food and media.  Because, as many of you know, writing isn’t exactly the quickest way to riches these days (if it ever was).  Maybe if I wrote something to shake the moral and ethical foundations of your typical NPR-listening, Prius-driving IKEA and Whole Foods shopper I’d have more money lying around to spend on handmade furniture, bespoke suits, grass-fed beef and sustainably grown potatoes.

I’d certainly like to consider Cheap in the context of other well-meaning, non-fiction journalism. It’s likely to find itself sharing “Customers who bought this book also purchased” space on Amazon with a number of books.  Barbara Ehrenreich comes to mind, as does Michael Pollan, whom I’ve been devouring of late.  What all of them do is essentially describe the symptoms of the illness called “industrial capitalism,” but none of them seem willing to take their critiques quite that far.  And, unfortunately, the suggested reforms do seem backward looking.

Contrast that approach with the pro-capitalist arguments put forward in Chris Anderson’s Free and Virgina Postrel’s The Substance of Style.  Anderson naturally celebrates the creative destruction Ruppel Shell laments, even though I’d love to see his face when his publisher decides that, if free is good enough for everyone else, it should be good enough for Anderson. Therefore, no checks will be forthcoming.

targetchairPostrel argues that the despicably produced furniture from the likes of Target is valuable, because of the aesthetic thought that went into the plastic mold.  She goes on to write that a world of disposable plastic luxury in bright colors and pleasing curves is a beautiful and dynamic one; that the clever packaging and marketing that surrounds a fast-food hamburger and the medical technology developed to cure the heart attacks or the diabetes it gives you are both boons. To suggest otherwise makes you hopelessly backward.

That’s what frustrated me so much about Cheap‘s ending.  While it wasn’t a Pangloss like Anderson or Postrel, Ruppel Shell had a chance to draw a conclusion that indicted the philosophy of industrial capitalism, but instead quoted Adam Smith — and in so doing, seemed a tad the naive Candide.  Because the essential problem with all the cheap crap which these markets bring us and the depredations that it took to get them here formed an ecology in which we, the working (or, these days, maybe working) class, are trapped.

Which belies any of Ruppel Shell’s advice to make the personal choice of “opting out” of the system by changing my shopping habits.  Because I must “buy in” to have any purchasing power at all.  Now that capitalism is truly global, there is nowhere to escape — except, of course, into wealth.  And the only way to get there is by wholly embracing the ideology that got us here in the first place.  Namely, to put private profit and property above all, and damn the torpedoes.

Now Ruppel Shell is right in that Smith’s self-interest was supposed to be an “enlightened” one — not necessarily strictly rational, as he is usually misquoted, or the more naked self-interest which it has devolved into with practice.  But Smith lived in a time and a place wholly different from our own. And as Ruppell Shell rightly points out, ours is a time in which we’ve made our ignorance of the true costs of our goods willful. We’ve hidden these costs behind trans-continental shipping and propaganda quite literally engineered through mind mapping, helping to fool our senses and reason.

Present Smith with the blinding fluorescent and neon light come-ons, and I bet he too would fail to perceive the dark age that lurks behind what lies just outside his field of vision.

What I’ve gathered from the likes of Cheap is yet another indication that, until there is a way to account for such externalizations like environmental degradation and human suffering, there’s no end in sight.  Capitalism by its very nature seeks to commodify through efficiencies of scale, quantify through market pricing, and exact measurement and monopolize by granting private ownership of anything and everything — from DNA to the very air we breathe.  So I find it ironic that a book that revels in the revelations of excess and hubris would return to the words of the system’s moral benefactor and apologist.

Apologies to Peggy, but I’m going to have to disagree that all revolutions end poorly — after all, as we were all so loudly reminded yesterday, July 4th, ours was a nation born of fire and steel and “Death to Tyrants.”  Though, naturally, that revolution ended with us right here debating this. So maybe you’re right after all.

frenchrevolutionBut at least revolutions happen at the time and choosing of the revolutionaries.  What worries me about the current spate of liberal hand-wringing in books like Cheap is that in not calling for a wholesale rethought of our political and economic organization, in only urging personal responsibility and institutional reform, we’re simply not going to act fast enough to avoid a catastrophic reckoning.  Because I have a bad feeling that all the “hidden costs” we’ve been charging to the bank of the future are being added up on some terrible ledger, and we will all have to pay for them eventually.

Call me a pessimist, but I just don’t see the kinder, gentler postindustrial capitalism Ruppel Shell calls for ever materializing.  At least not until the oil runs out and the climate changes and we’re all totally fucked, regardless.

Colleen Mondor writes:

You know, when I signed up for this round table I never thought the discussion would totally suck the life out of me. And yet it is. I just don’t agree that the situation is that bad – or that it is has crossed a line to prevent positive change. At least we are all now talking about cheap products and fast food and agribusiness, etc. Twenty years ago these topics were not part of the national conversation. When I grew up in the ’70s, TV dinners were good. So were plastic bags and Styrofoam. Twenty years before that, spraying DDT on crops was good. Heck, in the ’60s, my husband went to an elementary school with asbestos in the walls. But we learn. We discuss. Books are published. Studies are completed. And change does come. Does Cheap go far enough for everyone? Probably not. But it does go far for the general reader. Hopefully, just as we all embraced Fast Food Nation and other titles (Pollan included), we will find something of value in Ruppell Shell’s work as well.

It’s easy to say that things will never change. I give the author credit for pointing out reasons why she thinks change should happen and for writing a book that does not intimidate readers from asking themselves questions about why they think it should. Getting general readers curious about the economy is no simple task and while many members of this roundtable might already know what Cheap is about, I’m sure there will be a lot of readers who find something new in her discussion.

Sarah Weinman writes:

Let’s keep this in mind: One person’s “I’ve heard it all before” is another person’s mind being blown when hearing such ideas for the very first time. One person’s bitter pessimism is another person’s stubborn optimism. And maybe, just maybe, we’re talking more about class division in terms of how we’re approaching Ruppel Shell’s approach? But I admit, those are fighting words. Just as Jackson’s tipoff to the “moral and ethical foundations of your typical NPR-listening, Prius-driving IKEA and Whole Foods shopper” might be as well.

But let me backtrack a bit, since I haven’t really delved into my thoughts on Cheap more readily. Unfortunately, I don’t have the book in front of me. So I’m going to have to rely on memory. My take falls a lot closer to the mind-blown newbie than the jaded repeat listener, largely because, to misquote the Passover Seder in gross fashion, “in every generation you must act as if you personally had been brought out of Egypt.” Point being, Ruppel Shell’s examples aren’t new. Certainly not to me. But isn’t there some power in her having gone to Sweden to visit IKEA headquarters, or personally experiencing Vegas outlet mall shopping, and so on and so forth? Examples are just a means of finding the right way to frame an idea, a thesis, or an investigation. And while I had some of the same problems about Ruppel Shell’s conclusions, because the end of Cheap felt more than a bit rushed and frantic compared to the cool-as-cucumber research and investigation of earlier chapters, I was more than convinced by her own discoveries, her own personal approach to supposedly common problems, and, most of all, the questions that formed in my mind, independently, in agreement or disagreement — as a result of what she wrote.

corvairAs Colleen said, we’re talking about issues now that wouldn’t have registered in the slightest during the advertising boom of the ’60s, the gas guzzling years of the ’70s (crisis notwithstanding), the Me Generation ’80s, and even the ’90s, which sure look like a happy boom period from 2009. Maybe Cheap isn’t Silent Spring or Unsafe at Any Speed or even Fast Food Nation, but so what? For me, it passed many smell tests: There was (a) well-thought out, sourced, journalism of originality, (b) a clear, distinct voice, and (c) at least some attempt at problem-solving. And ultimately, there is absolutely no harm in repeating ideas you “know” about from a different angle or a new slant. Because maybe, just maybe, it will register and resonate and hit home. Need I bring up the adage about how many times we have to see an ad before it registers? Or other market research stats on the branding and corporate mentality propping up the lowest-price-is-best mantra? I know I’ve read any number of articles on any number of subjects and all it takes is one read at one time in one place for something to “click” in place, to get me thinking at a deeper level. Such are the goals of a book like Cheap and, as a result, it succeeded for me.

But I want to talk about the book itself and specifically, a topic that wasn’t addressed but which I thought about constantly as I read it: digital books and how to price them. I too wish Amazon had been given larger shrift, but figured Ruppel Shell didn’t have the space or felt she had to restrict herself to a given number of examples for narrative purposes. But since she didn’t, I could fill in my own blanks. $9.99 is just as mythical a set point as any number of cheaper or expensive prices are for goods, and when someone is willing to pay much more for an iPhone or a Kindle or the device that you’d read a digital book on, but the book itself is too “costly” when it’s more than $10 (consider the Amazon message board petition to boycott eBooks priced higher! I wish I had the link handy but others have found it) and we run into dangerous territory. I think eBooks should be cheaper than hardcovers for sure, just like mass market paperbacks should be cheaper. But what of the cost of producing a book, the advance/author payment, the editorial and production work? Should that always be a money-losing venture? And if eBooks are cheap and there is no physical value and they disappear because of DRM issues, then what? Is there value? Is it an object or a work of art or commercial pap or all of the above? I want my books to have value, but maybe the folks who sold to the pulps wanted them to as well, but had to settle for being paid at a penny a word or for signing away the rights for a few thousand bucks to lose control over everything but the words on the typewritten page, if that.

Cheap, to me, is a jumping off point, not the last word. I sure hope it’s not the last word, because then Ruppel Shell would have failed in her mission, but judging by the word count of this roundtable so far, I’d say it’s anything but.

Whet Moser writes:

Apologies for taking so long to write. I was on the road for the 4th, which is never as unstressful as it’s intended to be.

furniturebuildI remember the first time that I went to IKEA, thinking, “My family would kill me if they knew.” My dad used to work in the southern furniture industry (which is getting killed by imports), before getting laid off. His father had a part-time business making custom furniture, which took months or years to make and cost tens of thousands of dollars, as well as another part-time business making custom wood powerboats. His father ran a furniture business that specialized in expensive, handmade, archetypal southern furniture.

So the book hit me in a personal way, and made me question whether I’m part of the problem. But I had to weigh that against the realities of my life, as compared to the generations that preceding my own. Virtually no one in my family moved out of the state they were born in. Not only did I move to a big city for college, but I’ve lived in four different apartments since I graduated six years ago. Most of my family, if they went to college, went to state schools. I went to an expensive private school in another state, and will be paying for it well into middle age, in order to make an entry-level salary with less purchasing power than my family had back in the day. IKEA, for better or worse, has been a godsend in some ways, as it was to Levi Asher above.

I’d love to be able to support the sort of craft that Ruppell Shell describes, but it’s a slow process: Between declining purchasing power, an increased debt load, a longer workday, and my locally peripatetic lifestyle, the “cheap” products that Ruppel Shell describes are appealing for reasons beyond price, which is something to factor in (and she does a fine job of it in the IKEA chapter).

Along those lines, here are responses to discussion points that I thought were interesting:

“What worries me about the current spate of liberal hand-wringing in books like Cheap is that in not calling for a wholesale rethought of our political and economic organization, in only urging personal responsibility and institutional reform, we’re simply not going to act fast enough to avoid a catastrophic reckoning.” (Jackson West)

As an editor/blogger/etc., I’m really only good at thinking about these concerns in terms of how they’re discussed within that realm. So I can’t offer much help on wholesale rethought. But one area where I do think progress is being made is in food, as evidenced not only by Pollan/Food Inc./etc., but also just in terms of local food. Here in Chicago, it’s a big thing, as you’re probably aware. And it’s a shame that other forms of craft aren’t discussed in the same terms, e.g., people freaking out over a local furniture maker in the way they do over Moto or a new restaurant from the people behind Lula (if you’re in Chicago on a Monday, Lula’s farm dinner is the best thing in town).

People in my not-particularly-impressive financial demographic are willing to pay a premium for craft in terms of food – but not a lot of other things. I don’t have an explanation. I think it’s just one of those things. But I think it’s a good model.

Here’s one honorable example in a related field: Lifehacker may be my favorite blog. Give it a shot, if you haven’t. It’s mostly computer-oriented, but the bloggers also touch on food, time management, etc. It’s about how to do things efficiently and wisely, particularly getting the most out of expensive electronic gadgets. There isn’t a lot pertaining to the subject at hand, but I’d like to see Lifehacker’s philosophy get picked up by other bloggers and newspapers.

“How do we get from our current system, in which the hidden costs are catching up and twisting us into a vicious downward spiral in all areas, to a more equitable system, in which price reflects real cost, and local/sustainable is the more economical option? In other words, how do we get to Utopia?” (Peggy Nelson)

This is one hell of a hard question that the book doesn’t really ask or answer. Short of making the production process part of your advertising campaign (after reading Cheap, I bought some $14 American Apparel undies — they are quite comfortable), it’s difficult to tell whether a high price is a brand premium, the actual cost of something made honorably, or just an insane profit margin.

Part of me thinks consumers need better informational resources. But the local papers seem more interested in whatever scheme McDonalds has cooked up (they are Oak Brook based, but c’mon). Again, I turn to Lifehacker: If you want more wisdom about consuming and using what you consume. I know a lot of stuff. But if I need new shoes, I have no idea where to begin if I want to take some care in surveying their origins.

My biggest beef with the book: She picks up and drops Nick Kristof’s argument about how you should buy sweatshop-produced goods because it represents an improvement for the laborers over the alternative. Unfortunately I haven’t read Kristof’s own argument. So I don’t know how glib his argument or Shell’s description of it is.

But I think it’s a question that deserves some serious thinking. As a Virginian well-versed in Appalachian history, I’m painfully aware that the guaranteed “living wage” that Americans were promised isn’t that far removed from the economic exploitation that made things cheap back in the day. Demands for non-exploitative labor, at least in the U.S., are a comparatively new thing. We had to go through a long, bloody labor history to even get where we are now.

Here’s a related book that’s awesome: Free Lunch by the great David Cay Johnston. It really fleshes out the governmental advantages that “cheap” big box stores receive. It’s not just that they have structural advantages. They also lobby like hell.

Miracle Jones writes:

Whet, I brought up some of IKEA’s sins over dinner with my roommate over the weekend, and she put her fork down and glared at me.

“Without IKEA, it would be impossible for a single woman to move without help.  They make disposable furniture for disposable living arrangements.”

I shrugged and mentioned something about trees, but she knows I don’t give a shit about trees.  So maybe you are right.

***

Sarah, I don’t know if this book will be eye-opening at all.  It feels like the kind of soothing head massage that actually shuts eyes.  Much of this book instead felt like a letter from a fretful, middle-class parent to their affable, cloistered child just entering adult life, a letter about the real value of things.  The sort of letter you would hear read aloud in a Wegmans commercial. 

***

HOW TO LIVE CHEAP
by Miracle Jones

1.  Admit you are poor.  It’s easiest to admit this to another poor person.  Chances are they live next door to you.  Maybe this is a good time to meet your neighbors.

2.  Get cool with being poor.  Realize that what you are is actually “normal.” Go outside.  Let a pit bull lick your hand, take a deep breath, and say:  “I make under a thousand dollars every month just like most human beings on this planet, if not America.  The true human condition is to make under a thousand dollars a month and still live, fuck, breed, laugh, create, eat, dance, bleed, and die.  There is nothing noble about this and nothing wrong with it either.  How can it be anything other than baseline?”
 
beardedhomeless3.  Most of the money you make every month will go to rent.  This is a necessity. If you are homeless, you will get fired from your “job” or you will get jumped so often that you will become a paranoid wreck.  Try to get more roommates, if you can’t hack rent.  Learn to live with couples.  Don’t listen to bearded weirdos who tell you homelessness is the true freedom.  Being homeless feels “free” for exactly three days, and then you start to hate all of humanity, including yourself, which is more stressful than a full-time job.

4.  Get a job for at least six months working in the kitchen of a restaurant where you like the food.  Learn how to cook cheap shit using cheap ingredients.  Learn how to run your own household with the same tightwad attention to inventory management as a short-order line cook.  Treat yourself as both tyrannical boss and a tyrannical customer when you start cooking for yourself at home.  Hopefully your roommates are also experimenting with this form of culinary school and you can pool knowledge to make endless, fascinating feasts.  NOTE: It is much easier to get laid by cooking for somebody than taking them to a restaurant.  You are already in a private place with a bed. 

5.  Get a job for at least six months in the service industry where you have to sell something to people, preferably something that you like but that you don’t really need.  Get the job for the discount and stock up!  Sell the item using every sleazy sales trick you can think of.  Become immune to these tricks.  Make friends with other people in service industry jobs in order to learn the true value of the products you sell.  Step sideways from the consumer mentality by taking the Devil into you and learning how the Devil gets souls.  HINT: It’s not by lies, it’s by false correlation.

6.  Steal things if you know you will not get caught.  Go ahead.  You have my permission (this will not hold up in court).  “Get hold of portable property!”  Property acquires possessions, not people.  Steal from where you work.  Steal a lot from where you work.  It’s called “shrinkage.” It’s all insured.  Don’t get caught.  Learn how not to get caught, even if you have morals that preclude actual crime.  Give free shit to your friends and roommates when they come visit you.  Visit them where they work.  Get free shit from them.  

killtv7.  Get rid of your television.  Forever.  Watching rich people whine is no kind of entertainment for a normal person such as yourself.

8.  Sex, conversation, art, and games are what actually make people happy.  All advertising points back to these free phenomena and tries to tap into their power.  If you are thoroughly modern and you start to see items as information instead of as special physical curios, you will start to get bored by everything you can’t steal easily or produce yourself.  Handmade goods are only meaningful when the hands that make those goods are your own.  The internet has recipes for everything, from delicious marijuana cookies to beautiful homemade books.  Learn to value things by the amount of time it would take you to make them yourself at home.  Egg McMuffins =  EXPENSIVE.  Crepes and blueberries = CHEAP. 

Become cheap.  Don’t fight it.  Go so deep into cheap that you become competition for these eeeeeevil discounters.  Become so cheap that you are affordable to everybody in all your favorite activities (sex, conversation, games, art), both rich and poor alike.  You will have a good life. 

Eat gross-ass blood shrimp, but only have a handful as you scrape someone else’s plate in the back of a restaurant and then wash it.  That is truly “affordable luxury.”

Ellen Ruppel Shell’s CHEAP — Part Two

(This is the second of a five-part roundtable discussion of Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Other installments: Part One, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.)

Kathleen Maher writes:

cheaprt2I am not quite finished reading Cheap, but I have to admit that I’m finding it more interesting than I expected, seeing that I generally don’t read non-fiction and can’t stand shopping — especially for bargains.  

I enjoyed the quick history of American department stores and such trivia as the invention of the price tag.  But it’s hard to imagine this book will capture the popular imagination in the way that other quasi-academic books have (Malcolm Gladwell, et al). The sum of all these anecdotes and quasi-scientific studies seems like a great big “Well, duh. Cheap? You get what you pay for.” 

Miracle Jones hit the nail on the head with his preliminary preoccupations: First, that there is some downright weird stuff in Cheap that weakens Ruppel Shell’s argument, like the masturbation studies and the flying excrement neighborhoods.  And second, as Miracle so aptly put it, I suspect most of America lives in a perpetual “Gruen transfer,” mindlessly wandering in search of the next siren call.  I live in a cheap shopping district in Manhattan and I’m seeing shoppers walk by my window right now.

So I am stuck with a feeling that I know all this already. Ruppel Shell portrays our culture with a certain perspective that most of us may not have appreciated before, but it’s still the same old picture. A culture of mass consumerism in which intelligence, wisdom, quality, and beauty are devalued and degraded.

The depressing fact is that Ruppel Shell is preaching to the choir. We readers, the shrinking “elite” who take the time to actually read, know what she’s talking about. But can we possibly have any effect on the global corporations who are ramming the culture of cheapness down our throat?  I doubt it very much. Global capitalism is brutal, ruthless, and backed by overwhelming military might. Ruppel Shell may be right in her assessment, but Cheap probably won’t make an impact. (Of course, the pertinent question here is: Will it sell?)

Colleen Mondor writes:

Levi: I’m curious. Does reading Ruppel Shell’s sustainability argument about IKEA change the way you perceive your shelving units? Since you are someone who is aware that you are getting a “cheap” product and you’re fine with it because it works best for your purposes, did her discussion of its larger cost come as any surprise? And does it affect how you feel about the product or company?

Edward Champion writes:

I’ll have a lot more to say in response to the many interesting points offered so far. But I wanted to reply very briefly to Levi’s remark on not seeing the problem or the ethical violation of fixing prices. I’m wondering what he (and others) think of the following episode from Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide. The book is a tad too popular science for my tastes, but it does feature a very interesting profile of Herman Palmer, a Bronx financial counselor who helps working-class people manage their debts for a nonprofit organization.  One of Palmer’s chief strategies is to cut up a debtor’s credit card and place the plastic remnants in a large jar containing other shards.  Here’s the excerpt outlining the pernicious pitfall:

When Herman talks about the people who have been helped by his financial advice, his face takes on the glow of a proud parent.  There’s the plumber from Co-op City who lost his job and started paying rent with his credit card.  After a few months, his interest rate was above 30 percent.  Herman helped him consolidate his debt and get his expenses under control.  There’s that single mother who couldn’t afford daycare.  “We helped her find other ways to save money,” he says.  “We cut her expenses by enough so that she didn’t have to charge everything.  The trick is to notice whenever you’re spending money.  All that little stuff?  Guess what: it adds up.”  There’s the schoolteacher who racked up debt on ten different cards and paid hundreds of dollars every month in late fees alone.  It took five years of careful discipline, but now the teacher is debt free.  “I know the client is going to be okay when they start telling me about the sweater or CD they really wanted but they didn’t buy,” Herman says.  “That’s when I know they are starting to make better decisions.”

Most of the people who come to see Herman tell the same basic story.  One day, a person gets a credit card offer in the mail.  (Credit card companies sent out 5.3 billion solicitations in 2007, which means the average American adult got fifteen offers.)  The card seems like such a good deal.  In big bold print it advertises a low introductory rate along with something about getting cash back or frequent-flier miles or free movie tickets.  And so the person signs up.  He fills out the one-page form and then, a few weeks later, gets a new credit card in the mail.  At first, he doesn’t use it much.  Then one day he forgets to get cash, and so he uses the new credit card to pay for food at the supermarket.  Or maybe the refrigerator breaks, and he needs a little help buying a new one.  For the first few months, he always manages to pay off the full bill.  “Almost nobody gets a credit card and says, ‘I’m going to use this to buy the things I can’t afford,'” Herman says.  “But it rarely stays like that for long.”

According to Herman, the big problem with credit cards — the reason he enjoys cutting them up so much — is that they cause people to make stupid financial choices.  They make it harder to resist temptation, so people spend money they don’t have.  “I’ve seen it happen to the most intelligent people,” Herman says.  “I’ll look at their credit card bill and I’ll see a charge for fifty dollars at a department store.  I’ll ask them what they bough.  They’ll say, ‘It was a pair of shoes, Herman, but it was on sale.’  Or they’ll tell me that they bought another pair of jeans but the jeans were fifty percent off.  It was such a good deal that it would have been dumb NOT to buy it. I always laugh when I hear that one.  I then have them add up all the interest they are going to pay on those jeans or that pair of shoes.  For a lot of people, it will be around twenty-five percent a month.  And you know what?  Then it’s not such a good deal anymore.”

These people aren’t in denial.  They know that they have serious debt problems and that they’re paying a lot of interest on their debts.  That’s why they’re visiting a financial adviser.  And yet, they STILL bought the jeans and the pair of shoes on sale.  Herman is all too familiar with the problem: “I always ask people, ‘Would you have bought the item if you had to pay cash?  If you had to go to an ATM and feel the money in your hands and then hand it over?’ Most of the time, they think about it for a minute and then they say no.”

Levi Asher writes:

Colleen, I want to give this a well-thought out answer, but I’m away for a few days without the book in front of me.  I want to reread those sections of the book and then respond in a few days.

Erin O’Brien writes:

We readers, the shrinking “elite” who take the time to actually read, know what she’s talking about. (Kathleen Maher)

I drink shitty beer. Does that affect my newfound “elite” status?

I live in a suburb just south of Cleveland. The Walmart I shop at is about 6 miles away. It’s adjacent to Parmatown Mall, which you can visit vicariously here.

walmartI only go to Walmart when I need to buy Suave shampoo, Saran wrap, Q-tips (I buy the generic ones) and two or three dozen other really irritating things. I usually put said purchases on my credit card, which I pay off monthly in order to earn the one percent rebates.

There used to be another Walmart about 8 miles away. It was built on a landfill. The landfill started leaking noxious gasses that were finding their way into the land of Low Prices. They had to close that Walmart.

In each of the older toilet tanks in our home, you’ll find plastic bottles filled with water and sand that displace some of water therein and lessen the volume of every flush. We put these bottles in right after we moved into this house almost 17 years ago. We conserve everything where we can, but neither my husband nor I would ever leave less than a 20 percent tip. Since we do not want our kid to have to take out a college loan, there is no AC in our house. Vacations are long weekends to places like Mammoth Cave. And if you think my beer is shitty, you should try a cup of my coffee. I drink it with a smile.

Life. Is. Beautiful.

Peggy Nelson writes:

Ed, I’m glad you brought the credit card angle up, which is totally insidious. Ruppel Shell doesn’t get into it much, perhaps because she’s so focused on discount retail.  If anyone has time, I highly recommend the documentary Maxed Out. (You can watch it online via Amazon and also on Instant Play on Netflix.) [EDITOR’S NOTE: With great respect to the lovely Ms. Nelson, I’m afraid I must note the discount culture irony. The film is also available on DVD, but at a higher price. Do the filmmakers get more of a cut through the DVD or the cheaper on-demand option?]

familycreditcardCredit card companies target the poorest, and least credit-savvy, segments of the population to make their money.  They do not make money on you if you use the card responsibly and pay in full every month, or if you hold it in reserve only as an emergency fund.  They do make money off you if you run it up to the limit and then only pay the minimum, or, better yet, miss payments and run up fees and penalties.  

Providian anyone?  Capital One?  MBNA, who is one of the top contributors to the Republican Party?  These predatory lenders have a business model that’s just like the check cashing places out by the strip mall. Once you’re in their system, you will pay and pay and pay.  Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy lawyer interviewed in Ruppel Shell’s book, plays a large role in Maxed Out too, explaining how this works.  It is counterintuitive. How can they make money off the little people who have almost none?  And yet, they do.  Lots of it.

This all plays into something in us that is very difficult to resist. And I’ve been there, as have some of you. Hey, a little extra for free!  Just for now.  This will so help me out, get me over the hump, and I need some stuff.  Yeah, I have to pay it back, but only eventually. And I can do so in little bits.  Meanwhile, the total climbs higher and higher. Until things are worse than at the beginning. And now you don’t need a little help. You need a lot.  And they’ve started calling your family. And your boss.

There is one more insidious thing about credit cards (well probably more than one) — you need one for your social reputation.  I don’t mean that as some abstract thing.  You need one to rent a car, to buy an airline ticket, to stay in a motel, to rent an apartment (in some places), and, in some places, even to get a job.  You need one as a second ID, the “real” ID, that validates your active membership in society.  Without a credit card, you have no reputation (or worse, a bad one).  You cannot do things.  You are suspect.

Kathleen Maher writes:

Erin, so maybe you’re not elite — it’s my problem. The truth is, I’m so elitist that I don’t even like fireworks. Even as a child, they impressed me as bombs bursting in air–more martial than anything else. We’re free to accept or reject superficial labels like “down to earth” vs. “elitist.” I certainly didn’t mean to insult anyone.

I did think, however, that this book — which so carefully describes the lengths that shoppers will go (the outlet malls, for one) to score a designer label or a brand name — was referring to the “elitist” that runs rampant in so many psyches. Or maybe not. I don’t shop at outlet malls. It’s not worth the time and trouble. And here again, I can be called an elitist for not joining the outlet crowd.

To me, elitism is not a soul-sickness. It’s not a vice. It’s more a matter of not being able to get with the big group. Not belonging; not joining. I know there’s the connotation that real elitists think they’re better. I do not think I’m better. I do think I’m different. And admitting that sets me up for criticism, as if by different I mean special. I don’t necessarily mean special. Just different.

Erin O’Brien writes:

suaveadKudos to Peggy’s “great unasked question” and the subsequent points she raises. Life Inc. sounds like a book I need to visit. But I need to bellyache about the government for a bit anyway. As Ruppel Shell copiously notes in her book, many of us are hard-wired to find a good value or a good price. To that end, I shop at a discount grocer and Walmart.  But I also ride pretty far left of center for a reason. I just don’t think that enough people will shop responsibly or self-regulate to make a difference. I try to be conscientious and I try to conserve. Many others do. But it is simply not enough. This is why we need government. I want legislation that supports fair minimum wage. If the best price around is a few cents more in order to pay that wage, I have no problem shelling out $1.25 for my Suave shampoo instead of $0.99. Furthermore, I’m happy to pay taxes that support Medicaid and food assistance. I’d love to see Medicare gradually expanded to relieve the private sector of the choking health care/health insurance behemoth. I’m all for college becoming part of the public school system. I’m for a government that supports effective regulation and inspection of imported food and goods. The list goes on and on. Yes, I know all this means more taxes. I’m okay with that. I am happy to have a little less in order to live in a society that respects and values human dignity. Sorry about the flag-waving, but somewhere along the way, taxation became a dirty word and unfettered capitalism/consumerism became the new golden idol. Call it the bastard child of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics coupling with eight years of Bush’s crazed deregulation.

I am not naive. I know the lobbyists, the big corporations, and the big money are all staggering entities. There’s also plenty of regular red-blooded Americans who would decry every assertion in my previous paragraph. They usually vote Republican. All I can hope for is that the blue push which we saw in the last two elections starts the juggernaut moving slowly but surely leftward.

A few more notes:

I thought Ruppel Shell’s recounting of discount retailing history was interesting, but that she devoted too much space to it.

Sarah: Point well taken about publishers wanting books such as Cheap to be personalized. Unfortunately for me, Ruppel Shell’s brand of personalization did not necessarily warm this subject matter.  For instance, when she references people “wearing T-shirts emblazoned with slogans” on page 97, the tone felt condescending. That’s purely subjective on my part, but there it is.

Regarding the notes, I did find them valuable, but also distracting. I always knew they were lurking back there. Whenever I came upon something that intrigued me (the liquified manure for instance), I had to decide whether or not to interrupt my read and see if there was more to be had in the back of the book. When there was worthy content, I had to wonder why Ruppel Shell didn’t just incorporate it in the general text.  The notes also struck me as just one more reason that we should be reading ebooks. We all seem to be able to handle embedded links online. Books like Cheap beg for the convenience of a click and a shift of the eyes instead of the intrusive page fumbling begged by the elaborate notes. But all that said, 232 pages of text followed by 63 pages of acknowledgments, notes and bibliography was stunning to me. Of course, had this been an eBook, I wouldn’t have been comparing the thickness of pages devoted to text to the thickness of pages devoted to explaining said text, now would I?

Colleen Mondor writes:

Honestly, while we could pick out certain points we wish were expanded upon or not, I think the purpose of the book was to make the general reader think before they buy. We haven’t talked much about the social history Ruppel Shell presents here on department stores and malls. This was all very interesting — especially how outlet malls in particular are designed to keep people moving and to a certain degree uncomfortable (no covered walkways, etc.). I also thought that her passages on pricing and the example of the mattresses was very well done — we don’t want an inexpensive mattress; we want an expensive mattress that is priced inexpensively (even though the prices are all, to some degree, made up).

One thing I was worried about was that this would be a big Walmart bashing book. But it’s not. I appreciated that Ruppel Shell even framed Whole Foods in a less than flattering light. It’s not as if people need to aspire to go there for the good stuff. Ruppel Shell makes a point that the expensive stores are just as culpable as the dollar stores in manipulating the public.

wholefoodsTo me, that was rather key in the book. It also addresses this “elitism” issue. (That is a word that I think will be a lightning rod for some time due to the election.) Ruppel Shell’s point seems to be that the bargain idea crosses socioeconomic lines. While a bargain for some folks might seem crazy expensive to some (the Whole Foods example), it is still another person’s bargain. But then, as she explains in various ways, the bargains are revealed not to be bargains at all — either in their value to you (they won’t last long or flat out aren’t worth it) or in the true cost to others (or the environment, etc.). Levi is right that, for some items and some people, a cheap price for a short-term purchase may be worthwhile. But as Ruppel Shell shows, there is still the fact that the true price isn’t being exposed to the American consumer. It’s like how some of us are enjoying cheap energy while West Virginia and Kentucky pay with environmental destruction, health problems, etc.

I think Ruppel Shell did a very good job of writing a thinking person’s book that will appeal to anyone who shops — in essence, to pretty much anyone. You could argue that folks who have to buy cheap because they don’t have much money wouldn’t bother reading this book. But I don’t think that’s true. As I stated earlier, that’s the life I was brought up in. And I know that both my parents would be very interested in this book. No one likes to be manipulated. And at its heart, this is what Ruppel Shell is exposing.

I thought the endnotes were excellent also. But as a historian, that’s something I look for in a book like this one.

Robert Birnbaum writes:

Here’s the OED (that’s the Oxford English Dictionary for you non elitists)

elite noun & adjective. Also élite. L18.
[ORIGIN French élite, use as noun of fem. of obsolete pa. pple of élire, †eslire from Proto-Romance var. of Latin eligere elect verb.]

► A noun.
1 The choice part, the best, (of society, a group of people, etc.); a select group or class. L18.

K. M. E. Murray Oxford still catered…for the social elite, who could afford to go to the University as a…luxury. R. Rendell She…spoke of her family and its immediate circle as of an élite.

social elite: see social adjective.

► B attrib. adjective. Of or belonging to an elite; exclusive. M19.

 elitism noun advocacy of or reliance on the leadership or dominance of a select group elitist adjective & noun (a person) practising elitism 

Here’s American Heritage:

e·lite or é·lite 
n. pl. elite or e·lites
A group or class of persons or a member of such a group or class, enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status: “In addition to notions of social equality there was much emphasis on the role of elites and of heroes within them” (Times Literary Supplement).
The best or most skilled members of a group: the football team’s elite.

e·lit·ism or é·lit·ism 
n.
The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.
The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.
Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class

I am pretty certain that I am an elitist — and people, I think that all of you are too.

This pow wow, as such things are inevitably driven to, has devolved into a cross-hatching of confusions and personal defenses. That’s all understandable, as examining human behavior reveals all manner of anomalies, illogics, and base behavior; none of which we are comfortable admitting are parts of our own persona (in the spirit of [sort-of- ]full disclosure, I own more socks, baseball caps and hoodies than anyone should).

Bad boy Eddie introduced the subject of our behavior around credit (cards). That’s a whole other ball of wax— and whatever irrationalities are manifest you can bet that the shylocks and the money changers have worked out an elaborate rigging of the system so that we (you and me) can’t win. Remember: The House never loses.

Levi talked about the practicality of IKEA. Which makes sense. Except you can, for example, do bookshelves for less (cement blocks and lumber and unfinished pine shelves). May be that’s too much work. Personally I think IKEA and such outlets contribute to a stultifyingly dull sense of habitat.

jimmychoobahTo me, the big unaddressed issue is how we perceive value. Price is not about value. And I don’t think it ever really has been. What determines the price of a Hermes scarf, a Brioni suit, and Jimmy Choo shoes? Workmanship? Quality materials? Or the campaign that convinces some people that $5,000 or $6,000 is okay? Or that $25 or more is the price of a good cigar? (By the way, with workers, farmers at the bottom of the pyramid of production of luxury goods don’t fare better than the those making whatever products end up in Walmart, which, by the way, is no great bargain past a select number of items that are promoted.) And apropos of nothing, Whole Foods is vastly overpriced and oddly managed. (Did you read about the Whole Foods worker who was fired for planning to eat a tuna fish sandwich? Then Whole Foods tried to impede his collection of unemployment comp.) But Whole Foods is apparently well branded. I work part time at a Trader Joe’s and I can declaim on this subject at length if prodded.

Anyway, there will not be a revolution — certainly not by consumers. (By the way, Cheap is part of a long line of books about (us) dumb and benighted consumers going back to Vance Packard’s Nation of Sheep in the early ’60s.) Nope, the correction that will dismantle the mass market will be the slippery downward slope of peak oil and the reconstitution of society circumstantially deprived of energy to sustain the oil-based industries and products. Which is to say that James Howard Kuntsler (The Long Emergency) has me convinced.

For those of you who believe that reading these types of book make us smarter consumers, well, good luck.

P.S. One thing that continues to bother me is the rapid decline in the price of books (clearly an example of the disparity of price and value). Go to Amazon and see what some recently published books are being offered at. And remainders! There’s a surefire way for the book publishers to commit suicide.

Nina MacLaughlin writes:

Janet Maslin has some dismissive things to say about Cheap in the New York Times, where she pairs it with Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. “Neither author is entirely to be trusted,” Maslin writes. “And neither author has written a book that is as sharp as its one-word catchy title.”

I wonder about Robert’s most recent point about whether these sorts of books can actually be effective tools of change, and whether these books can serve in making us “smarter consumers.” I think I may tilt more towards Robert’s pessimistic take. Being more aware is one thing. We know now that we should care whether our apples were flown all the way from Argentina, and we know that it’s not a good thing to pay $4 for a T-shirt if it means that 11 year-old kids were involved in making it. But being able to care about the backstory of a product — the circumstances it was made, how far it had to travel to arrive on the shop’s shelf, &c — and being able to make choices based on those facts are two completely different things.

But this feels like a pretty obvious point, and so did many of Ruppel Shell’s examples. Some of her examples were mildly illuminating (the shrimp discussion, for example, if only for its gross-out factor). But as Janet Maslin points out in her response to the book, Ruppel Shell boasts that she decides to opt for chicken over shrimp at a Red Lobster dinner. As Maslin writes, “Yet cheap chicken-farming isn’t any less ghastly. It just doesn’t happen to be addressed by this book.” It’s all about picking your battles, I guess.

I have been thinking a lot about what Levi has said about IKEA and disposable shelves. It makes some sense, and, not to overstate the case, perhaps it helps in making us less attached to actual things (even if they do have cute Swedish monikers). For me, though, as someone who loathes shopping to an extreme, I think I’d rather pay a little more for the shelves, if only to avoid having to go back to IKEA to buy replacements.

Kathleen Maher writes:

I’ve finished reading the book, and I enjoyed reading the history of buying and selling stuff in this country and just how we got to the grotesque place we are today. Many of Ruppel Shell’s investigations into cognitive psychology either confirmed my intuitions or struck me as obvious. For example, I am already acutely aware that the “Winner Takes Nothing.” I know about deforestation, the pitiful working conditions, and these policies the world over. I’ve tasted that muddy, medicine-tinged shrimp. And while I may have been naive about that one word, I know full well that nobody around here is a “worker.” They’re associates and representatives with whom I’ve shared three-hour there and three-hour back bus rides. Except they get off the bus at the Woodbury Mall while I continue to the next stop to visit a friend who rents a bungalow outside Monroe, NY during the summer.

In the evening, the same passengers join me on the bus returning to the city. They’re now weighed down with glossy Dolce and Gabba shopping bags, along with (and there’s no real way not to notice) Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, and Versace shopping bags. And aside from whatever name brand clothing and leather goods these people may have bought, they’ll carry those high-end, name brand shopping bags around on the subway until it’s time for their next day trip to the designer outlet mall.

Overall, this book made me as anxious and as unhappy as shopping does. Count me an extreme case of HNFC: If I happen to hit upon a “bargain,” I do not enjoy it. I do not feel richer and frankly it would amaze me if the pleasure paths in my brain lit up. For I am all too aware that my personal bargain means another person’s loss. Yet I’m no happier knowing I’ve lost money in an institutionalized swindle.

When I’m feeling tougher, I don’t have time to figure gains and losses in percentages of pennies. As I’m more apt to see it, I indulge myself in that luxury — without counting pennies. For if I were truly poverty-stricken, I would need to empty trash bins, as people are doing right now outside the Dunkin Donuts across the street. My shopping cart would be the one I’d somehow procured in order to spend my days and nights accumulating recyclable waste and other junk. Scrounging for “bargains” feels like the high-end version of that activity. And as Ruppel Shell says, it’s work.

The extinction of craft and creativity for the sake of “smarts, drive, ambition, and speed” depresses me. A world without appreciation for craft, skill, and patience is not a happy one for me. Give me fiction and I’ll get out of here.

P.S. Nina’s remark about “cheap chicken” awoke a horrifying description I once read about how corporations breed poultry so that their beaks are barely existent. The birds’ throats are then wired open and liquefied feed, antibiotics, and hormones are poured into them, propelling the already genetically engineered birds to grow up faster and fatter in dirtier quarters.

Ellen Ruppel Shell’s CHEAP — Part One

(This is the first of a five-part roundtable discussion of Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Other installments: Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.)

Since present economic developments have caused nearly all of us to reconsider just how we spend our money, I selected Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap for our latest roundtable discussion. For those readers who aren’t familiar with the roundtable discussions, this website will be devoting the entire week to discussing Ruppel Shell’s book, and we’ll be serializing the conversation in five chunky installments from Monday through Friday. The discussion, as you’ll soon see, got quite spirited at times. But the hidden costs of “cheap,” as it turned out, proved to be quite complicated. Be on the lookout for cameo appearances, some unexpected revelations, and a lengthy podcast interview with the author. And feel free to leave any additional thoughts or personal experiences in the comments. Your communications will help many of us to understand and rethink a very important topic.

Edward Champion writes:

“Remember, time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but six pence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.” — Benjamin Franklin

cheaprt1There’s a bodega that opened up in my neighborhood with a bright and muti-hued awning reading GOURMET DELI. But I’ve examined the goods. The owners are using the same Boar’s Head meat found at nearly every place packing hero sandwiches in the five boroughs. But what this deli has done is undercut the competition. Another deli, situated just one block south, sells a turkey hero for $4.50. About three months ago, this deli had raised its price by a quarter. The regulars still grumble.  After all, everything’s going up.  Metrocards, milk, beer.  But they slide over their four paper George Washingtons and their two copper-nickel George Washingtons.  The hero remains a “good deal.”

But the new “gourmet deli” now offers the same sandwich for $4.25. The old price. The cheaper price.

And after reading Ellen Ruppel Shell’s fascinating book, I now find myself acutely curious about whether this “gourmet deli” is making the proprietors any money. I find myself morally compromised when purchasing a hero sandwich. And I’m wondering how many of you have experienced similar feelings. I want to know if every ingredient has been obtained through equitable labor. But unless I spend a good deal of my time asking about wholesalers and suppliers in the neighborhood, I’m probably not going to get even half of the answer.

benfranklinThe great irony with the Ben Franklin quote (which is dredged up in the book when Ruppel Shell mentions Ben & Jerry’s Free Ice Cream Day, which I’ll get to in a minute) is that we’ve become so dependent upon getting the best bang for our buck that all other time-based considerations fall by the wayside. Ruppel Shell brings up the telltale consumer who is willing to drive 75 miles out of their way to an outlet store to buy inferior goods for a cheaper price. She even describes a personal example: a man who drove up 75 miles to check out her car (on sale), noticed a few scratches, and then drove right back home. This is a curious trade-off, running contrary to Franklin’s wisdom. (Then again, we also live in a nation in which our thrifty founding father appears on one of our most expensive dollar bills.)

While Ruppel Shell presents a number of convincing developments that partially explicate this mentality (to name just three, the fixed price introduced with John Wanamaker’s price tags, Victor Gruen’s use of social space to develop the “shopping towns” that are now ubiquitous and that keep shoppers hanging around, and the “affordable luxury” seen with Coach discount leather), I’m wondering if you folks feel that Ruppell Shell is being too hard on the consumer. I mean, we can’t all be mindless sheep, can we? Is it not possible that our trips to outlet malls or our determination to spend endless amounts of time searching for the best deal may not be entirely tied into discount culture? There is such a thing as window shopping. And maybe we want to waste our time finding odd or unusual things. (I will confess that one reason I like to check out some of these dollar stores is to marvel at the shoddy merchandise. I mean, how often do you see bubble gum from 1972 that’s still on the market? Very rarely do I buy anything.)

billlybookcasetruBefore we plunge into Ruppel Shell’s IKEA Billy Bookcase example, which to my mind (and sadly my personal experience), truly reflects a pernicious reliance upon discount culture over quality, I want to first establish whether Ruppel Shell may be inadvertently suggesting that “bargain hunting” might be the new way of wasting time. Does discount culture and consumerism maintain such a hold on American culture that this is now how we spend most of our leisure hours? Should we pin the blame on corporations such as Wal-Mart for injecting capital into small towns and suburbs and establishing a town center? Preexisting local economies may not have been able to do this. Then again, how much of this is illusory? (Ruppel Shell cites a fascinating study from Emek Basker. Basker investigates the so-called “Wal-Mart effect” of prices lowering throughout community stores whenever a Wal-Mart moves into a community. His findings suggest that not all prices fall. Are there other “effects” beyond pricing that create such conditions? And should we blame Wal-Mart or the people who want a Wal-Mart?)

Citing Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is always a good idea to explore in a book of this type – seeing as how free market advocates often dust off this 200-year-old idea and cling to its possibilities like an AIG executive braying for another government bailout. But I’m wondering if comparative advantage is a viable application when we’re talking about consumers who want more than what a local economy might be able to give to them.

I’m also wondering if it’s fair to chide customers for standing in line for Ben & Jerry’s Free Ice Cream Day. Sure, the flavor options are limited. But it’s not as if you’re lining up for melted vanilla ice milk. And, yes, you can always go to another Ben & Jerry’s, slap down three bucks, and get an ice cream immediately. But are people lining up because bargain hunting and consumerism have replaced less conspicuous ways of frittering away our time? Is it the consumer or the corporation who is guilty of letting discount culture and bargain hunting dominate our culture like this? Have we lost the ability to let time simply be time? Why most every action have a monetary value? (That last question may involve bringing up Chris Anderson’s book, which I’ll let the others bring up, for obvious reasons.)

That may be a lot to throw into the fray, but I think I’ll close this opening sally by returning back to my neighborhood. In the past nine months, my neighborhood has seen numerous mom-and-pop stores close their doors due to the economic downturn and the unsustainable rents. In fact, last summer, a bodega was forced to close its doors. It seemed highly successful. It was the place where everybody went, largely because it had more space than the other bodegas and the prices were cheaper. But as it turned out, the owner couldn’t pay the rent on the place for three months and was forcibly evicted. What does it say about our reliance on discount culture when a man will enter into default because the customer is always right, even when he insists on an unsustainable price in an unsustainable economy?

Robert Birnbaum writes:

The recent spate of social science books doting on and then purporting to explain our irrationality in all manner of behaviors (especially consuming) is somewhat interesting and amusing (Gladwell excepted). The examples and case studies range from compelling anecdotes to something less. But if the intention was to blind us with science — well, no dice.

This will no doubt be viewed as simplistic. But given the preexisting gap between various regions of our cognitive faculties, the incessant message droning in the back and foregrounds of our lives to consume, to acquire, to converse about our acquisitions, write about them, devote publications and books to them and, to top it off, to be told in the midst of a national crisis that it was patriotic to shop, this very much guarantees senseless consumption behavior.

As far as I have read, I suppose the history of retailing does provides revelations but the conclusion I am heading toward is that, when retailing moved to large and then gigantic organizations, shopping became an adversarial contest in which consumers were bound to lose.

More TK

Peggy Nelson writes:

Some initial thoughts, building on what Ed and Robert have begun.

I think Ruppel Shell is trying to get at more than wasting time.  I think she’s posing the stronger argument that bargain hunting blinds us to the hidden costs of bargains because of the psychological thrill (at the individual level) of getting more than what you paid for — in some sense.  She’s making a two-pronged attack on the structure of discount economy and culture — that the consumers have their part of the bargain to uphold (or dismantle) as much as the corporations and the government have their part to be forced into acknowledging and changing — at the behest of the consumers, qua citizens.
 
dougrushkoffI just finished Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc., which speaks to many of these points as well.  “Big” has a market advantage in our economy; it’s not a level playing field.  Big corporations have easier access to money. The corporations can get bigger loans, at lower rates, than the little guys.  They can also afford big-time lobbyists, and there are any number of instances where lobbyists go back and forth between their lobbying jobs and the industries they were lobbying for.  Government is, in many crucial ways, out of our hands at this point.   But what remains very much in our hands is our own buying habits.
 
I am normally not a fan of the “pick up your own litter” school of thought. It’s not that I think that picking up your own litter is bad. I think it deflects attention and analysis from the larger and more systemic causes of trash.  But in this case, I think Ruppel Shell does a good job tallying the problems on both sides of this tricky equation.  There is something that the individual needs to do here.
 
I know that, if you make very little money as a cashier at Wal-Mart, you’re not going to be able to shop at Whole Foods.  But that’s exactly part of the problem too and part of the hidden costs Ruppel Shell brings to light: discount pay scales, on both the supplier and the retail ends, are a huge cost that is not reflected in the item’s price.  It’s all connected.  Decent-paying, somewhat-meaningful labor, with local, community-based commerce, is more affordable than the behemoth we have now.

I think Ruppel Shell’s a little weak on this final point. She does mention it, but I think it needed a little more ink.  My main qualm with this book was its overreliance on very similar studies by all these B school profs. They are not the B-all and end-all!  Had she not felt the need to underline every claim with a study as a sort of preemptive strike, Ruppel Shell would have had more pages to draw out the final links in the chain a little more strongly.

Also, Ed, I think you’re making a really important point about time, and how it need not/should not always be reduced to money.  There is a tendency to focus on homo economics when talking about the economy, that comes from both the right and left, that we need to guard against.  You’re right to point out that we’re more than just consumers, that our habits, even in the marketplace, are about more than the bottom line.  We’re more than the money!

Colleen Mondor writes:

The one thing I thought Ruppel Shell conveyed quite effectively is that “bargain” no longer equates to quality in our culture. She used the IKEA example well here when she noted that we buy the cheap shelves, knowing that these shelves won’t last more than a few years. But because these shelves are cheap, we think that’s fine. So it’s as if we’ve forgotten (in a cultural sense) what the word “bargain” truly means. It’s not just about the price; it’s about getting a good deal, if you spend money on something that won’t do the job for long. But are you really getting a good deal?

oldteePersonally, I grew up on cheap culture out of necessity. My parents just didn’t have much money and we lived paycheck to paycheck. We couldn’t see the big picture because we couldn’t afford it. Period. But what’s interesting is that, as my parents grew older and could afford to invest in things that would last, neither was able to change their thinking. My mother still struggles to spend more than $15 on a shirt even when she knows that it will likely stretch, fade, etc. She just has certain price points in her head and she just can’t let them go.

Overall, I thought Cheap was fascinating. The book provides readers with much food for thought.

Miracle Jones writes:

Here are some preliminary preoccupations I had while reading this book:

1.  The startling and unironic revelation that Ruppel Shell would rather eat horses than go without meat (taken from the “Note to Readers”).  I admire her honesty, and it’s a brave assertion to make, considering the potential market for this book.

2.  The startling free pass that Amazon receives from Ruppel Shell, despite Amazon being a corporation currently profiting from the economic collapse like no other and raking in ludicrous profits that look a good deal like blood to me.  She mentions Amazon once when she talks about unfair pricing models, and, once again later, when she refers back to that passage.  Evidently, Amazon got caught charging the old customers more than the new ones. Jjust like a drug dealer.  Why wasn’t there any further analysis of this pricing impact? Ruppel Shell knows for a fact that her audience consumes the commodity of books.  Doesn’t Penguin have some “most favored nation” status with Amazon?  Questions abound. 
 
3.  “A similar scenario is played out by urban street vendors today who claim that the Rolex and Cartier watches lining their jackets are not counterfeits but somehow ‘fell off a truck’ on their way to Neiman Marcus.”  I have not seen this “scenario” since cartoons from the 1950s.  Lining their jackets?  Are they also wearing Hamburglar masks?

4.  I wanted to read an entire chapter about what Daniel Ariely discovered when he had male college kids masturbate and then asked them sexually charged questions to determine the exact point when their “reason” disappeared and they could no longer be convinced to wear a condom. What questions did he ask?  Were the college students paid after they came?  Can I do this experiment? Or do I need a degree?

5.  “A psychological state known as the ‘Gruen transfer’ has come to signify when a ‘destination buyer’ shopping for a specific purchase loses focus and starts wandering in a sort of daze, aimless and vulnerable to the siren call of come-ons of every sort.”  I suspect that most of America lives in a perpetual “Gruen transfer.”

6.  “Two feedlots outside Greeley, Colorado, together produce more excrement than the cities of Atlanta, Boston, Denver, and St. Louis combined.  Trucking the stuff off is impractical.  One alternative popular among big companies is to spray liquefied manure into the air and let it fall where it may, coating trees and anything else that happens to be in its path.”  What?!?

Erin O’Brien writes:

I agree with much of what Miracle said. There are no less than 21 pages in my copy of Cheap that I’ve flagged.

If anything, I thought Ruppel Shell was too soft on the consumer. The book is a dense brew of numbers and statistics, but it mostly served to prove what I already knew: that the American dream has rotted to its core. I suppose this could be globally extrapolated, but I’ll keep my comments in my own backyard.

The idea that parents worked hard because they wanted better for their children maxed out years ago, perhaps in the ’70s. Somewhere along the way, the definition of high quality life became “More More More.” We have so much stuff that our stuff has stuff. We can’t get to the stuff we need because the stuff we don’t need is in the way. We rack our brains trying to think of gifts for our loved ones because they already have everything they want or need.

People who amass the most junk are the ones filling emotional and intellectual voids. That’s always been the case. The happier and more balanced people are, the less likely they are to rely on mountains of things. And if the American Dream is reduced to “More More More” stuff, the less money you have, the harder you’ll try to get as much of the stuff as you can for it (read: The Dollar Store). And as far as the junkiness of the junk is concerned, the cliché “you get what you pay for” got old and tired for a reason.

Sure, everybody wants to do right by their dollars. But how do you really tell if someone’s cheap? Watch how they tip the waiter.

I wanted more on cheap culture’s implications from this book, more on how a two-by-four has shrunken over the years and how drywall has become thinner and thinner. Not surprisingly, the most successful parts of Cheap for me were the ones that detailed the true cost of “cheap,” wherein we visit the shrimp farms and consider the implications of China’s labor practices.

This book represents a stunning amount of work, but I must say that I thought the “slot jockeys in track suits and sneakers” on page 88 was just plain mean. Why does Ruppel Shell include this description? This sort of commentary is particularly off-putting when just a few pages later, Ruppel Shell fawns over Prof. Naylor in her “Diane Van Furstenberg-style wrap dress accented with a stunning Plino Visona handbag.” That was the sort of thing that elicited flags from me. Unfortunately, it also eroded the book’s credibility.

The other day, I saw a woman with four small children foraging through a Goodwill drop box. She was pulling out clothes and putting them on the kids, who soon all had on multiple shirts and sweaters in the summer heat. Welcome to the cheapest shopping spree of them all. But I got the distinct feeling that this woman was no bargain hunter. This was a woman doing what she had to do. Although I understand and appreciate all the studies and arguments in Cheap, I wonder how much that woman would care about any of them. Who would tell her not to shop at The Dollar Store in order to delight those kids with a silly little toy?

There are lots and lots of people on this earth. Whether they’re clothed in “track suits,” Goodwill cast-offs, or they’re toting Plino Visona handbags, they all want food and shelter, which presents us with immense and complex problems. We won’t find the answers within the inviting aisles of a Wegmans.
 

“She even describes a personal example: a man who drove up 75 miles to check out her car (on sale), noticed a few scratches, and then drove right back home.”

That was from one of Ed’s comments.

I found Ruppel Shell’s anecdotes weak, such as that story about selling her used car. How extensively did she interview this fellow? Is there any guarantee that he didn’t have additional business in that area? A man comes and looks at her used car. Maybe he was lying about why he declined to purchase it. None of it really matters. But when I see a writer putting forth a serious nonfiction effort, and including this type of chatty personal anecdote, it’s dodgy to say the least. At worst, it can make a reader feel manipulated. All that story told us was what one guy had to say about one used Honda. To extrapolate it as commentary on how and why people spend their money is a fool’s game.

Here is another detail I flagged: On page 133, Ruppel Shell describes an IKEA table. “It looked just the right size to host a child’s tea party.” Why didn’t she go online and find the exact dimensions and let me judge the size of the table for myself? I’m a big girl. I can decide if a piece of furniture is appropriately sized or not. I realize this is a tiny quibble, but the text is inundated with these types of brush strokes. Every one risks making me feel manipulated, which in turn dulls the sharper points in the book.

dollarstoreAs far as your hero sandwich is concerned, Ed, I did feel morally dirty about the frozen shrimp in my freezer after reading Ruppel Shell’s description of the shrimp farms, which is why I found that section so successful. But even here, Ruppel Shell recalls a time when shrimp was a wild and expensive delicacy. There’ a bit of wistful nostalgia in her description. But as she says herself, the good old days weren’t always so good and now wild fish populations are in grave danger al over the globe. Here’s one story to that end by Johann Hari for the Independent:

The harder society cracks down on irresponsible farming, the greater the pressure on wild oceanic populations. Once again, there’s no easy answer.

Throughout all of this, I feel privileged to discuss and read about these issues. People who are cold and hungry couldn’t care less about whether or not a warm plate of food was ethically produced. If all you have is one dollar and a loaf of bread is $1.73 at the discount grocer, it ceases to be cheap. That’s the most mandatory and difficult part of this entire topic, the subjectivity of it.

Sarah Weinman writes:

I have much to say on Cheap and will do so soon. But I wanted to counter Erin’s point about the potential for manipulation when personal anecdotes are included in serious nonfiction. Part of that is publisher-driven; they want the serious medicine washed down with some degree of contextual personalization, if not entertainment. It’s not enough to be treated to the facts, backed up scrupulously (and Ruppel Shell impressed the hell out of me with her endnotes, in large part because this type of research is too often left on the cutting room floor — I’m thinking of the unclear endnotes in David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts, which was a very good biography that could have been stellar with clear and comprehensible references!); the serious nonfiction writer has to have a great voice and answer the pivotal question of “Why should the reader be reading your book?” Too much of the author is a problem, but just a little bit seasons it just right.

Which is to say, I didn’t have a problem with that personal example. It passed my believability test and brought home the point that people will add needless costs in order to find the lowest price, thus negating the price reduction in the first place.

Peggy Nelson writes:

I’d like to look at the book’s great unasked question, which is the reason she was compelled to write it (and to have us read it): What to do about hidden costs?  Ruppel Shell spends significant time tracing and exposing the hidden costs of “cheap”: personal, social, environmental, systemic.  What if these hidden costs were incorporated into the price?  “Cheap” would suddenly become prohibitively expensive.  

But then what?  Okay, so this plastic toothbrush from China is $47.50. Or maybe even $899.99!  Well, I’m not buying it, and neither is my neighbor who doesn’t have the financial luxury of buying a nice local sustainable wooden one at Whole Foods for $26.95.  But suppose there are no local small manufacturers around, no weekly farmer’s market that could serve the entire community, and no place that doesn’t depend on the vast oil-based chains of import/export.

How do we get from our current system, in which the hidden costs are catching up and twisting us into a vicious downward spiral in all areas, to a more equitable system, in which price reflects real cost, and local/sustainable is the more economical option?  In other words, how do we get to Utopia?  What are the practical or general steps?  Do we need The Revolution?  Because we all know how well that’s worked out each time.

Levi Asher writes:

I find myself less excited by this book than the others so far, and less convinced about its arguments. I do admire Ruppel Shell’s mission. I like the type of psychological investigative journalism this book represents. I have a feeling I’d relate to her first book (about modern eating habits) more than I did to this one.

I can’t relate to Cheap because, while Ruppel Shell writes as if every single modern American is caught up in the Kmart Syndrome, I think I’m immune to it in the first place.  I don’t feel any emotional attraction to consumer goods and I wouldn’t cross a street to get a bargain.  I do like stores like Kmart and Target for their practical simplicity, and I don’t think I ought to be considered part of a brainwashed bargain-hunting horde because of this.

Ruppel Shell is especially on thin ice with me when it comes to IKEA.  I have tended to move every few years in my life, and IKEA furniture is exactly what I need.  Long term value?  Who cares!  I don’t need to carry around a cherished antique.  I want to pay $70 for a bunch of pressed wood with screws and pre-drilled holes and a funny Swedish name that I can put up in an hour and throw away when it comes time to move again.  Maybe I’m crazy, but I always considered IKEA furniture to be an example of Zen perfection in home furnishing.  Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book does not make me want to change my ways.

I’ve written in the past about why I think it’s essential for the publishing industry to give up its sick addiction to expensive hardcover publishing and begin releasing new titles in affordable paperback. Here again, my philosophy seems to head-butt directly against Ruppel Shell’s, though really it’s not the hardcover prices that I despise so much as the size. Even as I read some of Ruppel Shell’s better and more intriguing passages in this book — and there are many of these — I wonder how to reconcile Ruppel Shell’s arguments against “cheap” with my own impassioned past arguments against “expensive.”  I’m simply at a loss.

What I like best about this book is its psychological contradictions — the fact that people will spend money to get a bargain and then consider that they “won”, the fact that a homeowner will cherish the memory of a couch bought on a “good deal” decades earlier, as if this really mattered at all.  This is pointed stuff and I enjoyed reading it.

But it occurs to me that this kind of bargain-hunting, for those who engage in it, must be simply a sport, a hobby.  Would Ruppel Shell deny people a hobby they enjoy? Sure, people can spend a ridiculous amount of time hunting pointlessly for bargains.  But they can also spend a ridiculous amount of time collecting stamps, or studying baseball statistics, or posting to blogs.  Maybe it’s just fun.

bottled-waterI remember once having an argument with a friend at an outdoor rock concert on a summer day.  I was about to pay $8 for a bottle of Poland Spring water from an amateur price-gouger, and my friend said I was crazy and the price-gouger was unethical.  I didn’t see the problem or the ethical violation.  The price-gouger had done the work to truck a Styrofoam container of ice and water bottles into our stadium, and that effort certainly seemed to me to be worth an $8 reward. 

The fact that I didn’t mind paying $8 for this water bottle probably means I’m not the target audience for this book.  Or should I say the “Target audience”, if you’ll pardon the pun …

Golden Hour

“Golden Hour,” which was shot at and around Riverside Park, is the third of what I’m calling my “anthropological films.” You can watch it above or click through to YouTube to see it in HD. (The series started with “Bubbles: A Consideration” and continued with “Dia de los Vivos.”) Like the other two films, this installment deals with certain glimpses of New York that most New Yorkers seem to ignore or fail to appreciate. This latest film chronicles aspects of how we live that were put into place decades ago by developer Robert Moses. (I recommend Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker, if you’re not familiar with the subject.) But you don’t need to be know New York history to experience the film.

I plan to shoot a total of ten “anthropological films” before the end of the year. There may even be more, depending upon how deeply I plunge into these variations on a theme.

[UPDATE: I have created an “anthropological films” page for anyone who cares to chart the progress. I will update this page with additional information pertaining to the interconnected themes of these films as it becomes available.]

The Bat Segundo Show: Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan

Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #296.

Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan are most recently the authors of Beyond Heaving Bosoms. They are also the proprietors of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

segundo296

Subjects Discussed; Kathleen Woodwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, the beginnings of original paperback romance, genre respectability, romance’s profitability, the stigma of effeminacy, cozy mysteries, arterial bloodspray, the fallacious anatomical placement of the hymen, spontaneously lactating virgins, whether the pun is intended or not, editorial house style and “the magic hoo hoo,” the wandering vagina, Lilith Saintcrow’s “Half of Humanity is Worth Less Than a Chair,” rapists within romances, Candy Tan’s suggestive hand gestures, marriage and choice, intrusive Mercedes drivers and related invective, the frequency of oral sex within romances, how far sex needs to go in art, porn, anal sex, bukkake, double wangs and double penetration, homunculi, the line between romance and erotica, hypothetical genre fusion, poseur man titty and erotic romance, the “shop and run” approach to romances, embarrassing covers, dashing long-haired heroes and bald badasses, game theory and Sarah and Candy’s reading preferences, Candy’s pirate fixation, the sharp disparity between genuine smelly pirates and the twee McSweeney’s pirates, “the big mis,” John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, misunderstandings and character flaws, simultaneous organs, romances and Republican presidencies, Cassie Edwards and plagiarism, and encouraging civil disagreement and discourse in the romance community.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

sarahwendellCorrespondent: Science fiction, mystery, YA. These genres are getting respect, particularly in the last decade. And yet romance is still one of those things in which people thumb their noses down. Why do you think this is? Must we always have some place to go for the ghetto? What’s the deal here?

Sarah Wendell: Well, I will point out that romance is actually getting a lot more respect because of the turgid strength of its quarterly earnings. And even though most industries — especially in New York, which is hyper-navel gazing in the financial industry — are experiencing massive losses year to year and quarterly to quarterly, romance is the one erect column in your spreadsheet. And it remains quite strong. So while it doesn’t get a lot of respect from your average cocktail crowd, most financial newspapers are having to pay attention to the strength of romance when you’re looking at it as an investment, or as an indicator of an economy. Which is why I think that Harlequin is chuckling, or befuddled, at the entire economic crisis. Because they were founded during the Depression. I’m sure they’re looking at this, going, “This? This is nothing. Are you kidding? Let me just tell you what it was really like.”

Candy Tan: This is great for business!

Sarah Wendell: I know.

Candy Tan: What the hell? No, I think personally that a lot of the reason why romance novels are the Rodney Dangerfield of genre fiction is the stigma of effeminacy. You know, science fiction. They’re “novels of ideas.” Mysteries have lots of blood and guts. Well, some of them do. The ones that don’t get respect, interestingly enough, tend to be the cozy mysteries. The ones in which there’s a cat solving the goddam murder or whatever the hell. You know, those are the ones: “Oh man, they’re not worth taking seriously.” If I remember correctly, and I might be wrong, because I don’t know mystery as well as I should, the hardboiled mystery were one of the first to exit the ghetto.

Sarah Wendell: As long as there’s arterial bloodspray, you get some respect.

Candy Tan: Or you know…

Sarah Wendell: Spooge, not so much.

Candy Tan: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot more respect for male fantasies versus female fantasies in fiction and you see this over and over again.

Correspondent: If we’re going to talk about arterial bloodspray, I think we should point to the fallacious anatomical scenario involving hymens, which you point out in this book.

Sarah Wendell: At length. At great, great length.

Correspondent: Yeah, at great length.

candytanSarah Wendell: You can tell that this is something that rubbed us the wrong way.

Correspondent: Yes, I got the sense…

Sarah Wendell: And to anyone who’s listening, I want a complete pun count at the end of the podcast. And if we can get an accurate pun number, I’ll totally give away a copy of the book and some beaucoup prize if you can identify how many puns we make in the course of this interview.

Correspondent: But the question is: You have so much attention to detail in historical romance and yet this one thing continues to propagate, continues, I suppose, to not be patched up in quite the way that one would expect.

Sarah Wendell: Good one.

Correspondent: And so what I’m wondering is: Do you think romance readers and romance writers want to fantasize about where the hymen is?

Sarah Wendell: No, I think it’s simple oral history. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I think that the legend of the misplaced hymen is just something that’s passed down from writer to writer. Much like the historical inaccuracies that plague other parts of the specific historical genre, “Where the hell your hymen is?” is one of them.

Candy Tan: Here’s the thing. I think I’ve spotted the same misplacement of the hymen in other books. Not romance novels. I think I’ve read a couple of horror novels — and maybe it would have made sense if the girl being devirginized were some kind of filthy alien beast. By hymen, you mean vagina dentata. But you don’t. Oh, oh, it’s infected other genres too! How wonderful! Anatomical craziness all the way around.

Sarah Wendell: And that’s not the only anatomical inaccuracy we’ve discovered. There’s a few one off inaccuracies we’ve discovered that are just mind-boggling. Like there’s one Gaelen Foley where the heroine’s a bona-fide virgin. And I mean bona-fide. Not is she like a virgin, but she’s like a princess or some shit? They haven’t even had sex yet. This is the first time they’re kissing in the woods. And he tastes her milk. Because, you know, virgins spontaneously lactate. Like a postpartum woman going into Target and hearing a baby cry. Yeah, same thing.

Candy Tan: It was the most nipple-tacular moment in all historical romance.

BSS #296: Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan (Download MP3)

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