So it is as we emerge from the darkest days of COVID-19. The clamor is rising for a “consumer-driven recovery” from the pandemic downturn, or even a binge of “revenge consumption” against the virus. Powerful forces are at work to make sure these calls are heeded, from a surge in advertising spending to government stimulus checks to reminders from lifestyle media that it’s time to follow trends again.

As always, we’re being asked to postpone a conversation about the dark side of consumerism. But to yield this time would be a terrible missed opportunity. Millions of people have just had deep reckonings with their values and priorities, and—maybe most importantly—the pandemic has offered glimpses of what life beyond consumer society could look like. What better time than now to grapple with our outsized appetites and their harmful impacts on the Earth and humankind?

We might start by reminding ourselves where things stood before the coronavirus emerged in late 2019. Earlier that year, a United Nations panel reported that, sometime around the turn of the millennium, consumption surpassed global population growth as the greatest driver of our environmental crises. When it comes to climate change, species extinction, toxic pollution, water conservation, and other challenges, how much each one of us consumes matters more than how many of us there are.

Consider that the average person’s lifestyle in a rich country now demands 13 times as much oil, steel, wood, water, coal, and so on as the average lifestyle in a poorer one. That means that raising two children in a country such as the United States will eat up as many natural resources as having 26 kids in a nation like Bangladesh, Haiti, or Zambia. I’ve traveled widely (I’m an overconsumer), but I have yet to encounter such a large family anywhere on Earth.

While global consumption slowed during COVID shutdowns, we’ve already regained nearly the same breakneck pace we were at in the beforetimes. Nothing we have done to “green” this consumer appetite has been able to keep up with how quickly it is growing. Here and there we ban plastic bags or plastic straws; meanwhile, plastic production overall is set to expand by 40 percent in the next decade. “Sustainable fashion” is trending, but in the past 20 years, the number of garments purchased per person increased by 60 percent, while the lifespan of those clothes was cut nearly in half. The fraction of goods in circular systems—in which discarded products are cycled into new ones—is actually shrinking. The amount of raw materials pouring into the world economy is higher than ever.

The sheer volume of our consumption—the average American alone consumes so much that, if everybody in the world lived the way they do, it would take five Earths to maintain such a global standard of living—has led the World Resources Institute, a non-profit environmental research outfit, to label it the new “elephant in the room”—dangerous, obvious, and yet somehow, overlooked. The standout example is the fight against climate change. Over the past two decades, no environmental issue has benefitted from more public attention, high-level action, or technological progress. Yet by 2019, the best we had achieved through efforts such as building bike lanes, inventing more energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances, and producing electricity with cleaner-burning natural gas instead of coal was to level off global emissions—at what was then a record high—for a few years in the mid-2010s. Then the consumer economy picked up steam worldwide, from the rise of the middle class in India to the supersizing of McMansions in America, and emissions started breaking records again. So far in modern history, the only times that global greenhouse gas emissions have actually declined have come amid major economic downturns—in other words, when the world stops shopping.

The raw power of consuming less became clear nearly the moment the pandemic lockdowns began. Consumer culture ground to a halt—and instantly, carbon emissions began their sharpest drop on record, tumbling nearly 9 percent in the first half of 2020. In a matter of days, skies turned a deeper blue—most strikingly, over the hazardously polluted Asian cities that produce many of the world’s manufactured goods. As the global economy shrank, it bent closer to being able to run on existing renewable energy supplies than ever before. There were visible signs of nature rebounding. My personal favorite was a group of American crocodiles photographed basking and body-surfing on a Mexican beach left empty by the retreat of mass tourism.

It wasn’t only the environment that changed under COVID-19. We did, too. Whether in the relative calm of quarantine or the depths of anxiety and sorrow, people worldwide questioned what matters most in life and where comfort and satisfaction really come from. Nearly everyone, I suspect, is emerging from the pandemic less hopped up to shop than to spend time with people they care about. Many others have a new appreciation for enjoying nature, expressing themselves creatively, or getting involved in issues larger than themselves.

This escape from what historian David Shi, a scholar of America’s simpler living traditions, once called “the prison of activities”—relentlessly overplanned and overscheduled lives—allowed people to learn firsthand what they truly value in consumer culture, and what they can easily live without. Many rediscovered low-consuming pleasures such as gardening, baking, and the art of conversation. Still others enjoyed freedom from social expectations around how they dress, and relief from constant pressure to keep up with the Joneses.

We are not the same people now as we were before the pandemic, and to be asked to put those changes behind us and return to full-throttle consumption is insulting. It’s the resources we found within ourselves and our communities, not consumerism, that got us through this catastrophe. “Go shopping” is as unsatisfactory a message today as it was when George W. Bush famously suggested it as a meaningful response to the 9/11 attacks. Fittingly, when this year’s Prime Day—the bogus shopping “holiday” invented by Amazon for its own benefit—arrived in June, we saw it meet with increasing social media pushback and mainstream critique.

On the other hand, we’ve also been talking too simply about simpler living. Catchphrases like “less is more” and “live simply” have always been glib, and seem even more now that we’ve freshly seen how the pandemic pause in household spending led to joblessness and shuttered businesses. While there are good reasons for individuals to choose to buy less (from saving money to helping the planet to pursuing deeper values), if we really want to achieve a “deconsumer” society, we need to change the system itself.

How, for example, might we reverse the unpopular trend toward products that quickly fall apart, go out of fashion, or need an upgrade? One answer is to move toward a “buy less, buy better” economy in which we buy fewer things that last longer. To get there, we could encourage consumers to pay a premium price for quality, though that hasn’t worked well in the past. A better bet is taking concrete steps to help durable goods compete with disposable ones. We could make companies pay more of the health and environmental costs of pollution, including climate pollution, produced in their products’ manufacture—costs that are currently borne by society at large. We could pass laws mandating that goods be easily repairable, or require life-span labels that tell us how long the things we buy will last. Interestingly, some companies—having witnessed the clear environmental benefits of the COVID-19 consumer slowdown—were inspired to move toward a business model in which customers buy fewer new things. “The apparel industry is facing an over-consumption crisis,” Levi’s posted on its website recently in a momentous public acknowledgement by a major brand. The company was launching a mildly deconsumerist slogan (“Buy better. Wear longer.”), and will also sell more of its products secondhand.

Another tack might address income inequality. Research suggests that larger gaps between rich and poor aggravate consumerism by magnifying status differences, which cause us to spend more in pursuit of a dignified place in society, and by increasing feelings of insecurity, which tend to make us focus more on income and possessions. Income inequality is something concrete we can change. We know there are ways to spread wealth more evenly.

Strategies like these point to a future built more around quality than quantity when it comes to our stuff, services, and experiences. They also point to a quality of life that includes some of the good that we glimpsed in the pandemic—cleaner air and water, less materialistic values, a better relationship with nature. We won’t get there by wishing individual consumers will one day see the light. We get there by building a different world. The first step is to start talking about it.

The post Could COVID-19 Force Us to Confront Our Consumption Problem? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From its start as a 19th-century mail-order firm, to its heyday on Main Street and in suburban malls, and from its late 20th-century reorientation toward credit and financial products to its attempted return to its original retail identity, Sears has mirrored the ups and downs of the American economy. It was a distribution arm of industrial America. It drove the suburbanizing wedge of postwar shopping malls. It helped atomize the industrial economy through manufacturer outsourcing in the 1970s and 1980s. It played a key role in the diffusion of mass consumer culture and commercial values. For better and for worse, Sears is a symbol of American capitalism.

By the early 20th century, Sears already was a household name across the United States, one that represented rural thrift and industry as well as material abundance and consumer pleasures. The company was founded as a modest mail-order retailer of watches in the 1880s by Richard W. Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck. Julius Rosenwald, a Chicago clothing merchant who became a partner in the firm in 1895, directed its rapid growth, expanding into new products and ever-broader territory. Mail-order firms like Sears were able to penetrate underserved rural areas by leaning on new infrastructure, such as the railroads that linked far-flung regions of the country. Government regulation also aided the company’s growth, with the Rural Free Delivery Act of 1896 underwriting its distribution chain by expanding mail routes in rural areas.

Sears, Roebuck letterhead from 1907 featured the mail-order company’s state-of-the-art distribution center, a symbol of its retail dominance. Image courtesy of Sears, Roebuck & Co/Wikimedia Commons.

In an era when print media reigned supreme, Sears dominated the rural retail market through its huge catalog, an amazing work of product advertising, consumer education, and corporate branding. Titled the Book of Bargains and later, The Great Price Maker, the famous Sears catalog expanded in the 1890s from featuring watches and jewelry to including everything from buggies and bicycles to sporting goods and sewing machines. It educated millions of shoppers about mail-order procedures, such as shipping, cash payment, substitutions and returns. It used simple and informal language and a warm, welcoming tone. “We solicit honest criticism more than orders,” the 1908 catalog stated, emphasizing customer satisfaction above all else. Sears taught Americans how to shop.

Sears also demonstrated how to run a business. Cutting costs and tightly controlling distribution fueled its rise to power. The company built a massive Chicago distribution complex in 1906, which occupied three million square feet of floor space. A full-page illustration of the plant, in all its bright redbrick glory, graced the back of the Sears catalog. Any customer could see how his merchandise was received and held, how his orders were filled and shipped out, and where the catalog itself was published. The distribution center was its own best advertisement; among the largest in the world, it was a symbol of the mail-order company’s dominance.

The company innovated in other ways, too. Bricks-and-mortar retailers today have to contend with new consumer habits brought about by e-commerce. Similarly, mail-order firms like Sears faced potential loss of their markets as the nation urbanized 100 years ago and entered the automobile age. Sears navigated the challenge brilliantly when it opened its first department store in Chicago in 1925. Under the managerial leadership of Gen. Robert E. Wood, who had formerly worked with mail-order competitor Montgomery Ward, Sears initiated a rapid expansion outside of urban centers. By 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, it operated more than 300 department stores.

In 1948, Ruth Parrington, a librarian at the Chicago Public Library, studied a Sears catalog from 1902. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.

Growth continued even during the economic downturn, because Sears wisely championed an aesthetic of thrift. The chain made its name selling dependable staples such as socks and underwear and sheets and towels, rather than fashion items like those found in traditional department stores such as Marshall Field’s in Chicago or John Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia or New York. Sears outlets were spare, catering to customers who were interested in finding good value, to meet practical needs. By the end of the Depression decade, the number of stores had almost doubled.

After World War II, still under Wood’s leadership, Sears continued to open new stores across North America, in the bustling new shopping centers populating the expanding suburban landscape. In the United States, the number of Sears stores passed 700 by the mid-1950s. The firm also expanded across the borders north and south, opening its first Mexico City store in 1947 and moving into Canada in 1952 (incorporating with a Canadian mail-order firm to become Simpson-Sears). Sears benefited from being a pioneer chain in a landscape of largely independent department stores. Along with J.C. Penney, it became a standard shopping mall anchor. Together, the two chains, along with Montgomery Ward, captured 43 percent of all department store sales by 1975.

Sears wouldn’t really lose any footing until the 1970s, when new challenges emerged. Skyrocketing inflation meant low-price retailers such as Target, Kmart and Walmart, all founded in 1962, lured new customers. The market became bifurcated as prosperous upper-middle class shoppers turned to more luxurious traditional department stores, while bargain seekers found lower prices at the discounters than at Sears.

Women’s and girls’ underskirts featured in the 1902 Sears Roebuck catalog sold from $1.18. Image courtesy of Edward Kitch/Associated Press.

In 1991, Walmart overtook Sears as the nation’s largest retailer. As big box stores began to dominate the country, the department store industry responded through mergers, reorganization and experimentation with the department store category itself. Sears was no exception. The company took many different tacks under a series of problematic leaders, losing sight in the process of its traditional niche, which it ceded to discounters. Sears moved into insurance and financial services. Its credit card business, for example, accounted for 60 percent of its profits at the turn of the 21st century. In 2003, however, it tried returning to its retail core, selling its credit and financial business to Citigroup for $32 billion.

There is a tendency to look at Sears’s decline, and the potential loss of a grand icon of American business, with fond nostalgia. This would be a mistake. Sears embodied many of the uglier aspects of American capitalism, too. Many times, the firm’s management pushed back against forces that benefited workers. Sears tried to undermine organized labor, successfully resisting it even though several other traditional flagship department stores had unionized by the 1940s and 1950s. Company leaders resisted 20th-century progressive social movements that sought economic equality for African Americans and women. Like other department stores, Sears contributed both to structural and daily acts of racism, against customers and workers. African-American boycotts against Sears in the 1930s, for example, exposed racist hiring practices; in the late 1960s, welfare-rights activists revealed the firm’s discriminatory credit policies. Gender inequality was deeply entrenched in its work structure—and challenged, prominently and unsuccessfully, in the famous 1986 “Sears case,” which emerged from an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint concerning discrimination against women, who had been passed over for lucrative commissioned sales jobs in traditionally-male departments.

All of it, good and bad, reflects our nation’s struggle to adapt to larger economic, political, and cultural forces. For historians like myself, who see business as a social institution through which to view and critique the past, the end of Sears will mean more than just one less place to buy my socks.

The post How Sears Industrialized, Suburbanized, and Fractured the American Economy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1937, when I was seven, we lived in a white, wood frame house on East 61st Street. It had a front lawn and a big backyard with an alley behind it. Main Street was a few feet west, with a print shop I visited because the owner gave away writing tablets and the Princess Theater where we spent weekend afternoons. To the east was a little street named Wall Street with a corner grocery store. Toward the end of the month when mother ran short of cash, the grocer was happy to put any needed purchases “on the bill” until payday. The farthest south we ever ventured was 64th Street where our school, St. Columbkille’s, stood.

But in those days, you didn’t need to take the streetcar to meet the world; so many memorable people and things arrived at your door. With few exceptions, like going to the neighborhood grocery store, we didn’t have to leave home to purchase goods; vendors came to us. Amazon may be onto something, but it isn’t something new.

I recall the greengrocer who visited in a horse-drawn cart selling fruit and vegetables. The driver would raise the side panels of his vehicle to display his selection, still in their packing boxes. In those pre-spraying days, anyone eating an apricot was best advised to split it open and not bite into it. Tiny worms often inhabited the area around the pit.

The Fuller Brush man was a regular visitor at most houses. He came laden with the latest thing in brushes to make our lives easier—brushes for the floor, for the kitchen, and bathrooms. Since I was the oldest child in our family, it was my job to prepare bottles of milk for my infant brothers and sisters. I was happy to discover that the Fuller Brush man sold bottle brushes to assist me in washing the bottles. The Fuller Brush man became part of American popular culture and achieved the ultimate—a movie that starred a top comic of his day, Red Skelton, as the Fuller Brush Man.

In an era when not every home had a refrigerator, the iceman delivered. In our neighborhood it was the Kirker Ice Company whose plant was at 5930 South Main St. Once a week, a household that needed ice would place a card with a large ‘K’ printed on it in the window—a signal to the ice man that he should stop and deliver. The iceman would grab a block of ice with heavy-duty tongs, fling it onto his shoulder where it rested on a pad of heavy leather, and lug it to the kitchen icebox where he deposited it in its compartment. The system worked fine except that the melting water often overflowed the pan we placed on the floor under the box, creating a sloppy mess.

The Helms man often announced his arrival with three toots of his whistle. The bread he sold didn’t interest the children who gathered around his distinctive yellow van. What attracted us were the sweets: doughnuts, turnovers, pies, eclairs, and more. He stored them in oversized drawers and removed a requested item by taking a piece of tissue paper and lifting the item as if it were a precious object. Even kids who weren’t buying gathered around to enjoy the show and inhale the accompanying fragrance.

Farmer Brothers sold coffee and tea door-to-door. Occasionally Farmers ran promotions that featured dishware at reasonable prices; it was decorated with delicate paintings of autumn leaves. I hadn’t seen any of them for many years until I recently spotted a bowl at a Pasadena flea market. The sight instantly took me back decades. Of course, I bought it. Marcel Proust evoked memories of his childhood with the taste of chamomile tea and madeleines. My bowl serves that purpose for me.

Milk was delivered to homes in the early mornings by men wearing white uniforms and lifting glass quart bottles in a metal carrier that fitted six bottles. Jessup, Knudsen, and Adohr were the important dairies then. During World War II, a song named “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet” became very popular. It was sung by a worker in a defense plant whose sleep the milkman disturbed.

Milkman, keep those bottles quiet,
Can’t use that jive on my milk diet.
Been jumping on the swing shift all right,
Turning out my quota all night.

Been knocking out a fast tank all day,
Boy, you blast my wig with those clinks,
And I got to catch my 40 winks.

During the summer, the neighborhood would be visited at least once by a photographer who arrived leading a pony that was laden with a large format camera and tripod. There was no need for him to broadcast his presence. Children caught sight of him and ran home to announce his arrival. Doting mothers who wanted photographs of their offspring came out of their houses to hail him. The photographer came prepared for his photo sessions with a pair of sheepskin cowboy chaps, a belt and holster with a six-shooter, a large bandana, and a cowboy hat. My mother was a customer and the family photo album contains photos of both my brother Raul and me posing warily on ponies, doing our utmost to smile. From that day to this, I have not gotten on another horse, of whatever size.

Insurance salesmen generally knocked on our door in the late evening when the entire family would be there to decide on whether to purchase a policy. Mother was a firm believer in insurance and it took no persuasive speech by the Prudential man to convince her to buy a policy. The salesman would come by monthly to collect the premiums, using his thick account book to record the payment and issue a receipt. When the insured, my father, died, payments on his policy were in arrears but mother contacted the agent anyway. He assured her that if she made up the late payments, the company would pay off as they had contracted. She did and they did. Prudential paid her $500, a not inconsiderable sum at the time.

These days when nearly everyone carries a personal telephone, it is difficult to imagine a time when most houses were not equipped with telephone jacks and didn’t have phones. I didn’t use a phone until I was 10 years old.

Bradford’s Bread Truck, Irvine Ranch, circa 1920.

For the many Americans in our situation—that is, phoneless—Western Union offered a scene that Ingmar Bergman might have thought up. A uniformed Western Union employee would knock on the door, usually at night. He carried a telegram that had a black border around the envelope that contained it. That border gave us immediate notice that someone close to the family had died. I witnessed that scene several times as a child and can testify that the interim between seeing the black border and learning the name of the deceased seemed a very long time.

Other itinerant salesmen included the knife and scissors sharpener who wheeled his little cart with its grinding wheel down our street periodically. A music man came by the house one evening to try his luck at selling music instruments. He demonstrated a steel guitar that I liked a lot. I asked my parents whether we could buy the guitar and if I could take the lessons that came with it. One parent agreed; the other didn’t. I still can’t play the guitar.

In the summer, the ice cream man drove his truck down the street playing a tune on his loudspeaker. Chocolate-covered Good Humor bars and Eskimo Pies were beyond our budget. What helped cool us off in hot weather were big slices of cold watermelon and frosty pitchers of lemonade that mother prepared for us.

A woman wearing a flowing, flowery skirt knocked on our door one day. She advertised herself as a fortune teller. Mother consulted her and I can only hope that she got some good news for her money. Vacuum cleaner salesmen dropped by to make their pitches. Mother liked the machine the Electrolux man demonstrated. She bought it. It was expensive but mother appreciated quality and never bought any vacuum cleaner that wasn’t an Electrolux.

Now that I think about it, both my brother, Raul, and I were members of the selling class. On Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, we’d pick up our quota of newspapers and roam the streets around our neighborhood, then around 62nd and San Pedro Streets, pulling our wagon and hawking our newspapers. To announce our presence, we developed a sing-song, “Exxxxxaminer, Times, Paperrrr!” We were thrilled when we got home with our pockets bulging with coins. It was a fun way to augment the family income.

Our family doctor was E.C. Deming, whose office was located at 6806 South Broadway. Dr. Deming made house calls for which he charged $2. In 1939 mother called him to our house to check the condition of a 9-year-old boy who was experiencing pain in the groin area. Father was less than enthusiastic about my going to the hospital, but when Deming mentioned the possible consequences of a ruptured appendix, I was allowed to go. The operation, at Children’s Hospital, was successful.

Many people, overwhelmingly men, worked as itinerant salesmen in the 1930s; I’m reminded that in 1937 the U.S. unemployment rate reached 17 percent. Those men took jobs that may not have been their first choice—they did so because there were no other employment options.

These vendors were eventually replaced as consumers took to driving their cars to malls, often on crowded streets and freeways, packing multi-storied, fortress-like parking structures to full capacity.

How long will it be before shopping malls and their parking lots join the list of things that aren’t here anymore, and that people of a certain age look back upon with nostalgia?

The post When the World Came to My South L.A. Door appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But I grew up and markets grew bigger. The Ralphs market at Ventura and Hazeltine in Sherman Oaks was my go-to grocery store for 42 years until it was demolished in 2012. That Ralphs and I went way back–to the moment in 1970 when the moving trucks dropped off my belongings at my new house and I had to stock my kitchen. For most of the time since, I was a working mom with no time to shop at more than one store. If Ralphs didn’t stock it, we didn’t eat it.

The big advantage of shopping at one store is that your place’s floor plan becomes permanently etched in your memory. My shopping lists were arranged to match the store’s aisles. I knew where even the most rarified items were shelved: marrow bones and scones, custard and mustard, fennel bulbs and light bulbs. Of course, every few years they would remodel and I’d have to learn a new floor plan all over again. But I always did–and I could have won any of those Food Network grocery store competitions.

I had strong feelings for my Ralphs. This was the market where each of my children rode around in the shopping cart, greeting neighbors and nursery school classmates, bargaining for Ding-Dongs and other unhealthy food choices. I stopped by the Ralphs on the afternoon of the Northridge earthquake in 1994 to buy a carton of milk and see how the place had fared. The floor was littered with broken glass bottles and covered with acoustic tiles that had fallen from the high ceiling; the wreckage told me just how powerful the quake had been. I worried about the checkers who I knew by name and wondered how long they would be out of work. It felt as though my own home had been damaged. Fortunately, after a few weeks, they were back to business as usual.

The trouble with loving a supermarket is that it can’t love you back. By contrast, mom-and-pop stores often extended credit to loyal customers in hard times, a tradition we see today only in vintage movies. One day a few years ago, I calculated that, after about four decades of shopping, I was about to spend my $250,000th dollar at Ralphs. Figure an average of $125 per week for a family of 5, for 52 weeks, for 40 years, and you get a quarter million dollars.

My paternal grandfather owned a dry goods and grocery store in Chicago. The babies are my father & his twin with store employees in 1915.

My father grew up working in his father’s stores. Here he is with my grandfather and uncle, dressed for work, about 1934.

Of course, the store didn’t acknowledge my extreme loyalty on this milestone, or on any other occasion. They didn’t even bother to ask my opinion in 2012 when they said they wanted community input about the idea of building a new, expanded Ralphs on the same site to meet the needs of the neighborhood. And they could have found me–by 2012, every item I purchased had a barcode to scan, and I was using a customer loyalty card for discounts, so they knew who I was.

But they didn’t ask me, so they went ahead and tore down a perfectly good market. MY market. For 22 months, during demolition and construction of a new super-sized Ralphs, the place was closed. I was left to stumble through other markets, unable to find familiar brands, disoriented and cranky. My favorite ice cream was nowhere to be found.

The expanded Ralphs opened just before Passover last year–good timing since the new market has a 1,500-square-foot kosher foods section. That section, like so much of the new place, is astonishing. I never realized that nearly every food and household item has a kosher version. Kosher ramen noodles with imitation chicken flavor? Kosher soap? Who knew?

Let me say first there are other improvements. The place is bigger and grander and offers more selections. The sushi counter features a gorgeous display of incredibly fresh fish, and the sushi chefs will create anything you ask for. One other plus is that all parking is covered so your car won’t be superheated on hot Valley days. Many of the reviews on Yelp and other online services are rapturous about the new place.

My maternal grandfather also owned a grocery store. My Uncle Ben in front of Witmer Quality Market, Los Angeles, about 1945. Note the building’s brick trim above his head.

GoogleMaps street view of the same location in 2011, now La Estrella Market. Note the brick trim on either side of the entrance matching the photo from 66 years ago.

But is bigger really better? Not when it comes to grocery stores. The new Ralphs is so gigantic and impersonal that no one knows your name or recognizes you. For me, the only familiar face from the old market is Angel in the produce department, still helping pick perfect melons.

The ceiling is that bare industrial style. The aisles are narrow and deep as canyons–not good for claustrophobia. If there is signage telling you where departments are located, you can’t see it over the aisles or from the entrance. I’ve yet to find the pharmacy and only found the bakery case last week. The dairy case is maddeningly far from the entrance, diagonally across the store in the furthest corner, a zig-zag trip away from the entrance. There’s no way to make a quick stop here for just a carton of milk.

The grand entry lobby is filled with enormous bright lights that burn wastefully all night. The check stands are located along the west side of the market next to a wall of windows without shades. The hapless clerks are sweltering in the afternoon sun and customers are so blinded by the glare that they hardly know how much they are paying or if a child in their cart is one they came in with.

All these problems could have been avoided if they had just asked me first.

The post My Supermarket Doesn’t Love Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I may be forgetting one or two others, but my quick count makes me fairly representative: The research firm Colloquy estimated last year that the number of loyalty programs per U.S. household stands at 22.

I have derived tremendous value from some of these programs, particularly those of the airlines and booksellers. Having concentrated most of my flying on United lately, I am rewarded with a little extra legroom in coach and the ability to check my bags for free. I know, I know, it’s a glamorous life: I even get to board with Group 2 these days, and once in a long while I have been able to trade in miles for a free trip.

At Barnes & Noble, the 10 percent discount I get with my paid membership adds up, even if it represents a conflict of interest with my Amazon Prime membership. Prime (also a pay-to-play) is among the more ingenious of all loyalty programs, featuring unlimited free two-day shipping—whose value to me (and cost to Amazon) increases with every purchase I don’t make elsewhere.

Now that I think of it, it feels odd being in a relationship with both booksellers. What kind of loyalty is that? Retailers call it “polygamous loyalty” (a term I advise you try not to use in other contexts), which speaks to the lack of seriousness underlying the loyalty program craze. By 2012, Americans had amassed 2.65 billion loyalty program memberships, which isn’t difficult when loyalty is defined so loosely.

It’s not hard to understand the reasons for our current craze for this form of marketing, which began in the mid- to late-1990s. Companies want to track your habits and preferences to improve their business. And new technologies like cell phone apps are making it ever more easier for companies to vie for your next purchase with targeted seduction.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a report last week on just how extensive the tracking of your consumer data is; the FTC also called for legislation to force more transparency around the issue of how much privacy you are surrendering for your loyalty. Your consumer behaviors are tracked even if you don’t sign up for a rewards card at your neighborhood grocer, but the tracking is far more individualized and accurate if you do open an account. Still, I suspect a majority of consumers are perfectly content to surrender their privacy not only to get better deals, but to recreate (even if in a virtual way) a seemingly more intimate, relationship-driven identity not just as a consumer but as an individual. Most people like the fact that multi-billion-dollar enterprises like Amazon and their grocery chain “know” them, much like people in a different era appreciated being known by the general store clerk, or the dairyman who made daily deliveries. It’s all about shrinking our worlds down to a scale where we matter.

Retail rewards and loyalty programs aren’t new, of course. I can remember being impressed as a child, on visits from Mexico to my relatives in East Texas, by how fun one of the pioneer loyalty programs seemed. We’d go shopping at Piggly Wiggly and get rewarded with a bunch of green stamps that would go in an album that could be traded in for goodies. And banks for decades would lure in customers with promises of free toasters or other tangible goods. Still, you have to credit Robert Crandall, the CEO of American Airlines who launched the first frequent flyer program in 1981, as the patron saint of contemporary loyalty/rewards programs driven by once unimaginable computing power. Few business leaders have had a bigger impact on how we lead our lives, even if his legacy has little to do with the mechanics of how we fly.

I am torn about all this commercialized loyalty. Yes, I have benefited. I derive some satisfaction (and, dare I say it, purpose and identity) in defining myself by the choices I make as a consumer. But I am often annoyed by retailers’ clinginess. Sometimes I just want to buy a cookie without entering into a lasting relationship (I’m talking to you, Panera Bread). As much as I benefit from my relationships with United or my grocery store, I enjoy being an uncommitted free agent in other arenas. I am loyal to no gas station, department store, or barbershop, which gives me a lot of freedom and anonymity, at the cost of picking up some rewards.

What’s most worrisome is the rising cost of not opting in. There have long been members-only stores, but I fear we are heading into a future where every retail experience will be defined by whether you are in or out of network. Fly an airline whose program you’re not signed up for, and you’ll be treated as an aggravating nuisance. Refuse to hand over your card or phone number at the grocery store, and you’ll be greeted with incredulity, making you feel like an anti-social element, or a visitor from North Korea. And they’ll charge you higher prices.

One welcome exception to this trend is Albertsons, the West Coast-based grocery behemoth, which announced last year that it was discontinuing its rewards card and offering the same “special” prices to all customers, all of whom deserve to be treated equally well. What a concept. Too bad Albertsons isn’t in my area—I could imagine becoming quite a loyal customer.

The post Why Do We Love Being Frequent Flyers, Buyers, Shoppers, and Eaters? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I owe the way I live my life to hippies. For lunch today, I went across the street and bought a sandwich with locally sourced chicken, avocado, and arugula. This weekend, as I do every weekend, I’ll get up early and head over to the farmers market, where I’ll wait in long lines without complaint. What I can’t find there, I’ll pick up at my local co-op. And I’ll pass three different bike shops on my way over.

I live in Takoma Park, Maryland, proudly known to its residents as “The People’s Republic of Takoma Park.” Back in the 1960s, hippies made Takoma Park what it is when their activism helped to establish the city as a nuclear-free zone (it still is, though nuclear power operators have never expressed the slightest interest in Takoma Park). We don’t do McDonalds in Takoma Park. We don’t tolerate Target or Ann Taylor. Everything we have is ours, and we’re proud of that.

Without hippies, Takoma Park might resemble many other American suburbs, where you find off-white, sprawling housing developments, a Walmart next to the Best Buy, some glass-enclosed office buildings, and an Applebee’s (where, contrary to their slogan, you do not belong—and I would never insinuate that you somehow “belong” at a mediocre chain restaurant).

Takoma Park is hardly alone in eschewing The Man thanks to a trail blazed by hippies. The best and biggest example of hippie influence in the United States is probably Portland, Oregon. I visited Portland a few months ago and was thrilled to discover a massive version of Takoma Park. I saw no familiar brands anywhere, bikes were apparently the primary mode of transport, and it seemed like it would be difficult to find food that wasn’t organic and sustainable. In a world that’s becoming increasingly commercial and consolidated by corporations, it’s empowering to see that we, the people, can still make our own way.

In essence, that’s what it means to be a hippie. It means rejecting the dominant culture, which, thankfully for people like me, has become more commonplace. We have Whole Foods grocery stores all over the country now, the concept of which would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. In fact, Whole Foods itself has become dominant enough to face counterculture rejection. Restaurants proudly tout their organic or locally sourced food. Even in terms of technology, it’s already entirely feasible to abandon Microsoft and Apple products completely in favor of Linux, which is a “by the people” operating system.

I find this amazing and wonderful. My parents didn’t have these sorts of options when I was growing up in the 1980s, the decade when commercial interests arguably took over. But thanks to hippies, I can remain unswayed by The Man, free to make my own decisions about what I create, consume, and support.

So to the hippies: My friends, I may not smoke with you, but I will gladly walk in your smoke.

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That should change. We all need more feedback on those who represent, or seek to represent, us. Since Americans are, for the most part, in between campaigns, now is the perfect time to build out a website to provide the public with something almost unheard of—useful information about politicians.

Modern campaigns are dominated by less-than-helpful advertisements. In the run-up to elections, our televisions and radios carry ads extolling the virtues, or warning of the vices, of our candidates. Our mailboxes, both real and virtual, brim with mailers explaining why we absolutely must not, under any circumstances, vote for a particular candidate. But very few of these campaign missives contain independent, factual information; campaigns, after all, aim primarily to get you to go to the polls, not to undertake a searching review of candidates.

This lack of helpful, substantive information leaves an ill-informed electorate grasping for answers. What is the solution? Here is one suggestion. Let’s create a dynamic website that would allow us to review our politicians based on a number of objective factors. And unlike well-intentioned but snoozy websites (I’m looking at you, League of Women Voters) that provide constituents with information on politicians, let’s promote a robust comment and ranking system.

There are many ways to review and rank politicians, and this site should cover them all. First, the site should describe every politician’s views on a broad but uniform set of issues, both domestic and international: immigration, taxes, education, foreign policy, the budget, and others. This would resemble the restaurant section on Yelp, which includes the hours, price, type of cuisine, requested attire and other items for all listed eateries. Whether you want a politician in favor of a path to citizenship and school vouchers—or an Indian restaurant that is good for kids and has outdoor seating —you’d be covered.

Second, just as on Yelp, there would be a comment section. Did you receive mediocre service at the neighborhood Chinese restaurant? Did your city councilmember return your call or respond to your request to fix the potholes on your street? Now there is a place to share your experiences.

But this raises a larger question: Do enough of us interact with our candidates and elected officials to be able to review them?

Yelp is based, at least in part, on the premise that local businesses are accessible.

Of the various filters to use when searching on Yelp, a popular one is price. When pricier restaurants, hotels, or businesses are out of reach for Yelp users, they can click on a single dollar sign to indicate they want to search for businesses on the lower end of the price range.

In an ideal world, politicians are accessible to all of their constituents, or all of their would-be constituents. But, thanks in large part to the U.S. Supreme Court and less-than-gutsy legislators, today’s reality is that those who can pay—campaign donors and outside spenders—are the only people who have regular access to politicians. Too many of our politicians are akin to the four-dollar sign restaurants on Yelp: They are open only to a select few.

Could we rate politicians according to cost, as we already do steakhouses? Yes, we could. I can think of a variety of “cost measures” for politicians. One might be based on campaign fundraising; politicians could be rated on how much money they raised and spent in campaigns. Or we could rate them on the median amount of the campaign donations they receive.

Making such information available would raise questions about the accessibility of these more “expensive” politicians. How big of a donation does it usually take to get a meeting? Are there some politicians who score big contributions but who still make time for those who can’t or don’t provide monetary support? Are politicians who raise very small amounts from many people really accessible—or are they too busy fundraising?

Yelp, via constituent comments and ratings, could answer such questions in ways that serve access-seeking constituents and the broader public. The service would also create an incentive for politicians to be accessible and responsive. We know that interest groups from the National Rifle Association to the Sierra Club rate politicians by their votes on certain issues as a means of getting more of the results they want. Why shouldn’t the rest of us get in on the game?

Yelp sells itself as “the best way to find great local businesses.” Why can’t a similar site be the “best way to find great politicians?”

The post I’d Like a Politician With Values and a Steakhouse With Outdoor Seating appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I think I love dead malls because I am a Midwesterner, a born-and-bred Kansas City man who has lived most of his life within flyover country. I will never belong anywhere else. I can identify with a place that was once great, a place where you look up and realize that the great herd of humanity has moved on. To spend a morning in a dead mall, where the shops are closed and your favorite restaurant is boarded up, feels like the world I know. It is, increasingly, the Midwestern mode of existence.

As a connoisseur of dead malls, I was recently gratified to discover that they exist even outside of Washington, D.C., where I moved to take a new job. The wealth of downtown Washington and its gilded suburbs might make hard times look inconceivable there. But I have found a mall to make me feel at home: White Flint, in North Bethesda, Maryland.

As in any proper dead mall, part of White Flint is being torn down. The department store on the southern end is being punctured by wrecking balls, while its rafters and insulation are picked apart by backhoes. But in the parts that remain standing, commerce, such as it is, carries on. On a recent visit, I drove around the piles of department store wreckage in the parking lot and entered the mall on the north end. A ramp led up to sliding glass doors etched with the White Flint Mall logo, a diamond with a gilded W and F.

Thirty years ago, the engraved sliding doors must have seemed lavish and futuristic. I pictured kids running toward them on a Friday night, arriving to see a movie and have dinner, or to just walk around the shiny interior hallways, where all the stores were new. Those kids must have felt how I felt when I was 10 and my mom and dad took me to Ward Parkway Mall in Kansas City, Missouri.

In the 1980s, malls were the future transported to the present. The Ward Parkway Mall movie complex was several theaters stacked together in a honeycomb, offering an impossibly diverse array of choices. That was exotic. So was a chain called T.J. Cinnamons, which sold enormous cinnamon rolls dripping with icing. It wasn’t the rolls themselves that everyone talked about; it was the way their scent carried. On nights when my parents took me to dinner at the Winstead’s hamburger restaurant (an outing that usually included a stop at the Ward Parkway toy store), I’d make a point of riding the food-court escalator, just to smell T.J. Cinnamons.

All of that is gone now, in Ward Parkway Mall and in White Flint Mall. It’s quiet. There is no Starbucks in White Flint, or even the Starbucks knock-offs you find at airports. The caffeine void is filled by the Texas BBQ Factory in the White Flint food court. Jerry’s Subs & Pizza, which opens early, also serves coffee and bagels, which both seem to be off-menu items. The coffee comes in Styrofoam cups; the half-and-half in plastic micro-barrels.

On my visit, I stopped in at Jerry’s. There was no line. Nobody was using a laptop, and nobody was talking on a cell phone. An old man sat in a booth and read a newspaper, which was actually printed on newspaper. It felt good.

My mind wandered to my favorite dead mall, Crestwood Court in suburban St. Louis. I took my kids to see Santa there one year, and they got a lot of face time with the old man, because there was no line to meet him. It was a Saturday, and old people walked along the edges of the hallways, getting their morning exercise. They probably shopped at Crestwood Court back in its heyday, in the 1980s. That’s when they lived in neighborhoods that were still sustained by middle-class factory jobs. They may have worked at the nearby Chrysler plant, which covered about 279 acres of land and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars in wages into the local economy each year.

Now the Chrysler plant, which closed in 2009, is the mother of all dead malls. And it wasn’t just the Chrysler jobs that went away. The corporate headquarters of so many St. Louis companies—A.G. Edwards, Federated Department Stores, Pulitzer Inc.—were bought out and carved up by outsiders during the 2000s. In 2008, the city’s most iconic company, Anheuser-Busch, was purchased by the Belgians. The new bosses at Anheuser-Busch InBev, as it is now called, announced just before Christmas that year that they would cut 1,400 jobs. Welcome to dead mall country.

Crestwood Court is being demolished. Society has decided it’s time to move on. But I tend to cling to things. Maybe this is a Midwestern trait, too. I just finished writing a book about the meat industry, and reporting it took me to a lot of small towns in the middle of the country. I saw something striking in rural America. Whole towns there are dead malls, where people walk around all the time feeling just like me.

One of the towns I visited was Waldron, Arkansas. An antique shop and a florist remained open on Main Street, but they stood among rows of empty stores, boarded-up windows, and vacant buildings. An exception was the Scott Theatre, a new business that was showing films on weekends. I learned that locals Raymond and Frankie Watson had bought the place a year earlier and renovated it—not because they expected to make a profit, let alone a living (Raymond works at a factory about an hour away, in Fort Smith), but because they were haunted by memories of what the town used to be like. Raymond told me it was the place where he once ran around with friends while his parents shopped, where kids drank sodas from a soda fountain and bought knickknacks for pocket change, where the adults knew all the kids by name.

So it is that people cling to dead towns, dead malls, and the memory of how things used to be. It’s irrational, economically—maybe emotionally, too. I should probably accept that the great tide of new jobs and new company headquarters is rolling away from the towns and cities I knew growing up. But I still love to drink cheap coffee at places like Jerry’s Subs, read nonfiction stories printed on paper, and ponder the way things used to be. What can I say? It feels like home.

The post Why Dead Malls Comfort Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This month marks my eighth year living in Los Angeles. I’ve always been a nomad–a collector not just of things but cities. I moved from Pennsylvania to Missouri to Michigan, back to Pennsylvania and then to Florida before coming to a city full of angels. You’d think I would have had enough of packing up junk and moving it from place to place. Quite the contrary. It’s the law of gravitas. What comes down must eventually be replaced.

In the Goodwill on Barrington and Santa Monica, just west of the 405 freeway that devours everything in its path, I find peace. Every aisle offers the solace of something I need replaced, or something my parents never allowed me to have but is now 95 percent off–and therefore screams, “Finders, Keepers!”

Sometimes I stray, and I flirt with other stores. But I’m pretty committed to this particular donation crowd. There’s just something about them.

I’ve trained my eye to catch subtly posh fabrics hanging amidst the racks of discarded GAP fashions and once-trendy H&M pieces. And I relish the chance to mock the donors of my designer finds. I wonder if they ever have regrets. Then I toss the clothing in my bag with a Mona Lisa grin. Their loss. As Marla Singer said of her bridesmaid thrift store find in Fight Club, “Someone loved it intensely for one day, then tossed it … like a Christmas tree. So special, than bam–it’s on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it.”

Sometimes it takes nothing more than the flash of a rogue rhinestone for me to dart from one color-coordinated aisle to the next. For my inner child (who lives on the outside most of the time, who am I kidding?), the experience is just shy of a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. A world of pure imagination.

The other day, I sat and stared at a slick pair of sparkly shades for a solid seven minutes trying to figure out where and how in my life they would be useful. Will everyone stare? Do they make too big of a statement? Do I like them ironically?

“You don’t have to worry about that here,” I told myself. “This is such stuff as dreams are made of.” It costs only $1.99 for me to walk out of the Goodwill feeling like a million bucks. I wonder what they’ll have in store for me next week.

Catherine Mangan currently heads up the internship program and social media efforts at Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. in Malibu.

*Photo courtesy of Catherine Mangan.

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In 1964, at the height of post-war consumer society, the mass-circulation monthly Look featured Publix supermarkets and the supposedly effortless shopping that they made possible. In these stores, “the harried housewife” could “drift gently among four-deck ‘gondolas’ bearing 12,000 of the [food] industry’s seductive products.” Look highlighted two indications of the stores’ success: the owner’s “personal fortune” ($8 million) and the happiness of everyone at the store. Even the employees were happy, Look explained, because “the customers they please are, in return, nice to them.”

Many other Americans subscribed wholeheartedly to this vision. Even critics of postwar consumerism assumed that stores–and their customers–were pacified by their surroundings. In his 1957 best-selling exposé of advertising, The Hidden Persuaders, well-known social critic Vance Packard entitled the chapter on supermarkets “Babes in Consumerland” and described women walking past old friends and neighbors without seeing them, moving as if in a trance through the “fairyland” store.

Like so much else about the 1950s and 1960s, these accounts of supermarkets are charmingly alien to the modern eye. Today, grocery shopping is one more chore among many chores, and almost no one looks forward to a trip to the supermarket–if anyone ever did.

However, the popular conception of smooth-running, streamlined supermarkets created an important legacy. In the minds of many Americans, grocery stores occupied a sphere that was outside of politics, power relations, or public life. Instead, the stores merely stood for effortless, pleasurable, mindless, and resolutely apolitical modern living.

The powerful countercultures that arose in the late 1960s and 1970s cemented this view of supermarkets, using them to represent the mainstream–and all the feelings of alienation and ennui that the mainstream awakened in the outsider. The Clash, for instance, sang in 1979 that they were “lost at the supermarket.” Supermarkets, whether they wanted to be political or not, symbolized the powerlessness many people felt in the face of modern life.

Injecting politics into the food-shopping experience wasn’t unprecedented. In fact, the visions of seamless and effortless food shopping that entranced so many in the decades immediately following World War II were an aberration. For most of human history, including most of American history, obtaining food was difficult work that required interaction with other people who might not necessarily want to help you. Nineteenth-century public markets were sites of exciting interaction–but also of tension and frustration. City governments both created and governed these spaces, which meant that politics always intruded.

Small neighborhood grocery stores had their own tensions. Relations between clerks and shoppers were unpredictable. Sometimes they were allies, rallying together against a bad store manager, and sometimes they were adversarial bargainers. Food prices were also politically touchy. When staple goods got expensive in the years after World War I, citizens started demanding that local governments find a way to lower prices. Grocery stores have long been important nodes of community, but they have also been places on the front lines of political frustration.

Politics have not disappeared from grocery stores. A few months ago, a near-strike by workers at Ralphs, Vons, and Albertsons stores in Los Angeles made clear that labor tensions are still running strong at regular supermarkets. And that’s just one example. We also see drives to make supermarkets post nutrition information on their shelves, discussions about the balance grocers ought to strike between the fair treatment of workers and organic compliance, and arguments over the role of government in bringing any of this about. If supermarkets were ever smoothly running pleasure palaces, they sure aren’t now.

One thing has changed. Now, many of the tensions manifest themselves outside of stores themselves. Rather than complain to managers, bargain with clerks, or demand changes to store policy right away, customers tend to leave and do their campaigning and complaining outside the store and through electronic media. They’ll make phone calls, send emails, post online, or complain informally to friends. Things would have been far more direct in the 1910s or 1920s. Part of this is because communication is easier, but in part it’s also because stores tolerate less overt confrontation today. For instance, shopping malls–those other icons of public consumption–are more heavily policed than ever. Loud complaints or protests are the (often unwelcome) exception in grocery stores.

With all the politics and hassles surrounding our food stores, Americans have been seeking out the old supermarket ideal–in which provisioning is a relaxing and apolitical pleasure–in new formats. Recent alternatives have included small stores and farmers markets, which are celebrated for restoring the pleasure to shopping and rekindling the warm fires of community.

But with something as fundamental as our daily bread, protest, demands, debate, and confrontation will enter into the picture. Grocery stores will always, however subtly, be places of politics, interaction, and tension. But it is not a failure that they are so. It is a tribute to Americans’ demands for liberty and the dynamism of public life. It’s a good thing to be thankful for, even as we wonder, amid all the cart jams and skyscrapers of candy canes, why we ever went shopping. Seeing stores as political spaces can transform how we understand their possibilities–and our own.

Tracey Deutsch lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she is an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender Politics and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century.

*Photo courtesy of Muffet.

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