This is a model of Xanadu, the mega-mall under construction in New Jersey during what seems to be doom time for the shopping mall. Is it? See the post below.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
This is a model of Xanadu, the mega-mall under construction in New Jersey during what seems to be doom time for the shopping mall. Is it? See the post below.
Sustainable Doom
Once again, the shopping mall is doomed. The death knell has been sounded periodically since the 1980s, even before The Malling of America was first published. Now the sudden and still continuing destruction/reinvention of the financial system and the severe downturn in the American and world economy--the Great Recession--seems to make it certain.
Time Magazine hangs its obituary on the bad timing of Xanadu, the megamall-amusement complex under construction in the Meadowlands of New Jersey. It seems made to order: huge and--by several accounts, including New Jersey's governor--garish and ugly--it is so badly timed that if it did open this year, it would be the only major new mall to do so. (But it won't--the opening has been pushed into 2010.)
Meanwhile, Time quotes predictions that up to 3,000 other malls could close this year, as well as 73,000 retail stores before summer. Another obit in The Week adds more numbers: more than 400 of the 2,000 largest malls have closed in the past two years, and a new one hasn't opened since 2006.
So are they right? Is the shopping mall doomed? Not necessarily, but then I've always taken a different view of what the mall essentially is. As the kind of dominant retail hubs that shopping malls were in the 1980s, they've been fighting a losing battle to the Big Boxes for at least a decade. As new large retail developments that can be plopped down at any highway intersection, clearly those days have been over for awhile. What could be malled in America, mostly has been malled.
What the Great Recession does seem to signal is the end of the kind of psychotic consumerism that gripped this society with increasing frenzy over the past several decades. So as centers of retail that generate huge profits, malls may well be gone with the wind. But the Big Box complexes that have replaced malls in many places aren't going to find the going so easy either.
Many of these changes have been happening for awhile, and some malls have responded to them. The Mall of America in Minnesota--which itself got started during a downturn--merged retail with destination entertainment, which was one new trend, and also self-consciously became a more diversified hub for a community it in part defined. Its proposed expansion was largely non-retail.
But that's not exactly the model for the future either. Malls are malleable--they can adapt. The trends some were slowly adapting to are now likely to accelerate: namely the move away from highway dependence, and a new balance between retail and everything else, including low-profit or non-profit public services. Malls as nothing but artifice, artificially sustained, right down to plants in their gardens that didn't actually grow, are probably over. Malls, like everything else, will have to become sustainable.
Sooner or later, communities and perhaps companies are going to realize that they can do better by retrofitting their dead malls instead of abandoning them, or even better, transforming them while they are still alive. They will have to become part of the green economy, and not simply market rain forest awareness and recycling somewhere else.
And there probably still will be a place for a Xanadu--which is well-located in the New York metro area, and accessible by a new train line. After a few stutters, entertainment is flourishing, as it did in the Great Depression. That doesn't guarantee Xanadu will survive even long enough to open. But it has a chance.
So do malls all over America, if the degree of imagination is applied that the shopping mall's pioneers demonstrated when they began, and again when they went downtown. Probably new models of finance as well as new models of what a mall can be will be necessary. For all the reasons I wrote about in The Malling of America, malls served the needs of people, better than other places, despite their deficiencies. Malls always had a social reason to exist, and not just an economic one.
Once again, the shopping mall is doomed. The death knell has been sounded periodically since the 1980s, even before The Malling of America was first published. Now the sudden and still continuing destruction/reinvention of the financial system and the severe downturn in the American and world economy--the Great Recession--seems to make it certain.
Time Magazine hangs its obituary on the bad timing of Xanadu, the megamall-amusement complex under construction in the Meadowlands of New Jersey. It seems made to order: huge and--by several accounts, including New Jersey's governor--garish and ugly--it is so badly timed that if it did open this year, it would be the only major new mall to do so. (But it won't--the opening has been pushed into 2010.)
Meanwhile, Time quotes predictions that up to 3,000 other malls could close this year, as well as 73,000 retail stores before summer. Another obit in The Week adds more numbers: more than 400 of the 2,000 largest malls have closed in the past two years, and a new one hasn't opened since 2006.
So are they right? Is the shopping mall doomed? Not necessarily, but then I've always taken a different view of what the mall essentially is. As the kind of dominant retail hubs that shopping malls were in the 1980s, they've been fighting a losing battle to the Big Boxes for at least a decade. As new large retail developments that can be plopped down at any highway intersection, clearly those days have been over for awhile. What could be malled in America, mostly has been malled.
What the Great Recession does seem to signal is the end of the kind of psychotic consumerism that gripped this society with increasing frenzy over the past several decades. So as centers of retail that generate huge profits, malls may well be gone with the wind. But the Big Box complexes that have replaced malls in many places aren't going to find the going so easy either.
Many of these changes have been happening for awhile, and some malls have responded to them. The Mall of America in Minnesota--which itself got started during a downturn--merged retail with destination entertainment, which was one new trend, and also self-consciously became a more diversified hub for a community it in part defined. Its proposed expansion was largely non-retail.
But that's not exactly the model for the future either. Malls are malleable--they can adapt. The trends some were slowly adapting to are now likely to accelerate: namely the move away from highway dependence, and a new balance between retail and everything else, including low-profit or non-profit public services. Malls as nothing but artifice, artificially sustained, right down to plants in their gardens that didn't actually grow, are probably over. Malls, like everything else, will have to become sustainable.
Sooner or later, communities and perhaps companies are going to realize that they can do better by retrofitting their dead malls instead of abandoning them, or even better, transforming them while they are still alive. They will have to become part of the green economy, and not simply market rain forest awareness and recycling somewhere else.
And there probably still will be a place for a Xanadu--which is well-located in the New York metro area, and accessible by a new train line. After a few stutters, entertainment is flourishing, as it did in the Great Depression. That doesn't guarantee Xanadu will survive even long enough to open. But it has a chance.
So do malls all over America, if the degree of imagination is applied that the shopping mall's pioneers demonstrated when they began, and again when they went downtown. Probably new models of finance as well as new models of what a mall can be will be necessary. For all the reasons I wrote about in The Malling of America, malls served the needs of people, better than other places, despite their deficiencies. Malls always had a social reason to exist, and not just an economic one.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Christmas at Ye Olde Shopping Mall: New traditions and even nostalgia now locate Christmas memories where, for better or worse, families have been going to celebrate as well as shop... for forty or fifty years.
Mall Nostalgia: Recalling Christmas at Ye Olde Shopping Mall
In what’s shaping up to be a bleak Christmas, thoughts may naturally turn to better days gone by. Holidays often look happier in memory anyway, and since Christmas is so associated with childhood (your own or your children’s or grandchildren’s), the season inspires recollections of magical lights and displays, exciting street scenes and parades, and those first visits to Santa.
But one difference over the years has become: many of those fond memories took place in a shopping mall. Routinely berated as cold, indistinguishable and soulless madhouses of over-consumption, these enclosed behemoths have increasingly become the locations of happy, wistful—and important—memories.
Right now on the Internet, sites such as Livemalls.com and Malls of America.com celebrate days of malls gone by, while others, such as Labelscar.com keep current with fan-like devotion to detail. That so many malls have failed in recent years (catalogued on such sites as dead malls.com), or were otherwise transformed in the course of time, has added impetus to this mall nostalgia.
So people are online sharing their memories of Christmases past that might include toddling past the huge mall Christmas tree to tell Santa your secret desires in the Walker-Scott department store in the Escondido Village Mall, or staring at Santa amidst the splendor of a Colonial Christmas with trees decorated by students of local schools at Montclair Plaza, or dashing through the shaved-ice snow at Fallbrook Mall in West Hills, California.
Or riding the Christmas carousel at South Park in North Carolina, being dazzled by the red and green lights in the fountain at Jefferson Mall in Louisville, or standing uncertainly in front of the Talking Christmas Tree at Midway Mall in Elyria, Ohio.
Real old timers may recall Santa arriving at the Tacoma Mall by helicopter in 1965, or in a tank from the local military base (a traumatic event for one online commenter) at the Edgewater Plaza Mall in Biloxi, Mississippi; or snowballs dropping from Santa’s plane over Northland Plaza in Lima, Ohio in 1967.
There is at least one mall that is primarily associated with Christmas experiences, and it happens to be the mall I wrote about extensively in my book, The Malling of America. A website hosted by Dead Malls.com called Greengate Mall Memories includes over a hundred comments in its “Guest Book,” most of them with recollections sited in the mall, and many of them mentioning Christmas.
These memories are so strong partly for two reasons: because Christmas really was a very big deal at Greengate Mall, and because Greengate Mall is no more.
text continued after photos and in photo captions...
In what’s shaping up to be a bleak Christmas, thoughts may naturally turn to better days gone by. Holidays often look happier in memory anyway, and since Christmas is so associated with childhood (your own or your children’s or grandchildren’s), the season inspires recollections of magical lights and displays, exciting street scenes and parades, and those first visits to Santa.
But one difference over the years has become: many of those fond memories took place in a shopping mall. Routinely berated as cold, indistinguishable and soulless madhouses of over-consumption, these enclosed behemoths have increasingly become the locations of happy, wistful—and important—memories.
Right now on the Internet, sites such as Livemalls.com and Malls of America.com celebrate days of malls gone by, while others, such as Labelscar.com keep current with fan-like devotion to detail. That so many malls have failed in recent years (catalogued on such sites as dead malls.com), or were otherwise transformed in the course of time, has added impetus to this mall nostalgia.
So people are online sharing their memories of Christmases past that might include toddling past the huge mall Christmas tree to tell Santa your secret desires in the Walker-Scott department store in the Escondido Village Mall, or staring at Santa amidst the splendor of a Colonial Christmas with trees decorated by students of local schools at Montclair Plaza, or dashing through the shaved-ice snow at Fallbrook Mall in West Hills, California.
Or riding the Christmas carousel at South Park in North Carolina, being dazzled by the red and green lights in the fountain at Jefferson Mall in Louisville, or standing uncertainly in front of the Talking Christmas Tree at Midway Mall in Elyria, Ohio.
Real old timers may recall Santa arriving at the Tacoma Mall by helicopter in 1965, or in a tank from the local military base (a traumatic event for one online commenter) at the Edgewater Plaza Mall in Biloxi, Mississippi; or snowballs dropping from Santa’s plane over Northland Plaza in Lima, Ohio in 1967.
There is at least one mall that is primarily associated with Christmas experiences, and it happens to be the mall I wrote about extensively in my book, The Malling of America. A website hosted by Dead Malls.com called Greengate Mall Memories includes over a hundred comments in its “Guest Book,” most of them with recollections sited in the mall, and many of them mentioning Christmas.
These memories are so strong partly for two reasons: because Christmas really was a very big deal at Greengate Mall, and because Greengate Mall is no more.
text continued after photos and in photo captions...
Photos I took of Greengate Mall in 1999, when it was nearly abandoned: (top) outside the old Hornes (later Lazarus) department store; inside at center court, the famous fountain; and in the floor near the fountain, the time capsule, buried in 1985 and scheduled to be opened in 2005, but which apparently "disappeared" during demolition. In it, among other things, was a signed copy of my book, The Malling of America. (click photos to enlarge.)
Greengate was built on land that had been part of a farm and summer home owned by the appropriately named John S. Sell family. (The place even had a name: Sellcroft.) This was an era when a lot of the fresh milk sold in Greensburg came from local dairies and dairy farms. The farm was just west of the town of Greensburg, along the two-lane Lincoln Highway, adjacent to the Mount Odin drive-in theatre.
Then the new four lane Route 30 was built through there, having bypassed the Greensburg downtown. The highway spawned new commercial and housing development, meaning that beginning in the early 60s, it bypassed downtown Greensburg. An early indicator was the K-Mart shopping center that replaced the Mount Odin drive-in.
Then came the first enclosed shopping mall in the county, Greengate Mall. Designed by Victor Gruen, the architect generally considered the inventor of the enclosed mall, it opened in 1965, and after decades of dominance and several troubled final years, it turned off the climate control in 2001 and closed. The building was demolished and a new Wal-Mart opened on the site in 2005.
Then the new four lane Route 30 was built through there, having bypassed the Greensburg downtown. The highway spawned new commercial and housing development, meaning that beginning in the early 60s, it bypassed downtown Greensburg. An early indicator was the K-Mart shopping center that replaced the Mount Odin drive-in.
Then came the first enclosed shopping mall in the county, Greengate Mall. Designed by Victor Gruen, the architect generally considered the inventor of the enclosed mall, it opened in 1965, and after decades of dominance and several troubled final years, it turned off the climate control in 2001 and closed. The building was demolished and a new Wal-Mart opened on the site in 2005.
Local news coverage about Greengate’s demise inevitably mentioned its Christmas events and elaborate decorations. (I’d written about the overnight process of setting up the center court tree and Nutcracker theme exhibit, surrounded by a child-sized train ride.) Christmas season at Greengate was popular with the surrounding communities for at least 30 years—long enough for some who experienced Christmas at the mall to bring their own child to do the same.
Many if not most of the comments at Greengate Mall Memories—over a hundred of them—mention Christmas recollections. These memories could be surprisingly specific. I’ve tried to match some of them with images I recently transferred from color slides, which I took at Greengate during the Christmas season of 1981.
Many if not most of the comments at Greengate Mall Memories—over a hundred of them—mention Christmas recollections. These memories could be surprisingly specific. I’ve tried to match some of them with images I recently transferred from color slides, which I took at Greengate during the Christmas season of 1981.
Many recalled riding the train through the snow-covered Christmas village. “I remember the animated deer with the jerky movements that built toys as kids rode through the display.” Another recalled a young adult perspective, of accompanying nieces and nephews, and watching “how big their eyes would be when they first walked into the center courtyard... Nothing made my parents more happy then seeing [the children] laugh as they went round and round on the train.”
The element of nostalgia is particularly evident in the frequency of comments such as: “Wow, nothing compares to it today.” A department store employee who met her husband there wrote, “We all have very fond memories of Greengate Mall. We especially miss the beautiful holiday decorations!” An ex-employee of another store who remembers “singing on the steps in center court in 1980 for Christmas” with a local high school choir, concludes: “Ahh - Christmas at Greengate Mall - it didn't get any better than that!!!”
When I was first writing about Greengate in the late 70s and early 80s, I often heard similar sentiments expressed about downtown Greensburg in the 50s and before: memories of shopping in the department stores and shops on Main Street, going from store to store in the falling snow, seeing friends and ducking into the Chat and Chew. But Greengate and other malls drew the department stores away from Main Street, and Christmas along with it.
As the malling of America took hold, their size, their concentration on consumption and their sudden omnipresence alarmed many, and their formulaic resemblances to each other brought the malls a lot of scorn. But lost in broad-brush critiques, as justified as they might be on many grounds, was the social and cultural roles many malls played, often defining their own communities.
As the malling of America took hold, their size, their concentration on consumption and their sudden omnipresence alarmed many, and their formulaic resemblances to each other brought the malls a lot of scorn. But lost in broad-brush critiques, as justified as they might be on many grounds, was the social and cultural roles many malls played, often defining their own communities.
Then they simply lasted, and thanks partly to years of shared experiences, the local shopping mall often became a real place. And so they became part of memories, and now, of nostalgia. A woman who remembers Greengate as a child (“at Christmas especially. It was wonderful”) has since moved away but visits family in the area every Christmas. She writes: “I'm sad the mall is gone. I would have loved to take a trip down memory lane there by taking my son to ride the holiday train I rode so long ago.”
Christmas is still being experienced at hundreds of malls, and thousands of photos taken with Santa. But even before the latest economic blows, malls were under serious assault by Big Box developments, chiefly Wal-Marts. After decades when not a single regional mall failed, many began to fade, and some (like Greengate) were demolished. Now retail sales so far in this Christmas shopping season are plummeting, and some retail companies are endangered. One mall developer (General Growth) already faces bankruptcy.
But all is not lost for those with mall nostalgia. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, more than a dozen abandoned malls are being transformed into mixed-use projects, with housing, parks and public services as well as retail. Many malls with empty storefronts typically turn to recreation and public services to fill the space, and White Flint mall near Bethesda, Maryland used community-oriented events and organizations (the local Academy of Performing Arts) to increase traffic, and in the process revived itself as a retail destination. One key event was a Christmas celebration. Christmas magic, it seems, does not require total concentration on consumerism.
But will future generations remember instead a beloved Big Box Christmas? There are many reasons why is this unlikely, but the short answer is: maybe—but not quite yet. Some who rhapsodized Greengate castigated the Wal-Mart and related shops that replaced it. One called it “a soul-less development that could be in Anywhere, USA.” That of course is what used to be said of malls.
But all is not lost for those with mall nostalgia. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, more than a dozen abandoned malls are being transformed into mixed-use projects, with housing, parks and public services as well as retail. Many malls with empty storefronts typically turn to recreation and public services to fill the space, and White Flint mall near Bethesda, Maryland used community-oriented events and organizations (the local Academy of Performing Arts) to increase traffic, and in the process revived itself as a retail destination. One key event was a Christmas celebration. Christmas magic, it seems, does not require total concentration on consumerism.
But will future generations remember instead a beloved Big Box Christmas? There are many reasons why is this unlikely, but the short answer is: maybe—but not quite yet. Some who rhapsodized Greengate castigated the Wal-Mart and related shops that replaced it. One called it “a soul-less development that could be in Anywhere, USA.” That of course is what used to be said of malls.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Big Box Reuse: an inspiring, important book about transforming abandoned retail spaces for crucial public uses (or at least public fun.)
Big Box Reuse
by Julia Christensen
The MIT Press
This is a wonderful, inspiring book--all the more so because it is meticulously reported and cogently written. But it's also wonderful and inspiring because of the people who made all these projects happen.
The book is about 10 projects in various parts of America that took abandoned Big Box buildings (usually Wal-Marts and some K-Marts) and transformed them for public uses--as a courthouse, children's or senior center, school, library, health center, museum, and in one case, a new wrinkle on a public market.
These buildings were abandoned not because there was anything wrong with them, but mostly because that's what Wal-Mart does: it builds a big store to create a market, then abandons it to build an even bigger store close by, to expand the market. Using jobs and business generation as bait, Wal-Mart often gets municipalities to provide land and roads for reduced or no cost, loans and a deal on sales taxes, with promises of later repayment and/or tax revenues--by which time they're long gone.
So it is more than poetic justice that retail buildings sited and built with public funds eventually get re purposed to serve the public. But it's not easy or quick. It takes a lot of public and private perseverance, ingenuity and hard work.
For example, the Wal-Mart that eventually became the Centralia Senior Resource Center in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. Once the long process of imagining how to use this building, designing it and getting the community to accept and even love the idea was all begun, a deal had to be struck with Wal-Mart, which made some compromises but eventually made money on the deal, as well as getting the money it owed the town forgiven. Though the Wal-Mart company was more giving in other projects described here, it was Wal-Mart workers who rose to this occasion, by donating their time to the project and forcing the company to contribute. Eventually there were over 900 names of contributors on a wall in the resulting complex, which has become a center not only for seniors but for the entire community.
For me, this and others like it --the Head Start Center in Hastings, Nebraska, and the charter schools in Buffalo, New York and Laramie, Wyoming --are the most heartwarming and hopeful stories. Of the library project, one participant said, "It honestly would probably be easier to count the people in this town who didn't help."
The more colorful projects may attract other readers more, like the indoor raceway in Round Rock, Texas or the Spam Museum (the kind in the can) in Austin, Minnesota, or the Peddler's Mall in Kentucky. Christensen does the work of a scholar in describing the projects, the design issues, the outcomes, and adds enough voices of participants to provide a sense of personalities. But it is her clear and judicious prose that brings this book to life.
There's a web site of photos and some information, but the book is the thing: hefty but sturdy, with friendly type on good strong paper, with well presented images. Well-written and well published, Big Box Reuse is a pleasure as well as an important book.
by Julia Christensen
The MIT Press
This is a wonderful, inspiring book--all the more so because it is meticulously reported and cogently written. But it's also wonderful and inspiring because of the people who made all these projects happen.
The book is about 10 projects in various parts of America that took abandoned Big Box buildings (usually Wal-Marts and some K-Marts) and transformed them for public uses--as a courthouse, children's or senior center, school, library, health center, museum, and in one case, a new wrinkle on a public market.
These buildings were abandoned not because there was anything wrong with them, but mostly because that's what Wal-Mart does: it builds a big store to create a market, then abandons it to build an even bigger store close by, to expand the market. Using jobs and business generation as bait, Wal-Mart often gets municipalities to provide land and roads for reduced or no cost, loans and a deal on sales taxes, with promises of later repayment and/or tax revenues--by which time they're long gone.
So it is more than poetic justice that retail buildings sited and built with public funds eventually get re purposed to serve the public. But it's not easy or quick. It takes a lot of public and private perseverance, ingenuity and hard work.
For example, the Wal-Mart that eventually became the Centralia Senior Resource Center in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. Once the long process of imagining how to use this building, designing it and getting the community to accept and even love the idea was all begun, a deal had to be struck with Wal-Mart, which made some compromises but eventually made money on the deal, as well as getting the money it owed the town forgiven. Though the Wal-Mart company was more giving in other projects described here, it was Wal-Mart workers who rose to this occasion, by donating their time to the project and forcing the company to contribute. Eventually there were over 900 names of contributors on a wall in the resulting complex, which has become a center not only for seniors but for the entire community.
For me, this and others like it --the Head Start Center in Hastings, Nebraska, and the charter schools in Buffalo, New York and Laramie, Wyoming --are the most heartwarming and hopeful stories. Of the library project, one participant said, "It honestly would probably be easier to count the people in this town who didn't help."
The more colorful projects may attract other readers more, like the indoor raceway in Round Rock, Texas or the Spam Museum (the kind in the can) in Austin, Minnesota, or the Peddler's Mall in Kentucky. Christensen does the work of a scholar in describing the projects, the design issues, the outcomes, and adds enough voices of participants to provide a sense of personalities. But it is her clear and judicious prose that brings this book to life.
There's a web site of photos and some information, but the book is the thing: hefty but sturdy, with friendly type on good strong paper, with well presented images. Well-written and well published, Big Box Reuse is a pleasure as well as an important book.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
When Black Friday Comes
When Black Friday comes, I stand down near the door
and catch the great men when they dive from the 14th floor.
When Black Friday comes, I call in everything I'm owed
and before my friends find out, I'll be on the road....
--Black Friday by Steeley Dan
Black Friday--the day after Thanksgiving-- got its ironic title in recent years because as one of the biggest shopping days of the most important shopping season of the year, it was the day that retailers went into the black.
This year, as expected, not so much. If it wasn't quite Black Friday in the old sense of doom, initial reports interpreted the data as not promising, and particularly, retailers were still seeing red. Already discounting, it seems they weren't slashing prices quite enough for consumers, willing (or perhaps needing) to wait.
If this shopping season is the nadir, it's been moving in that direction for several years, at least according to expectations--and expectations tend to become needs for those corporate investors who figure in the original Black Friday of the stock market. So come January, a number of major retailers may be holding going out of business sales.
But despite the pain and problems, some kind of adjustment is long overdue. Growth in sales and profits, artificially inflated over the years by marketing, easy credit cards, near-slave labor and other ethically questionable practices, could not continue indefinitely. It's all contributed to changing us, and not always for the better.
Part of what that means is evoked by the Black Friday incident of shoppers trampling to death a Long Island Wal-Mart employee in their frenzy to get into the store as he opened the door. The Washington Post reported further that: "Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers stepped over him and became irate when officials said the store was closing because of the death, police and witnesses said."
What combination of greed and desperation could lead to behavior like that? Black Friday indeed.
It's likely that we're just beginning to feel the effects of the current economic turmoil, which may well result in a lot more unemployment, lost investments and economic insecurity in the coming year. But if this Black Friday is the symbolic nadir of the consumer age, January 20 may be the beginning of a positive transformation.
We have become a society out of balance in so many ways. In America we are consumers but not producers. The excesses of advertising and marketing, together with the dumbing down that helped to make them effective, have compromised our ability to communicate honestly about matters of importance. The resources consumed by our consumption have thrown our planet into dire peril, and weakened what ultimately sustains all life, including ours.
But in this election we have endorsed the changes we need, and hired the leadership to make those changes. Now we can help to build a more balanced society and economy, with cleaner and sustainable energy systems and practices. Besides buying separately, we can work together. The malls of America can house public services as well as private enterprise.
It doesn't have to be either/or, all or nothing. But as one age is dying, another is being born. It won't be easy or painless, but we can be part of it, help to shape it, and save the future.
When Black Friday comes, I stand down near the door
and catch the great men when they dive from the 14th floor.
When Black Friday comes, I call in everything I'm owed
and before my friends find out, I'll be on the road....
--Black Friday by Steeley Dan
Black Friday--the day after Thanksgiving-- got its ironic title in recent years because as one of the biggest shopping days of the most important shopping season of the year, it was the day that retailers went into the black.
This year, as expected, not so much. If it wasn't quite Black Friday in the old sense of doom, initial reports interpreted the data as not promising, and particularly, retailers were still seeing red. Already discounting, it seems they weren't slashing prices quite enough for consumers, willing (or perhaps needing) to wait.
If this shopping season is the nadir, it's been moving in that direction for several years, at least according to expectations--and expectations tend to become needs for those corporate investors who figure in the original Black Friday of the stock market. So come January, a number of major retailers may be holding going out of business sales.
But despite the pain and problems, some kind of adjustment is long overdue. Growth in sales and profits, artificially inflated over the years by marketing, easy credit cards, near-slave labor and other ethically questionable practices, could not continue indefinitely. It's all contributed to changing us, and not always for the better.
Part of what that means is evoked by the Black Friday incident of shoppers trampling to death a Long Island Wal-Mart employee in their frenzy to get into the store as he opened the door. The Washington Post reported further that: "Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers stepped over him and became irate when officials said the store was closing because of the death, police and witnesses said."
What combination of greed and desperation could lead to behavior like that? Black Friday indeed.
It's likely that we're just beginning to feel the effects of the current economic turmoil, which may well result in a lot more unemployment, lost investments and economic insecurity in the coming year. But if this Black Friday is the symbolic nadir of the consumer age, January 20 may be the beginning of a positive transformation.
We have become a society out of balance in so many ways. In America we are consumers but not producers. The excesses of advertising and marketing, together with the dumbing down that helped to make them effective, have compromised our ability to communicate honestly about matters of importance. The resources consumed by our consumption have thrown our planet into dire peril, and weakened what ultimately sustains all life, including ours.
But in this election we have endorsed the changes we need, and hired the leadership to make those changes. Now we can help to build a more balanced society and economy, with cleaner and sustainable energy systems and practices. Besides buying separately, we can work together. The malls of America can house public services as well as private enterprise.
It doesn't have to be either/or, all or nothing. But as one age is dying, another is being born. It won't be easy or painless, but we can be part of it, help to shape it, and save the future.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The Wasting of America
In sites all over the Internet, the shopping mall has become an item of nostalgia. I understand how malls can inspire these feelings, but when so many of these cherished malls are no more, this devotion is a sign of the shopping mall's decline.
There are lots of abandoned malls that aren't necessarily cherished, but there is still lots of fascination--at Dead Malls and other sites-- with these once-gleaming and still huge spaces becoming ghostly edifices and deteriorating ruins of a dissipating consumer culture. (There's more analysis than nostalgia however at the Label Scar site.)
There are lots of reasons for these mall failures (this article on the De-Malling of America suggests some) but while some closings are due to overbuilding and bad business practices, competition from Big Box stores and other outlets, etc., there are now significant, more general economic pressures that are likely to result in even more failures.
First there were the spikes in gasoline prices and now a global economy still falling like dominoes. In the U.S., the collapse of the housing market, financial system meltdown, corporate failures, rising unemployment, etc. are already being expressed in disastrous retail sales, and the Christmas shopping season is supposed to be underway.
Change has always been part of the shopping mall industry, and many malls have transformed themselves. Re-purposing old malls is not a bad thing--often they include more public services, and build on the sense that they were always community centers. (Some similar projects are catalogued at Big Box Reuse.)
But it's the abandoned malls that really tell the story of how this particular consumerist era is ending. Because many of these malls were simply abandoned long before any economic downturn. Following the practice of Wal-Mart, some were simply emptied and left behind for bigger malls at supposedly better locations. Wal-Mart has made a science out of such waste, because it is in a sense pre-planned. They build a market with one size store, then expand the market with a bigger store at a nearby location, perhaps in a different jurisdiction that will provide them with tax breaks and free access roads before they are required to start paying taxes from the old store.
I'm told that Florida, for example, is littered with abandoned malls of this kind, just as lots of places are littered with abandoned Wal-Marts. This was not the result of recession but of excess, a symptom of greed over any other value. To generate, attract and feed consumption, there was no conscience about consuming resources, taking land that might have been part of an ecosystem or at least green space, and leaving it a few years later as a heap of broken concrete, toxic chemicals and waste--and then moving on to do the same thing again to an even larger plot of land. Not to mention what these behemoths did to the existing web of businesses and their relationships in the community.
This was part of the wasting of America, contributing to a legacy that will haunt us for decades to come. But this grim end to the consumer culture may yet be redeemed. If we are lucky and smart, we are entering a new era which balances so-called private enterprise with public enterprise--with a sustained effort, involving millions of Americans, to modernize our common infrastructure, to transform our systems of creating and distributing energy as part of renewable, sustainable, super-efficient systems.
A Green Deal for a green economy may well be in our future, and soon. We have a new president who is also dedicated to fostering new public values: not selfishness but service, not 'you're on your own' but 'we're all in this together.'
When the shopping malls that so many people remember with fondness were being designed and built, America had a greater balance of corporate and government, of private and public, and especially of rich and not rich. There was a real, robust middle class.
We're not going back to that America, but we can find new ways to get that balance back, to get the middle class back, so that opportunity is real, and we aren't destroying what ultimately sustains us--like our natural resources, our common air and water, the rest of life, and our planet.
Victor Gruen had a dream: that America needed beautiful places that would foster community, where people could share efforts and ideas as well as pleasures. That was his idea of the mall's purpose. Beauty was essential to that idea, and so was commerce. In the thousands of shopping malls that were built in the next few decades, commerce was paramount and beauty--if it existed at all--was often accidental. But people do remember at least some of those malls as the centers of their communities. So there is hope that malls can be that again.
We're always going to want to buy things, and enjoy the process. But malls are going to have to provide more than that. They're going to have to be different than they are or have ever been. Above all, they can't be causes and symptoms of the wasting of America anymore. That kind of America has no future.
In sites all over the Internet, the shopping mall has become an item of nostalgia. I understand how malls can inspire these feelings, but when so many of these cherished malls are no more, this devotion is a sign of the shopping mall's decline.
There are lots of abandoned malls that aren't necessarily cherished, but there is still lots of fascination--at Dead Malls and other sites-- with these once-gleaming and still huge spaces becoming ghostly edifices and deteriorating ruins of a dissipating consumer culture. (There's more analysis than nostalgia however at the Label Scar site.)
There are lots of reasons for these mall failures (this article on the De-Malling of America suggests some) but while some closings are due to overbuilding and bad business practices, competition from Big Box stores and other outlets, etc., there are now significant, more general economic pressures that are likely to result in even more failures.
First there were the spikes in gasoline prices and now a global economy still falling like dominoes. In the U.S., the collapse of the housing market, financial system meltdown, corporate failures, rising unemployment, etc. are already being expressed in disastrous retail sales, and the Christmas shopping season is supposed to be underway.
Change has always been part of the shopping mall industry, and many malls have transformed themselves. Re-purposing old malls is not a bad thing--often they include more public services, and build on the sense that they were always community centers. (Some similar projects are catalogued at Big Box Reuse.)
But it's the abandoned malls that really tell the story of how this particular consumerist era is ending. Because many of these malls were simply abandoned long before any economic downturn. Following the practice of Wal-Mart, some were simply emptied and left behind for bigger malls at supposedly better locations. Wal-Mart has made a science out of such waste, because it is in a sense pre-planned. They build a market with one size store, then expand the market with a bigger store at a nearby location, perhaps in a different jurisdiction that will provide them with tax breaks and free access roads before they are required to start paying taxes from the old store.
I'm told that Florida, for example, is littered with abandoned malls of this kind, just as lots of places are littered with abandoned Wal-Marts. This was not the result of recession but of excess, a symptom of greed over any other value. To generate, attract and feed consumption, there was no conscience about consuming resources, taking land that might have been part of an ecosystem or at least green space, and leaving it a few years later as a heap of broken concrete, toxic chemicals and waste--and then moving on to do the same thing again to an even larger plot of land. Not to mention what these behemoths did to the existing web of businesses and their relationships in the community.
This was part of the wasting of America, contributing to a legacy that will haunt us for decades to come. But this grim end to the consumer culture may yet be redeemed. If we are lucky and smart, we are entering a new era which balances so-called private enterprise with public enterprise--with a sustained effort, involving millions of Americans, to modernize our common infrastructure, to transform our systems of creating and distributing energy as part of renewable, sustainable, super-efficient systems.
A Green Deal for a green economy may well be in our future, and soon. We have a new president who is also dedicated to fostering new public values: not selfishness but service, not 'you're on your own' but 'we're all in this together.'
When the shopping malls that so many people remember with fondness were being designed and built, America had a greater balance of corporate and government, of private and public, and especially of rich and not rich. There was a real, robust middle class.
We're not going back to that America, but we can find new ways to get that balance back, to get the middle class back, so that opportunity is real, and we aren't destroying what ultimately sustains us--like our natural resources, our common air and water, the rest of life, and our planet.
Victor Gruen had a dream: that America needed beautiful places that would foster community, where people could share efforts and ideas as well as pleasures. That was his idea of the mall's purpose. Beauty was essential to that idea, and so was commerce. In the thousands of shopping malls that were built in the next few decades, commerce was paramount and beauty--if it existed at all--was often accidental. But people do remember at least some of those malls as the centers of their communities. So there is hope that malls can be that again.
We're always going to want to buy things, and enjoy the process. But malls are going to have to provide more than that. They're going to have to be different than they are or have ever been. Above all, they can't be causes and symptoms of the wasting of America anymore. That kind of America has no future.
Friday, August 22, 2008
As products get crappier, malls get gaudier, especially
for upscale buyers, and especially overseas. This is
one section of several theme areas in a mall in Dubai.
Junk
This summer required our household to consider some major purchases, and it was an eye-opener. It began modestly, but with portent: the old microwave gave out. The next one lasted about a week--among its defects, the light stopped working. We took that one back, exchanged it for a different brand. That one took several weeks for the light to go out. We don't much like it, it's pretty shoddy and beat up already, but it doesn't seem we'll get anything better even if we try.
Then the stove developed a glitch that involved it turning the oven on all by itself for up to a few minutes. When this began to happen more frequently, we consulted two repair people, who diagnosed it as caused by two different problems, but came up with the same price for fixing it--which was nearly the price of an identical new stove.
Our stove was about four or five years old, but salespeople of new stoves told us that these days that's all they last: five years. I admit to coming from a generation in which gas stoves lasted 20 or 30 years. Refrigerators lasted almost as long, and again we were advised not to expect too much of our new one.
I realize that new appliances have new features designed to be more energy efficient, which might increase the initial cost. But why would it affect how long they last? We also had trouble finding appliances without additional bells and whistles we didn't want or need.
As we all know by now, practically everything we buy is now made in China or some other place overseas, beyond our health and safety laws. But add to that this fairly shocking shoddiness, and we understand some of the consequences of ceding our industries. It's also a predictable consequence of the Wal-Mart- China alliance and the fixation on lowering costs, which now goes way beyond Wal-Mart to most of the products available to other retailers.
American consumers, consumed by low prices and with no thought of the waste involved, are also to blame. When Wal-Mart figured out that if they sold lawn mowers at a low enough price, it wouldn't matter that they lasted but one summer. Consumers would just come back and buy another one the following spring. Let the landfills fill up. Let future generations worry about it.
It's a psychology that in a somewhat different way also affects a somewhat different segment: cutting-edge electronics. I've also been shopping for an Ipod type MP3 player, and I liked what I saw about a new Creative Zen player. But scanning the reviews on Amazon, I saw a question about the battery--could it be replaced? The answer was, no. But it would last two or maybe three years, and by then, you'd want a new player anyway. This response was not written by the manufacturer or retailer, but by a consumer.
Now I can guess that because this player is so small that its battery is simply built into it. But the attitude that a two or three hundred dollar device is expected to last for no more than a couple of years is appalling.
But what is really disturbing is the attitude that throwing this stuff away at that rate has no consequences. The millions of discarded cell phones alone are creating environmental havoc. We are being polluted and poisoned by e-waste at a fantastic rate. Well, not we consumers so much right now--a lot of this is shipped off to poison people who can't afford to buy any of it. But our ground water, our land and air are all inevitably at risk.
All for...junk.
This summer required our household to consider some major purchases, and it was an eye-opener. It began modestly, but with portent: the old microwave gave out. The next one lasted about a week--among its defects, the light stopped working. We took that one back, exchanged it for a different brand. That one took several weeks for the light to go out. We don't much like it, it's pretty shoddy and beat up already, but it doesn't seem we'll get anything better even if we try.
Then the stove developed a glitch that involved it turning the oven on all by itself for up to a few minutes. When this began to happen more frequently, we consulted two repair people, who diagnosed it as caused by two different problems, but came up with the same price for fixing it--which was nearly the price of an identical new stove.
Our stove was about four or five years old, but salespeople of new stoves told us that these days that's all they last: five years. I admit to coming from a generation in which gas stoves lasted 20 or 30 years. Refrigerators lasted almost as long, and again we were advised not to expect too much of our new one.
I realize that new appliances have new features designed to be more energy efficient, which might increase the initial cost. But why would it affect how long they last? We also had trouble finding appliances without additional bells and whistles we didn't want or need.
As we all know by now, practically everything we buy is now made in China or some other place overseas, beyond our health and safety laws. But add to that this fairly shocking shoddiness, and we understand some of the consequences of ceding our industries. It's also a predictable consequence of the Wal-Mart- China alliance and the fixation on lowering costs, which now goes way beyond Wal-Mart to most of the products available to other retailers.
American consumers, consumed by low prices and with no thought of the waste involved, are also to blame. When Wal-Mart figured out that if they sold lawn mowers at a low enough price, it wouldn't matter that they lasted but one summer. Consumers would just come back and buy another one the following spring. Let the landfills fill up. Let future generations worry about it.
It's a psychology that in a somewhat different way also affects a somewhat different segment: cutting-edge electronics. I've also been shopping for an Ipod type MP3 player, and I liked what I saw about a new Creative Zen player. But scanning the reviews on Amazon, I saw a question about the battery--could it be replaced? The answer was, no. But it would last two or maybe three years, and by then, you'd want a new player anyway. This response was not written by the manufacturer or retailer, but by a consumer.
Now I can guess that because this player is so small that its battery is simply built into it. But the attitude that a two or three hundred dollar device is expected to last for no more than a couple of years is appalling.
But what is really disturbing is the attitude that throwing this stuff away at that rate has no consequences. The millions of discarded cell phones alone are creating environmental havoc. We are being polluted and poisoned by e-waste at a fantastic rate. Well, not we consumers so much right now--a lot of this is shipped off to poison people who can't afford to buy any of it. But our ground water, our land and air are all inevitably at risk.
All for...junk.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Chosen!
When I published a new paperback edition/revision of my book, THE MALLING OF AMERICA, I became part of a new publishing phenomenon: print-on-demand. Several outfits, including Xlibris (where I published) offer books through primarily online booksellers, and when the orders come in, the books are printed and sent. It's digital age publishing, and for certain books and authors, it's great.
But these days, it's marketing that drives the publishing business. Conventional publishers market and publicize only a few of their books, usually to see that those that would do well anyway, do even better. But even big name publishers employ marketing and p.r. firms, and most of their authors must do most of their own publicity, and even hire p.r. and marketing firms themselves.
Still, getting your book noticed is a particular problem for those who "self-publish" through these print-on-demand companies, and so they often offer marketing services for additional fees, and there are independent companies that can be hired to do this work as well.
So after I published my paperback, I've been contacted from time to time both by Xlibris and these independent companies. Usually they offer to do things I've already done, or give me access to being reviewed in publications where reviews of my book have already appeared. (Not much point in offering me possible access to Kirkus reviews when I was already reviewed there, and in a full page review in the New York Times as well as the San Francisco Chronicle, etc.) But recently I received a unique offer--and an eye-opening one.
It came from an outfit called Chosen Few Books. At the top of the letter in headline-sized type were the words: The Malling of America has been chosen! The special meaning of "being chosen" is quickly "revealed" in the letter's first sentence: "Every year Christian authors write hundreds of inspiring and uplifting books." I'm sure that's true, but what does it have to do with my book?
"THE CHOSEN FEW is a limited collection of Christian titles that we believe deserve special attention. We discovered you and The Malling of America only because we were seeking books with powerful messages that we believe will sell."
I could rationalize ways in which my book could be read as having a message that comports with a Christian message of charity, tolerance and moral values. But it seems more likely that this letter was sent without anyone there having the slightest idea of what my book is about.
That much would simply be either touching or amusing or both. But then I took a look at what they were offering. There were the standard promises: book and author photo on their website, selling the book through websites and online booksellers (where it is already available), etc. But here's what caught my eye:
"We will guarantee an interview on a Christian AM/FM radio show."
And in bold:
We will guarantee an interview on a nationally syndicated AM/FM radio show.
For these and other services, they charge a fee of $2700. Which my perhaps creaky sense of ethical practices tells me, is for Christian payola.
For those unfamiliar with the word, "payola" was a term for record companies paying disk jockeys to play certain records in the 1950s, which led to congressional hearings and ended some careers. Things have slipped sufficiently now that many people may be surprised that according to the official radio and television code of ethics, an "interview" that's guaranteed by paying for it is unethical if not illegal, unless the radio program specifically states that it is a paid commercial.
I'm certainly not against giving potential readers the opportunity to buy my book, or to hear about it. (That should be obvious from this site.) But there are rules, or there should be.
Although I have to say that if I had $2700 to throw away, it might be fascinating to hear the questions of that interviewer, trying to figure out what the powerful Christian message of my book might be. I could point to the chapter near the end where I write about commercial media as part of the Mallcondo Continuum of controlled entertainment environments designed as simultaneous advertising and product. I could offer as an example, that very interview. Although perhaps that wouldn't be a very Christian thing to do.
When I published a new paperback edition/revision of my book, THE MALLING OF AMERICA, I became part of a new publishing phenomenon: print-on-demand. Several outfits, including Xlibris (where I published) offer books through primarily online booksellers, and when the orders come in, the books are printed and sent. It's digital age publishing, and for certain books and authors, it's great.
But these days, it's marketing that drives the publishing business. Conventional publishers market and publicize only a few of their books, usually to see that those that would do well anyway, do even better. But even big name publishers employ marketing and p.r. firms, and most of their authors must do most of their own publicity, and even hire p.r. and marketing firms themselves.
Still, getting your book noticed is a particular problem for those who "self-publish" through these print-on-demand companies, and so they often offer marketing services for additional fees, and there are independent companies that can be hired to do this work as well.
So after I published my paperback, I've been contacted from time to time both by Xlibris and these independent companies. Usually they offer to do things I've already done, or give me access to being reviewed in publications where reviews of my book have already appeared. (Not much point in offering me possible access to Kirkus reviews when I was already reviewed there, and in a full page review in the New York Times as well as the San Francisco Chronicle, etc.) But recently I received a unique offer--and an eye-opening one.
It came from an outfit called Chosen Few Books. At the top of the letter in headline-sized type were the words: The Malling of America has been chosen! The special meaning of "being chosen" is quickly "revealed" in the letter's first sentence: "Every year Christian authors write hundreds of inspiring and uplifting books." I'm sure that's true, but what does it have to do with my book?
"THE CHOSEN FEW is a limited collection of Christian titles that we believe deserve special attention. We discovered you and The Malling of America only because we were seeking books with powerful messages that we believe will sell."
I could rationalize ways in which my book could be read as having a message that comports with a Christian message of charity, tolerance and moral values. But it seems more likely that this letter was sent without anyone there having the slightest idea of what my book is about.
That much would simply be either touching or amusing or both. But then I took a look at what they were offering. There were the standard promises: book and author photo on their website, selling the book through websites and online booksellers (where it is already available), etc. But here's what caught my eye:
"We will guarantee an interview on a Christian AM/FM radio show."
And in bold:
We will guarantee an interview on a nationally syndicated AM/FM radio show.
For these and other services, they charge a fee of $2700. Which my perhaps creaky sense of ethical practices tells me, is for Christian payola.
For those unfamiliar with the word, "payola" was a term for record companies paying disk jockeys to play certain records in the 1950s, which led to congressional hearings and ended some careers. Things have slipped sufficiently now that many people may be surprised that according to the official radio and television code of ethics, an "interview" that's guaranteed by paying for it is unethical if not illegal, unless the radio program specifically states that it is a paid commercial.
I'm certainly not against giving potential readers the opportunity to buy my book, or to hear about it. (That should be obvious from this site.) But there are rules, or there should be.
Although I have to say that if I had $2700 to throw away, it might be fascinating to hear the questions of that interviewer, trying to figure out what the powerful Christian message of my book might be. I could point to the chapter near the end where I write about commercial media as part of the Mallcondo Continuum of controlled entertainment environments designed as simultaneous advertising and product. I could offer as an example, that very interview. Although perhaps that wouldn't be a very Christian thing to do.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Predictably Irrational:
The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
By Dan Ariely
Harpercollins; 304 pages; $25.95.
Call me crazy, but I’ve always thought the axiom of academic economics that says our decisions, especially buying decisions, are based on rational choice is itself irrational. Counter-examples are rife in most of world literature, movies and TV shows, as well as psychology since 1890 and the entire advertising industry, which is not notable for critiques appealing to pure reason.
There’s abundant evidence, including books from Vance Packard’s 1957 The Hidden Persuaders to Douglas Rushkoff's 1999 Coercion to Martin Howard’s 2005 We Know What You Want that advertisers and retailers thrive on pushing non-rational buttons, as have con artists peddling snake oil, pyramid schemes, Florida land, phony stocks and fake charities, from antiquity to the Internet.
But apparently it takes an official Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT like Dan Ariely to suggest that “we are really far less rational than standard economic theory assumes. Moreover, these irrational behaviors of ours are neither random nor senseless. They are systematic, and since we repeat them again and again, predictable.”
In this book, Ariely describes experiments that pertain to general conclusions (“Why we often pay too much when we pay nothing,” “why we can’t make ourselves do what we want to do,” “why options distract us from our main objective,” etc.), and then offers extrapolations of why these tendencies are important. He then offers ideas on how to get ourselves under more rational control, individually and by changing organizational or societal structures.
Some of his research I found eye-opening, particularly the experiments involving the suggestibility that words can have. In one experiment, Asian-American women took a math exam. Half were given a preliminary questionnaire with innocuous survey questions that related to gender (opinions on coed dorms, etc); the other half, questions relating to their racial heritage (family history, etc.) The women who got the race-related survey did better on the subsequent math exam than the women who got the gender-related survey, apparently confirming the stereotypes of women as bad in math, and Asian-Americans as smart in math, as suggested just by the topic of whichever survey they were given.
Another group was given a scrambled-sentence puzzle with words “priming the concept of the elderly,” such as “Florida, bingo, ancient.” Then when they were dismissed, they walked more slowly down the corridor than members of a control group. They weren’t, Ariely notes, “themselves elderly people being reminded of their frailty—they were undergraduate students at NYU.” Yet another experiment found that after being asked to list the Ten Commandment—or when they were reminded of the Honor Code they’d agreed to-- subjects were more honest.
Other topics include how we judge (and misjudge) relative value, the power of placebos, the power of price (more ailments are allegedly cured when the subject believes the medicine is expensive), and the gently subversive idea that market forces don’t always regulate the market for the best outcomes.
Most chapters frame the information in terms of the kind of decision-making processes many of us go through in choosing what or whether to buy, though usually in more simplified form than the bewildering blitz of options, questions and information we contend with these days. Since this book is meant for a wide readership, the style is pleasantly conversational and personal, though jargon is sometimes replaced by cliché.
Ariely’s conclusions sometimes make good sense to me, like bundling preventive health care procedures to combat procrastination. But some seem to be too limited in terms of what questions the research suggests, and others too broad. His general assertions—that we tend to underestimate the role of the irrational in our perceptions and decisions, and that if we have some idea of how we are irrational, we’re less helpless and can assert more conscious control—are useful principles to repeat. Even if they’re not at all new ideas, they could well be new to readers of this book.
While Ariely’s stated goal is to understand the decision-making processes behind behavior—“yours, mine and everybody else’s” he may be overreaching in the applicability of his conclusions.“We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains,” he writes, but he presents no evidence of this causal relationship. It depends on his behavioral experiments being universal. The experiments he presents support the irrationality part of his argument, but I don’t buy the universal predictability of all their specific findings. While these experiments take place in California, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina and so on, they rarely get off campus, and the experimental subjects (at least the ones he describes) are almost always university students.
That’s a specific demographic group that marketing psychologists study very closely, and pitch their products to in ways that don’t work with other—especially older—consumers. There are several conclusions that Ariely makes (the decisive role of image among peers when choosing food at a restaurant, or the “irrational impulse to chase worthless options” in a game, for instance) that could be quite different according to age or even income and social class. And that’s without even attempting to assess the experiment involving young men, Playboy magazines and a Saran wrap-covered laptop.
In any case the accounts of these experiments are useful as cautionary tales and examples inspiring academic as well as water cooler discussion. As for Ariely’s basic conclusion, addressed as this question—“Wouldn’t economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?”—hey, aren’t those economists wild?
Update: This review now appears in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Book Review.
The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
By Dan Ariely
Harpercollins; 304 pages; $25.95.
Call me crazy, but I’ve always thought the axiom of academic economics that says our decisions, especially buying decisions, are based on rational choice is itself irrational. Counter-examples are rife in most of world literature, movies and TV shows, as well as psychology since 1890 and the entire advertising industry, which is not notable for critiques appealing to pure reason.
There’s abundant evidence, including books from Vance Packard’s 1957 The Hidden Persuaders to Douglas Rushkoff's 1999 Coercion to Martin Howard’s 2005 We Know What You Want that advertisers and retailers thrive on pushing non-rational buttons, as have con artists peddling snake oil, pyramid schemes, Florida land, phony stocks and fake charities, from antiquity to the Internet.
But apparently it takes an official Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT like Dan Ariely to suggest that “we are really far less rational than standard economic theory assumes. Moreover, these irrational behaviors of ours are neither random nor senseless. They are systematic, and since we repeat them again and again, predictable.”
In this book, Ariely describes experiments that pertain to general conclusions (“Why we often pay too much when we pay nothing,” “why we can’t make ourselves do what we want to do,” “why options distract us from our main objective,” etc.), and then offers extrapolations of why these tendencies are important. He then offers ideas on how to get ourselves under more rational control, individually and by changing organizational or societal structures.
Some of his research I found eye-opening, particularly the experiments involving the suggestibility that words can have. In one experiment, Asian-American women took a math exam. Half were given a preliminary questionnaire with innocuous survey questions that related to gender (opinions on coed dorms, etc); the other half, questions relating to their racial heritage (family history, etc.) The women who got the race-related survey did better on the subsequent math exam than the women who got the gender-related survey, apparently confirming the stereotypes of women as bad in math, and Asian-Americans as smart in math, as suggested just by the topic of whichever survey they were given.
Another group was given a scrambled-sentence puzzle with words “priming the concept of the elderly,” such as “Florida, bingo, ancient.” Then when they were dismissed, they walked more slowly down the corridor than members of a control group. They weren’t, Ariely notes, “themselves elderly people being reminded of their frailty—they were undergraduate students at NYU.” Yet another experiment found that after being asked to list the Ten Commandment—or when they were reminded of the Honor Code they’d agreed to-- subjects were more honest.
Other topics include how we judge (and misjudge) relative value, the power of placebos, the power of price (more ailments are allegedly cured when the subject believes the medicine is expensive), and the gently subversive idea that market forces don’t always regulate the market for the best outcomes.
Most chapters frame the information in terms of the kind of decision-making processes many of us go through in choosing what or whether to buy, though usually in more simplified form than the bewildering blitz of options, questions and information we contend with these days. Since this book is meant for a wide readership, the style is pleasantly conversational and personal, though jargon is sometimes replaced by cliché.
Ariely’s conclusions sometimes make good sense to me, like bundling preventive health care procedures to combat procrastination. But some seem to be too limited in terms of what questions the research suggests, and others too broad. His general assertions—that we tend to underestimate the role of the irrational in our perceptions and decisions, and that if we have some idea of how we are irrational, we’re less helpless and can assert more conscious control—are useful principles to repeat. Even if they’re not at all new ideas, they could well be new to readers of this book.
While Ariely’s stated goal is to understand the decision-making processes behind behavior—“yours, mine and everybody else’s” he may be overreaching in the applicability of his conclusions.“We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains,” he writes, but he presents no evidence of this causal relationship. It depends on his behavioral experiments being universal. The experiments he presents support the irrationality part of his argument, but I don’t buy the universal predictability of all their specific findings. While these experiments take place in California, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina and so on, they rarely get off campus, and the experimental subjects (at least the ones he describes) are almost always university students.
That’s a specific demographic group that marketing psychologists study very closely, and pitch their products to in ways that don’t work with other—especially older—consumers. There are several conclusions that Ariely makes (the decisive role of image among peers when choosing food at a restaurant, or the “irrational impulse to chase worthless options” in a game, for instance) that could be quite different according to age or even income and social class. And that’s without even attempting to assess the experiment involving young men, Playboy magazines and a Saran wrap-covered laptop.
In any case the accounts of these experiments are useful as cautionary tales and examples inspiring academic as well as water cooler discussion. As for Ariely’s basic conclusion, addressed as this question—“Wouldn’t economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?”—hey, aren’t those economists wild?
Update: This review now appears in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Book Review.
Saturday, June 09, 2007
I don't know the name of this mall, but it is (or was)
in Ogden, Utah. Photo by the Hahn Company in
the early 1980s.
The Silent Threat of e-Waste
Hardly anyone talks about it, but the threat is astounding. According to Giles Slade in his book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (published by Harvard University Press.) e-waste may become "the greatest biohazard facing the entire continent."
E-waste is comprised not only of discarded computers but the very hottest consumer electronics, like ipods and cell phones, and all their combinations. One hundred million cell phones were thrown out in 2005 alone. All of these devices are prettily on sale at your friendly neighborhood mall or shopping center or Big Box outlet. And online, too.
In his book, Slade places the e-waste problem in the right context: of our consumption habits, which are partly fed by the carefully nurtured assumption that (as I heard a performance artist put it tonight) there is such a place as "Away." As in, "just throw it Away."
Made to Break recently won the U.S. Independent Publisher Book Award national gold medal for best environmental book of 2006. There's talk of a TV documentary. The following is a shorter version of my review of this book published in the San Francisco Chronicle:
As Steven Wright famously said, "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" So you get rid of the old stuff, but what makes it old? The idea of products built not to last irks us, but for a variety of reasons we routinely discard devices that work just fine. Obsolescence by any other name has helped nourish a sweet economy, but a hidden cost is coming due fast, in the poisonous waste quickly overwhelming the world's capacity to deal with it.
Giles Slade, who describes himself as an "unaffiliated scholar," produces these numbers in "Made to Break": At least 90 percent of the 315 million still-functional personal computers discarded in North America in 2004 were trashed (it was 63 million just a year before), and more than 100 million cell phones -- 200,000 tons worth -- were thrown away in 2005. Cell phones are especially dangerous, because their toxic components are too small to disassemble and recycle. They are also being trashed with amazing speed, with the shortest life span of any electronic product.
Things are likely to get much worse in the near future, thanks to better enforcement of the international ban on exporting hazardous waste expected in coming years ($100 bills taped to the inside of inspected cartons currently help grease this activity, Slade notes), and especially due to the FCC-mandated switch to high definition TV in 2007, which may result in millions of suddenly junked televisions. "This one-time disposal of 'brown goods' will, alone, more than double the hazardous waste problem in North America."
The overall effect is profound. "As the waste piles up in the United States, above and below ground" Slade writes, "contamination of America's fresh water supply from e-waste may soon become the greatest biohazard facing the entire continent." Even if there were places to take the stuff offshore, there won't be enough ships to carry it.
"We are standing on the precipice of an insurmountable e-waste storage problem that no landfill program so far imagined will be able to solve." This assessment frames Slade's examination of the various kinds of obsolescence that contribute to the problem. A new machine that does something different (the PC), or adds new capability (cell phone versus land line) or adds new features (cell phones with Internet, etc.) is an obvious incentive for a consumer to replace the old machine. But besides the apparent progress of the new and improved, there are other factors that encourage consumers to buy and rapidly throw away products.
Changes in style (the annual model change adopted by the auto industry being the best-known example) and appeals to status encouraged by massive advertising are major forms of "psychological obsolescence," specifically designed to create demand for new versions of old and still usable products. But another way of selling new machines at a faster rate is to make sure the old ones break down sooner. This practice of "death-dating" is what most people think of when they hear the term "planned obsolescence."
The book ends where it began, with concise warnings about the perils of e-waste, and a call for "technological literacy." Just because cyberspace is invisible, and few people know or care how cell phones work, doesn't mean these new devices are as ethereal as magic. They have costs. We're paying in fuel and air pollution to power them (George Gilder projects that Internet computing will soon require as much power as the entire U.S. economy did in 2001), and to make them (author Hunter Lovins estimates the manufacture of a laptop computer creates 4,000 times its weight in waste.) Now toxic e-waste joins the mountain range of rubble from our throw-away economy. In the 21st century, garbage is becoming our most important product.
Hardly anyone talks about it, but the threat is astounding. According to Giles Slade in his book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (published by Harvard University Press.) e-waste may become "the greatest biohazard facing the entire continent."
E-waste is comprised not only of discarded computers but the very hottest consumer electronics, like ipods and cell phones, and all their combinations. One hundred million cell phones were thrown out in 2005 alone. All of these devices are prettily on sale at your friendly neighborhood mall or shopping center or Big Box outlet. And online, too.
In his book, Slade places the e-waste problem in the right context: of our consumption habits, which are partly fed by the carefully nurtured assumption that (as I heard a performance artist put it tonight) there is such a place as "Away." As in, "just throw it Away."
Made to Break recently won the U.S. Independent Publisher Book Award national gold medal for best environmental book of 2006. There's talk of a TV documentary. The following is a shorter version of my review of this book published in the San Francisco Chronicle:
As Steven Wright famously said, "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" So you get rid of the old stuff, but what makes it old? The idea of products built not to last irks us, but for a variety of reasons we routinely discard devices that work just fine. Obsolescence by any other name has helped nourish a sweet economy, but a hidden cost is coming due fast, in the poisonous waste quickly overwhelming the world's capacity to deal with it.
Giles Slade, who describes himself as an "unaffiliated scholar," produces these numbers in "Made to Break": At least 90 percent of the 315 million still-functional personal computers discarded in North America in 2004 were trashed (it was 63 million just a year before), and more than 100 million cell phones -- 200,000 tons worth -- were thrown away in 2005. Cell phones are especially dangerous, because their toxic components are too small to disassemble and recycle. They are also being trashed with amazing speed, with the shortest life span of any electronic product.
Things are likely to get much worse in the near future, thanks to better enforcement of the international ban on exporting hazardous waste expected in coming years ($100 bills taped to the inside of inspected cartons currently help grease this activity, Slade notes), and especially due to the FCC-mandated switch to high definition TV in 2007, which may result in millions of suddenly junked televisions. "This one-time disposal of 'brown goods' will, alone, more than double the hazardous waste problem in North America."
The overall effect is profound. "As the waste piles up in the United States, above and below ground" Slade writes, "contamination of America's fresh water supply from e-waste may soon become the greatest biohazard facing the entire continent." Even if there were places to take the stuff offshore, there won't be enough ships to carry it.
"We are standing on the precipice of an insurmountable e-waste storage problem that no landfill program so far imagined will be able to solve." This assessment frames Slade's examination of the various kinds of obsolescence that contribute to the problem. A new machine that does something different (the PC), or adds new capability (cell phone versus land line) or adds new features (cell phones with Internet, etc.) is an obvious incentive for a consumer to replace the old machine. But besides the apparent progress of the new and improved, there are other factors that encourage consumers to buy and rapidly throw away products.
Changes in style (the annual model change adopted by the auto industry being the best-known example) and appeals to status encouraged by massive advertising are major forms of "psychological obsolescence," specifically designed to create demand for new versions of old and still usable products. But another way of selling new machines at a faster rate is to make sure the old ones break down sooner. This practice of "death-dating" is what most people think of when they hear the term "planned obsolescence."
The book ends where it began, with concise warnings about the perils of e-waste, and a call for "technological literacy." Just because cyberspace is invisible, and few people know or care how cell phones work, doesn't mean these new devices are as ethereal as magic. They have costs. We're paying in fuel and air pollution to power them (George Gilder projects that Internet computing will soon require as much power as the entire U.S. economy did in 2001), and to make them (author Hunter Lovins estimates the manufacture of a laptop computer creates 4,000 times its weight in waste.) Now toxic e-waste joins the mountain range of rubble from our throw-away economy. In the 21st century, garbage is becoming our most important product.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
HARRY POTTER, ENVIRO WIZARD? Why not? With more than 12 million copies of the final book in JK Rowling's series expected to be sold in the U.S. alone, the publisher's decision to go green is going to have impact.Scholastic Press has promised that no less than 30% of each book will be post-consumer recycled paper, and 65% of the virgin paper used will be from Forest Stewardship Council approved sustainable forests.
It's especially important when paper recycling is lagging-- more than 90% of printed matter still comes straight from the trees. Deforestation is one of the major problems affecting the biosphere. Among other things, it makes the climate crisis worse. So thanks, Harry. We need more of your magic.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Unintelligible Design
Awhile ago I perused a book called The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda of MIT's Media Lab, which is a designer's response to new devices that are too complex, like DVDs with multiple menus and nifty little electronics that come accompanied by manuals way bigger than they are. It's not a bad book--I especially liked the chapter on Emotion (you can see the Laws for yourself at lawsofsimplicity.com) but it doesn't really address the problems I have.
It's not that devices are too complex (though they are) but that their most basic functions are increasingly difficult to use. Maeda praises the simplicity of the Ipod dial, but one major problem with small devices is that the buttons and dials that operate them are very, very small, and often the "simple" design hides them. Screen menus, also very small. Plus they are dominated by "simple" icons. My lovely little digital camera has a little thing you move that puts you into "portrait" mode (as distinguished from "image" mode. Because of course a portrait isn't an image.) Then you press Menu and up comes a screen full of row upon row of indistinguishable icons that you need to decipher in order to control light and exposure and focus, pretty important when you're taking pictures. But not only do I need extra-strength magnifying glasses, I require the assistance of perhaps an Egyptologist skilled in the peculiar hieroglyphics of this particular camera brand and model.
The problem of buttons that are too small to distinguish and often to find, plus too small to see, is perhaps more a problem for aging baby boomers than the original target market for these devices, although since there are thirty billion of us (approximately), more than any other age cohort, it might be a good idea to keep us in mind. Devices to hear music everywhere, to edit video and sound, etc.--we've been dreaming of this stuff since the 60s. We're primed. And quite clearly, we're being dissed.
But it's not just age-related. How many of these devices do we use when we're supposed to be looking at something else--car music systems are perfect examples. If you've rented cars you know how insane many if not most if not all of these systems are, and how insane they make you. Just trying to figure out how to turn them on (or off!), change the station, get the station back you were listening to before, or switch to a CD etc. is difficult enough when you're looking right at it, but here's a newsflash for designers--people who use them are quite often DRIVING. Their attention--and their eyes--are needed elsewhere.
And there are other circumstances in which we'd like to turn the volume up or down, or whatever, by touch. I've got a portable CD player (I know, how quaint) that works admirably--good sound, doesn't skip--or not much--when I'm moving. But the various functions are scattered all over it, the play and stop are on top, the volume control is on the side, and is indistintinguishable (even when you're looking at it) from the control that pops open the lid of the CD. It's a nightmare, especially since the controls are very sensitive to touch, and if you brush the wrong one, you're screwed.
But don't worry--I've got a hot design idea for these devices--it may sound radical, but hear me out: How about an actual on/off button that's the biggest button on the thing, and a nice big red light to say it's on? Or even better--a dial that when you turn it clockwise, clicks on with a discernable sound, and as you keep turning it, it increases the volume. And put this dial on, say, the far left of the device. Then on the far right, another dial that allows for manual control of things like radio stations. And if you must, you can put a bunch of other buttons in a row between them. But the real key is, this design is the same on every device, no matter the make or manufacturer, so we all have a clear idea in our heads of how it operates, and we can do the most important functions without looking, even in the dark, even without taking our eyes off that idiot weaving into traffic in front of us.
I know it sounds far out--oh, wait--isn't that exactly the configuration that's been on every audio and video device since the dawn of humanity, until quite recently? I wonder why?
I understand as well that these devices are made for the mass international market, so they come loaded with icons and with manuals providing the same noninformation in six languages. So icons may be a fact of life, but how about a few words here and there? I'm willing to learn the Spanish for "low light" or the Chinese for "daylight." I already know the French for "night."And if you want to work on a real design problem, how about earphone wires and other wires that don't make it their life's mission to tangle up and intertwine? There are times they seem to exhibit the only signs of intelligence these devices can offer: the clear intent to make things difficult for me.
I caught part of a segment on 60 Minutes about this, and they said part of the problem is products being rushed to market without being adequately tested. So people are actually hiring consultants to help them figure out how to run their big screen TVs and turn on their car radios. This is a kind of decadence nothing in consumer culture so far has adequately prepared us for.
Awhile ago I perused a book called The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda of MIT's Media Lab, which is a designer's response to new devices that are too complex, like DVDs with multiple menus and nifty little electronics that come accompanied by manuals way bigger than they are. It's not a bad book--I especially liked the chapter on Emotion (you can see the Laws for yourself at lawsofsimplicity.com) but it doesn't really address the problems I have.
It's not that devices are too complex (though they are) but that their most basic functions are increasingly difficult to use. Maeda praises the simplicity of the Ipod dial, but one major problem with small devices is that the buttons and dials that operate them are very, very small, and often the "simple" design hides them. Screen menus, also very small. Plus they are dominated by "simple" icons. My lovely little digital camera has a little thing you move that puts you into "portrait" mode (as distinguished from "image" mode. Because of course a portrait isn't an image.) Then you press Menu and up comes a screen full of row upon row of indistinguishable icons that you need to decipher in order to control light and exposure and focus, pretty important when you're taking pictures. But not only do I need extra-strength magnifying glasses, I require the assistance of perhaps an Egyptologist skilled in the peculiar hieroglyphics of this particular camera brand and model.
The problem of buttons that are too small to distinguish and often to find, plus too small to see, is perhaps more a problem for aging baby boomers than the original target market for these devices, although since there are thirty billion of us (approximately), more than any other age cohort, it might be a good idea to keep us in mind. Devices to hear music everywhere, to edit video and sound, etc.--we've been dreaming of this stuff since the 60s. We're primed. And quite clearly, we're being dissed.
But it's not just age-related. How many of these devices do we use when we're supposed to be looking at something else--car music systems are perfect examples. If you've rented cars you know how insane many if not most if not all of these systems are, and how insane they make you. Just trying to figure out how to turn them on (or off!), change the station, get the station back you were listening to before, or switch to a CD etc. is difficult enough when you're looking right at it, but here's a newsflash for designers--people who use them are quite often DRIVING. Their attention--and their eyes--are needed elsewhere.
And there are other circumstances in which we'd like to turn the volume up or down, or whatever, by touch. I've got a portable CD player (I know, how quaint) that works admirably--good sound, doesn't skip--or not much--when I'm moving. But the various functions are scattered all over it, the play and stop are on top, the volume control is on the side, and is indistintinguishable (even when you're looking at it) from the control that pops open the lid of the CD. It's a nightmare, especially since the controls are very sensitive to touch, and if you brush the wrong one, you're screwed.
But don't worry--I've got a hot design idea for these devices--it may sound radical, but hear me out: How about an actual on/off button that's the biggest button on the thing, and a nice big red light to say it's on? Or even better--a dial that when you turn it clockwise, clicks on with a discernable sound, and as you keep turning it, it increases the volume. And put this dial on, say, the far left of the device. Then on the far right, another dial that allows for manual control of things like radio stations. And if you must, you can put a bunch of other buttons in a row between them. But the real key is, this design is the same on every device, no matter the make or manufacturer, so we all have a clear idea in our heads of how it operates, and we can do the most important functions without looking, even in the dark, even without taking our eyes off that idiot weaving into traffic in front of us.
I know it sounds far out--oh, wait--isn't that exactly the configuration that's been on every audio and video device since the dawn of humanity, until quite recently? I wonder why?
I understand as well that these devices are made for the mass international market, so they come loaded with icons and with manuals providing the same noninformation in six languages. So icons may be a fact of life, but how about a few words here and there? I'm willing to learn the Spanish for "low light" or the Chinese for "daylight." I already know the French for "night."And if you want to work on a real design problem, how about earphone wires and other wires that don't make it their life's mission to tangle up and intertwine? There are times they seem to exhibit the only signs of intelligence these devices can offer: the clear intent to make things difficult for me.
I caught part of a segment on 60 Minutes about this, and they said part of the problem is products being rushed to market without being adequately tested. So people are actually hiring consultants to help them figure out how to run their big screen TVs and turn on their car radios. This is a kind of decadence nothing in consumer culture so far has adequately prepared us for.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Rebirth
I've been neglecting this blog for awhile, but I'm going to be posting more regularly now, with a new template, some new features and a new focus.
I've noticed that a lot of visitors here have linked from the Malls of America and Livemalls sites, and so I've started my new links menu with them. Since those nostalgic photos from shopping mall history seem to be of interest, I plan to add some here from my collection of hundreds of images gathered over the years I researched THE MALLING OF AMERICA. However, a lot of those images need to be digitized first, so it may take awhile. I did convert a few slides--like the one above--but there are many more to come.
I'm fascinated by mall nostalgia, but I am mostly interested in the future. So this blog will also take up those aspects of consumer culture that characterize our present and have the greatest impact on the future. I hope that will be interesting, too.
I'll also be going back to previous posts and tagging them, to make the site more searchable. See you soon, and much more often...
I've been neglecting this blog for awhile, but I'm going to be posting more regularly now, with a new template, some new features and a new focus.
I've noticed that a lot of visitors here have linked from the Malls of America and Livemalls sites, and so I've started my new links menu with them. Since those nostalgic photos from shopping mall history seem to be of interest, I plan to add some here from my collection of hundreds of images gathered over the years I researched THE MALLING OF AMERICA. However, a lot of those images need to be digitized first, so it may take awhile. I did convert a few slides--like the one above--but there are many more to come.
I'm fascinated by mall nostalgia, but I am mostly interested in the future. So this blog will also take up those aspects of consumer culture that characterize our present and have the greatest impact on the future. I hope that will be interesting, too.
I'll also be going back to previous posts and tagging them, to make the site more searchable. See you soon, and much more often...
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Is Wal-Mart a Potent Political Issue?
As the campaign heats up for Congressional seats in this November's election, the New York Times claims that "Democratic leaders have found a new rallying cry that many of them say could prove powerful in the midterm elections and into 2008: denouncing Wal-Mart for what they say are substandard wages and health care benefits."
The erstwhile popular shopping choice, with more stores in more places than its top competitors combined, may now be a symbol for the economic race to the bottom that is affecting its core market of middle class and lower income Americans.
It is getting harder for the non-wealthy to afford decent housing, health care and education because wages haven't kept up. But will attacking Wal-Mart resonate with the people who often shop there? According to this story, a broad segment of Democrats is betting that it will.
Still, what is striking about this campaign is the ideological breadth of the Democrats who have joined in, including some who in the past have warned the party against appearing hostile to business interests. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who was a member of Wal-Mart’s board when she lived in Arkansas, the corporation’s home state, returned a $5,000 campaign contribution from the company last year. Mrs. Clinton said she did so to protest Wal-Mart’s health care benefits, and she has continued to distance herself from the policies of a company she was close to when she was the first lady of Arkansas.
John Edwards, the former v-p candidate, spoke at an anti-Wal-Mart rally in Pittsburgh recently. “Wal-Mart as an example of the problems that exist in America today is a powerful political issue,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “I think our party pretty much across the board agrees that people who work hard should be able to support their families. When a company like Wal-Mart fails to meet its corporate responsibility, it make it impossible for that to occur.”
Democrats say Wal-Mart is a potent symbol of corporate excess. The company earned $11 billion in profit last year, but fewer than half of its employees in the United States are covered by its health care plan, and the average worker earns less than $20,000 a year.
These attacks come at a weak moment for Wal-Mart. After abandoning Germany and South Korea (and encountering difficulties in England), the company posted its first quarterly loss in a decade. Higher gasoline prices in the U.S., which kept some shoppers home while increasing Wal-Mart costs, was also a factor. Also recently its former vice-chairman pled guilty to stealing from the company.
There is some statistical evidence that the Democrats may be onto something. From the latest Zogby poll on President Bush's job performance:
Just 62% of Republicans give him positive marks for his job performance, while 38% give him negative marks. Even among weekly WalMart shoppers – a demographic group identified by Pollster John Zogby as a critical support group for Bush – just 45% now give him positive job marks, though his numbers among those shoppers have improved 10 points since early June.
More than three out of four – 76% – of weekly WalMart shoppers voted for Bush over Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, earlier Zogby polling showed.
As the campaign heats up for Congressional seats in this November's election, the New York Times claims that "Democratic leaders have found a new rallying cry that many of them say could prove powerful in the midterm elections and into 2008: denouncing Wal-Mart for what they say are substandard wages and health care benefits."
The erstwhile popular shopping choice, with more stores in more places than its top competitors combined, may now be a symbol for the economic race to the bottom that is affecting its core market of middle class and lower income Americans.
It is getting harder for the non-wealthy to afford decent housing, health care and education because wages haven't kept up. But will attacking Wal-Mart resonate with the people who often shop there? According to this story, a broad segment of Democrats is betting that it will.
Still, what is striking about this campaign is the ideological breadth of the Democrats who have joined in, including some who in the past have warned the party against appearing hostile to business interests. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who was a member of Wal-Mart’s board when she lived in Arkansas, the corporation’s home state, returned a $5,000 campaign contribution from the company last year. Mrs. Clinton said she did so to protest Wal-Mart’s health care benefits, and she has continued to distance herself from the policies of a company she was close to when she was the first lady of Arkansas.
John Edwards, the former v-p candidate, spoke at an anti-Wal-Mart rally in Pittsburgh recently. “Wal-Mart as an example of the problems that exist in America today is a powerful political issue,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “I think our party pretty much across the board agrees that people who work hard should be able to support their families. When a company like Wal-Mart fails to meet its corporate responsibility, it make it impossible for that to occur.”
Democrats say Wal-Mart is a potent symbol of corporate excess. The company earned $11 billion in profit last year, but fewer than half of its employees in the United States are covered by its health care plan, and the average worker earns less than $20,000 a year.
These attacks come at a weak moment for Wal-Mart. After abandoning Germany and South Korea (and encountering difficulties in England), the company posted its first quarterly loss in a decade. Higher gasoline prices in the U.S., which kept some shoppers home while increasing Wal-Mart costs, was also a factor. Also recently its former vice-chairman pled guilty to stealing from the company.
There is some statistical evidence that the Democrats may be onto something. From the latest Zogby poll on President Bush's job performance:
Just 62% of Republicans give him positive marks for his job performance, while 38% give him negative marks. Even among weekly WalMart shoppers – a demographic group identified by Pollster John Zogby as a critical support group for Bush – just 45% now give him positive job marks, though his numbers among those shoppers have improved 10 points since early June.
More than three out of four – 76% – of weekly WalMart shoppers voted for Bush over Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, earlier Zogby polling showed.
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