This feature is back! Did you miss it? I did.
Marc Cooper's The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas reminded me in some ways of the infamous Not Buying It. For one, both books caused me look up and inquire to the room at large, "Why must lefties be so goddamn humorless about capitalism?"
Also, both authors only go halfway with their efforts to lend personal authenticity to this so-called "universal" experience -- Levine natters on about how she defines herself by her spending but doesn't ever examine why she accepted this benchmarking criteria, and Cooper loves to gamble, but has no problem deriding the other people in Las Vegas as mere suckers to be bled dry by heartless corporations. Both authors ultimately posit that they're more savvy than the other participants in human commerce, instead of exploring the common threads that pulled them toward this interest.
However, once I got past those issues, it was an okay book.
Cooper makes several points worth mulling over: Las Vegas visitors are moving away from active entertainment (blackjack) to passive entertainment (slot machines, video poker) which requires less skill from them. These monkey-hit-the-lever devices also part one from one's money far more efficiently than blackjack does. Las Vegas offers unskilled and uneducated workers a fantastic shot at a middle-class life, thanks to thriving unions. The lack of local casino ownership may hurt future Las Vegas development.
But here's what I found most interesting: Cooper musters a lot of outrage against corporations like Steve Wynn's or the Mandalay-MGM, and he is duly angered by the way the city ignores its indigent. His passage detailing Mandalay Group's successful strategy for getting visitors to self-segregate by income level clearly forces the reader to wonder why Excalibur customers are inherently less deserving than their Luxor or Mandalay Bay counterparts. It's good business reporting, because it places commerce in a context that's relatable to anyone.
It is apparently wrong for companies to be blatantly contemptuous of the not-rich. However, it turns out to be okay for individuals to make snap judgments of others based on income level. Cooper really, really hates the bargain-hunting middle class. A typical passage:
Once inside the doors of the Desert Inn, I knew I was safely delivered from the swelling, heat-stricken herds of shorts-clad schleppers outside grazing the Strip, fanny-packs around their waists, one hand clasped around a 24-ounce watermelon margarita souvenir glass, one eye fixed on the video-cam viewfinder, the other on the pulsating Circus Circus sign that reeled them in with ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktails.
Everything about this is designed to paint these tourists in a negative light: they are rubes, they are unattractive, they are fat from their unabashed gluttony, they are greedy and therefore more concerned about the price of the shrimp cocktail than with its actual taste.
(Now, I will admit that one of my favorite things to do in Las Vegas is to take the stairs that are offered next to every escalator -- and it's not just because I get the exercise. It's because I like calculating the ratio of stair-climbers to escalator-standers and marveling at the differences. So there. I have my own snobbery matrix.)
However, I have to ask: given that we've established a premise that corporations are busy bleeding noble working stiffs dry ... might we not also consider that these shorts-clad, cheap-crustacean-craving visitors are merely trying to get a taste of luxury on their own tightening budget?
There's an interesting sentiment that's beginning to percolate through commerce-based writing, a backlash against bargain-hunters. I noticed it in Cooper's work, it's in today's NYT "Critical Shopper" column wherein the reporter (and wife of a well-compensated financial type) writes:
I might mind the physical horror of being mauled while reaching for a flat-screen television set. But what I really could not bear is participating in the grand cliché of it all — that my eyes would meet the wild eyes of other shoppers, people who believe with all their heart that if they park outside a Wal-Mart all night in order to buy Dad a slightly discounted flat-screen TV, they will have accomplished something when in fact they have been lured into one of the most breathtaking marketing ploys thrust upon the shopping public.It’s like watching thousands of farm animals being herded about mindlessly. I simply can’t handle that much human pathos around the holidays.
-- "The Wool Over My Eyes Should Be Cashmere"
The dismay over Americans' bargain-hunting behavior also percolates through the other book I read last week, Kate Newlin's Shopportunity: How to Be a Retail Revolutionary.
Newlin's core argument is pretty basic: people do not need all the stuff that they buy, so they should focus on getting a different bang for the buck -- quality of product and shopping experience over quantity. To her, when you spend time shopping, that time should be as valued as the end product, so you should get something out of it. It's a laudable thesis.
She writes about the joys of shopping at Whole Foods and Wegman's, thrilling to the experience and noting that it only costs "a little more." I would love it if "a little more" could have been quantified so we can see whether "a little more" is something families can reasonably swing by cutting out a Wal*Mart trip per month, or whether it's "a little more" in a budget already unemcumbered by the usual American spending habits at big-box stores.
Newlin also makes a very salient insight: companies with the latitude to establish and maintain a stellar shopping experience and the happy employees that experience demands are very often not publicly-held companies.
I would have added: Private companies only have to answer to themselves for their performance; the pressures publicly-held companies face to constantly increase profit margins essentially set up a completely different competitive landscape for the company. It is fine to talk about the joys of Wegman's abundant inventory, but it might be worth tracking whether Whole Foods is going to maintain its practices in the face of rising analyst and investor criticism of its practices. It is great to talk about Title 9 Sports as a company that loves establishing relationships with customers, but it doesn't face the same investor pressure to increase its monthly same-store sales as the Foot Locker does.
However, the one thing Newlin doesn't do is consider the plight of the shopper who is simply trying to get by. In her Wal*Mart analyses and anecdotes (she seems particularly stricken that the shoppers trend toward a uniform of jeans, "message" sweatshirts and sneakers), in her Costco quips, there's the underlying assumption that the people who go to these stores are over-consuming. She's got a chapter that argues bargain-hunters are as physically addicted to a destructive behavior as a junkie, arguing that if the people who camp out and stampede through Black Friday pulled that business in front of a liquor store, they'd be smacked into AA before noon.
I'm willing to bet some of those people are actually going to door-buster sales because that's the only way they can afford Christmas. Yes, for a lot of us, those sales give us the luxury of extending our resources further. But for many of us, those sales are the only ways people can afford the experience of delighting a loved one with a much-longed-for gift. Some people may strive to enjoy the shopping journey, but let's not forget that for plenty of people, the destination is more meaningful.
A lot of the commerce-related reading I do covers the way the affluent spend. This is because we do love reading about the rich. It's aspirational reading: we can come away from an article about a discontent millionaire with the happy fantasy that we won't be such an ungrateful git when our ship comes in. We do not like reading about the bargain-hunters and budget-stretchers. There but for the grace of God go we.
But in a culture like ours, where you do repeatedly hear the message "You are what you buy" -- as in this Nov 27, 06, SFChron piece, "Bling Leads to Ka-Ching: Online sites cashing in as people spend millions to buy clothing and items that look like the things celebrities use," which reports:
"People are very interested in what celebrities own," said Zebo founder Roy de Souza. "If you have all that money and become successful, what do you spend it on?"Though some may feel it encourages people to be more materialistic, the reality is people care about what they own, de Souza said.
"When you buy a $200 pair of jeans or Nike sneakers, you care about it," he said. "You want to wear it and show people. There are so many choices, so what you own really says a lot about you."
In this culture, everyone hears that message. Everyday low prices and door-busting sales have democratized the opportunities to create a material identity.
So until there is a way to incorporate the process of that acquisition into that material identity -- and I think there is, thanks to Project Red and the increasing emphasis on socially-conscious consumption -- I don't think weaning people off bulk and bargain consumption will be that easy. You're asking them to change who they are, to curtail their efforts at self-defintion. For some people, that may be even scarier than paying full retail price.
I'm glad you brought this feature back with a plethora of shopping talk!
I grow increasingly irritated at the disdain held towards those who look for bargains because they have to. I have long suspected that much of ironic hipster culture is just making fun of the working-class in disguise (Moustaches! Trucker hats!) and I think it has spread.
Don't even get me started on the Times lately; the Critical Shopper pisses me off on a regular basis, and their general mandate when it comes to their shopping and retail coverage right now seems to be "Products for people with more money than sense." Not "Wow, so with gas prices up so much, are families resorting to using their credit cards so their kids can have a Christmas? How are they getting by?" I think that's relevant to a lot more people, whether it's glamourous or not.
Geez, I am cantankerous.
Anyway, Vegas...I have never been there. I kind of want to go, though, even if my feelings about one-armed bandits are very much tied up in the destruction their ubiquitousness has had in Atlantic Canada. I suspect that the reason there are so many shorts-with-socks-wearing proletariats in Vegas (or so I'm told) is that the city has managed to position itself as a popular North American vacation destination that families can visit -- and maybe afford -- while maintaining some of that celebrity-visiting, exciting image. Should the more affluent get to deny them their affordable fun just because Celine Dion is really, really irritating?
As far as Vegas goes, it's worth considering that maybe the tourists aren't just rubes. Maybe they don't care -- they know Vegas is all flash, and that's why they're there, to have a good time and forget about their everyday. (Or maybe -- maybe! -- it is possible for an individual to enjoy both low-brow and high-brow entertainment. Crazy, I know.)
Posted by: drunken monkey | 2006.11.30 at 12:53