Filthy Commerce

Define necessity.

There's a photo going around on Facebook, which I've included to the left, where the emaciated forms of African children are contrasted with the chubby, Michelin man-like figures of frenzied Black Friday shoppers. While I appreciate the sentiment and I certainly think that more westerners could stand reminders of how easy we have it compared to the people trapped in climate-related or geopolitical nightmares, I think that photo's a bit facile. It assumes a lot about the fat Black Friday shoppers. It assumes they have any money at all.

Wages in the U.S. have not risen in line with consumer costs; in the last year, consumer prices rose 3.5% while average wages rose approximately half of that. People are feeling a little pressure in the wallet.

The logical thing to do when you have a lot of month at the end of the money is to tighten your belt and reduce expenses. But people have been doing that for a while. And Christmas is coming up.

I don't doubt that stores on Black Friday are happy hunting grounds for bargain shoppers. But I also think that those stores are where people go to stock up on the clothes their kids need (or they need). Those sales are where people go because if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to have Christmas at all. And although people can, and do, waggle their fingers about how the income-challenged should cut out non-essentials and just be grateful they've got the chance to work part-time for less than a living wage ... who among us really thinks that the working poor don't deserve the pleasure of watching their kids' faces light up when they behold presents under a tree on Christmas morning?

Not all Black Friday shoppers are mindless greedbots. Many are people who know if they sit out the sales, they sit out Christmas. Instead of stigmatizing the people who are scrabbling for sales merchandise, we need to realize that they're one front in a class war that's pitting the middle and working classes against one another. And we need to ask, "Who benefits from tsk-tsking the bargain shoppers and scolding the workers?"

Maybe they're the mofos who should be on the other half of that picture instead.

Every little girl a princess, every little boy a monster

One of the unanticipated benefits of using Amazon Mom is that it's a wonderful window into the mainstream parent-industrial complex. Living as I do in the Bay Area -- land of babies dressed in transgressively hip ensembles and named after Charles Mingus albums -- it is easy to believe that we're all nurturing our kids to chase their bliss, unweighted by gendered expectations and the accompanying baggage.

So when I log into Amazon Mom and see a big ol' display for Disney Cuddly Bodysuits and that those bodysuits are split along baffling gender lines ... it's an unpleasant reminder that sooner or later, I'm going to have to explain to my daughter that her ideas of what it means to be a person and a girl are not the same as the wider world's ideas of what it means to be a person and a girl.

Consider: this green bodysuit, clearly inspired by Pixar's Monsters, INC., is listed under baby boy clothing. So are the three-packs of Monsters, INC. bodysuits, the Cars bodysuits and 101 Dalmations. Little baby girls can get dressed in the Aristocats and Minnie Mouse.

The same day I discovered that the green bodysuit is apparently meant for little boys, I happened to get a Company Kids catalog. Fun fact: little girls get "pony dreams," "ballerina stars," "cupcake parties" and pastel polka dots. Little boys get "travel by sky," "scaryosaurus," "safari expedition" and primary colored stars.

Here is where I unpack my own gender baggage for you: From ages four to seven, I was passionately interested in dinosaurs. Like, to the point where the entire neighborhood knew I was going to be a paleontologist when I grew up. I was also a little girl who liked wearing dresses, and it baffled me that nobody ever made a dinosaur print dress. I didn't want the little blue t-shirt and pants set with the stegosaurus print, I wanted a dress. It fell to my parents to gently explain that the people who made clothes didn't think that little girls liked dinosaurs.

Rather naively, I had assumed that things had progressed in the intervening 30-odd years. My generation -- the generation that grew up on Free to Be You and Me and Star Wars -- is now sufficiently advanced in the workforce where we're product managers and marketing directors. We're making the mainstream commercial culture.

Yet we're apparently perpetuating and imposing an incredibly rigid set of gender signals through consumer choices. It's entirely possible that product managers have run the numbers and concluded that there aren't enough dino-loving little girls out there to justify a sundress with a raptor on the chest. People do buy what they think boys or girls "should" like. When I unloaded five boxes of baby-related stuff at a consignment store recently, the store owner remarked that I must have had a girl because "baby boys don't get stuffed animals. At least, not as many as baby girls." I honestly don't know who to feel worse for -- the little boys who don't get a lovey or the little girls who don't get a toy car to roll around.

My daughter is only eight months old. At this point, her interests are mostly gender-free: She likes to knock down towers of blocks, eat the corners of her board books and play peekaboo. But eventually, she's going to get introduced to pop culture. She'll see Toy Story, and Finding Nemo, and all that. And we may end up having a conversation about why we can't find her a pink Buzz Lightyear t-shirt. I'm already dreading it. And I have no good answer for her if she asks why things haven't changed.

Lord, save me from the cute

One of the stylistic quirks of prenatal media is the irritating habit of referring to the reader -- and presumed parent-to-be -- as "Mommy." I'm not linking to any direct examples because I don't make a habit of keeping irritating articles in my bookmarks. Please, just take my word for it: If you become pregnant, you will be exposed to a number of articles that strip you, the gestating woman, of your autonomic personhood and slap you with the infantilized "Mommy."

So there's that.

This infantilization has infested the homekeeping sphere of writing too. There's a lot of cutesy-wootsy out there in domestic blogland. Make your chores into games, take tons of photos of you cracking an egg into a bowl -- be sure to quip about how "Gosh, that's eggs-actly what it's supposed to look like!" -- give your kids quirky nicknames ... It is as if women who take an active, thoughtful interest in domestic science are afraid to put forth their experience and observations with an authoritative voice.

A word about FlyLady: I once proposed doing a profile on Marla Cilley for a newspaper I was working at, because I thought her branding and online expansion were noteworthy for a business audience. I spent about a week negotiating with the assigning editor while also trying to line something up with Ms. Cilley. That woman is focused. Roll your eyes though you may at things like "Twenty-three fling boogie," the person behind them is every bit as dedicated to optimizing her own potential and others;' as, say, Tim Ferriss. I wonder if her focus and ambition are somehow threatening to her core constituency.

There was a recent New Yorker article on Ree Drummond, aka the Pioneer Woman, in which the author reported:

Several bloggers who know Drummond told me, in the furtive tone one might use to convey gossip about a friend, that she is a "very savvy businesswoman." But no one would offer specifics. "She's quietly, insanely ambitious," Ed Levine, a friend and the founder of the Web site Serious Eats, said. "Drummond reminds me of a duck: underneath the water, it’s paddling like mad, but above the surface it’s placid."

-- "O, Pioneer Woman!" May 9, 11

Why are people who take budgeting, cooking and cleaning seriously afraid of tipping their hand as to how serious they are? More specifically, why are women who take this stuff seriously afraid to own their ambition and authority?

Thank God for Martha Stewart. One of the things I've always admired about her publishing empire is its editorial tone. The articles all seem to be written with a few bedrock assumptions firmly in place: Of course, the subject is worth learning about, so of course, you want to master it; of course, you will settle for nothing less than cool proficiency; of course, nothing is worth doing if it's not worth doing well. MSLO's unabashed embrace of high standards has often been lampooned or bitterly remarked upon; I applaud it. She takes homekeeping seriously and if you don't? That's your loss.

There are a few other non-goofball voices in the domestic wilderness: for example, I've been using Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts as a reference for years.

It is striking to me: women who want to make a public name for themselves by optimizing the routines and results of their private lives go cutesy. Men go for "life hacking." It's a dichotomy that does nobody any good.

 

Attribution and attrition on Pinterest

So I'm on Pinterest, and I am fascinated by it. Watching how people curate things is an ever-living lesson in human behavior. Here my general impressions so far:

1. The bookmarklet that lets you "pin" whatever image you want on a Web page is wonderful for getting people to slap things up on Pinterest the minute they see them. Kudos to in-browser ubiquity!

2. That bookmarklet is hell on someone trying to find a primary source for an idea. This is because a lot of tumblrs, lifestyle blogs and picture-heavy sites are curators first, original content creators second* and they have no problems republishing photos. When Pinterest participants hit a blog and like what they see, they just click the bookmarklet. Subsequently, the Tumblr that's reproduced a photo is getting referenced in someone's pinned entry, as opposed to the original source.

Here's an example from my Pinterest board. I saw this pin of a Christmas candy cane bouquet and liked it. I wanted to know how to make it, so I went to the cited source in the pin. It's a Tumblr that had lifted the picture from another Tumblr blog, and that one had lifted the picture from the how-to entry on Ecopolitan Bride. It took me, what, three links to get to the original source of the content?

I'm touchy about primary sources right now because I just finished crunching through the O'Reilly Radar's "Strata Week: The mortality rate of URLs," with its sobering statistic that approximately 50% of 1997's URLs are dead today.

Link rot is a very real problem for the Web. It pokes holes in the contextural, curatorial nets we weave via our surfing. Link rot is going to make blogs less of a repository for information and more of a series of flat, decontextualized text files. It is going to alter information landscapes. It will make research more difficult.

We already deal with link rot in our bookmark files. How many times have you saved something to your bookmark file, found the specific bookmark months or years later, then clicked, only to find a 404?

As a visual way to organize your bookmarks, Pinterest is great. I have entire folders in my bookmarks file I plan on revisiting and pinning; for some types of content, seeing the item explains better why you saved it than whatever's in the page title.

As a way to get people to port more of their desktop data to the cloud, Pinterest is brilliant. Imagine the data mining Pinterest could do. Users tend to stick to the suggested "boards" Pinterest has set up, and all of them -- "Products I Love," "My Style Pinboard," "Favorite Places and Spaces," "Books Worth Reading," "For the Home," Eats" -- can be mapped to very lucrative consumer sectors. Imagine being able to sell a retailer information on which products of theirs resonate with specific demographics! Pinterest will be able to do that. What about working with a media company to track how many of their features get referenced in a given time period? The metrics will be there.

The question will be: How good is the information? Few users are going to bother drilling back to an original source. I don't do it 100%. I trust that some curators -- Apartment Therapy or Design Sponge, for example -- are "responsible" Web citizens who keep their site organized and published. That trust is largely unfounded.

But what Pinterest tells me overall: People love using the cloud as a way to sort and share data that is meaningful to them. They don't care about data hygiene or who's profiting. There isn't a good reason to yet. In a way, it's almost like 1997 all over again.

 

* I'm aware that one can argue that the specific curation of a collection is, in and of itself, a form of content. I agree. But that's not relevant here.

What do you mean, "Hippies aren't big shoppers?"

So I was doing research for tomorrow's SFGate.com post on daily deals websites (yes, I'm still blogging semi-regularly over there), and I ran across a three-year-old blog post detailing the environmentally conscious deal a day sites out there. Would you like to know what they're up to?

EcoSteal, which promised to save the planet "one steal at a time," is busy restructuring their business model.

Guffly --"If eco-friendly & style made a lovechild, they'd call it Guffly. A new product every weekday!" -- quietly stopped updating its Twitter feed nearly a year ago; its site is MIA.

Ecobunga is now a Facebook-only concern.

I checked some other green deals sites: Go Green Deals has not been updated since January of this year, Green Deals Daily has a terse shut-down message, the Big Green Deal is the Big Green 404 and Hip Green Deals went dark in December 2009. And in a little bit of Rage Diaries history, Ideal Bite -- which used to be a source for some of my links -- went dark in 2009 and the domain is now for sale.

(Note that Ideal Bite is one exception to the success that Bob Pittman's had building businesses in the newsletter space; this is possibly because, unlike Thrillist, Daily Candy or Tasting Table audiences, the Ideal Bite audience may not have been avid shoppers.)

Naturally, I wanted to know why the green deals market collapsed. Here are my theories, in no particular order:

1. The recession happened and many of the people who loved feeling good about buying green decided they loved not being broke a whole lot more -- and curbed their "ethical" spending practices.

2. Hippies are not exactly impulse shoppers.

3. The investor money went to social networking and social commerce sites -- which is now we now see "do gooder" social shopping sites like Ethical Deal, Green Box Top, Blissmo and Dealgooder.

I haven't seen a lot of press looking at this. I am happy to be the press to look at this story (hint, hint, any business editors out there looking for an enterprise reporter with a flair for features). Or, you know, I could just blog my theories until they become the accepted wisdom per search engine results.

In the meantime, I'll be over here quietly persisting in reducing, reusing, recycling --and seeing where eco- and e-commerce go next.