1 Reading response: Signs of Life The More Factor In the book signs of life by Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, "The More Factor," Laurence Shames discuss the effects of greed in Americans where they always chase more wealth, land, and opportunities. The optimistic aspect of the Americans keeps them believing in the power of having more and pursuing even more wealth and opportunities. Over the centuries, Americans have been pursuing more opportunities, and they believe that the generations to come would have even more chances. The generations to come would ferret more lavish opportunities than those that are gone. These opportunities, however, die with time, and as early as 1835, America was experiencing emptiness in opportunities. The concept of growth is mainly applied to things that can be measured, weighed, or counted, and it is in these things that hunger is increased (Maasik and Solomon). The supply for more is, however, reducing with time as much as more opportunities are acquired. I agree with Laurence Shames' concept of greed for more and support his belief that opportunities are reducing with time. "There have been ample indications over the past two decades that we are running out of more" (89). From centuries ago, people focused on gaining lands, wealth, and having more opportunities, which they used as an advantage over others. The opportunities for grab are, however, reducing since most resources are used, and the remaining are insufficient for the need to multiply. In my understanding of "The More Factor," it is my belief that the greed for more still exists, and that is why new innovations and inventions are made a year in year out. The inventions are also extended to space since land resources are depleted. ()\\ 1 Reading response - The Treadmill of Consumption In the book signs of life by Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, James A Roberts reading, a veil is unveiled about the consumption habits of Americans and their love for new shiny things (119). The rich acquire more wealth with an expectation of having satisfaction, but after a few days, the things acquired are simply objects and bring no happiness whatsoever. Roberts talks about the treadmill of life; this is whereby people strive to move ahead in life materially without gaining anything, not even satisfaction (Maasik and Solomon).. For instance, teenagers who have no cell phones feel that they are left out. At that point, the teenagers will strive to buy one, but after acquiring it, they realize that it is just an object and not something that adds happiness to someone. According to Roberts, mass media has significantly impacted people's desire to acquire a status symbol. Roberts observes that social media focuses on the wealthy I the community making their new achievements known to anyone who cared. Social media cover the lifestyles of the rich while at the same time; people want to outdo each other hence leading to buying silly stuff. He further explains that the failed economy does not significantly affect people's lifestyles and the way they acquire stuff. Humans have an idea of adjusting their lifestyles to overcome the challenges of the economy (Maasik and Solomon). Still, once it stabilizes, they resume their senseless buying of things competitively and comparatively. It is the nature of a human to love what they don't have, especially the beautiful and trending stuff. This appetite is unstable since new shiny objects will always come, and people will still go after them. For instance, new phone models come and go; buying the latest model now does not mean it will be the latest in the market hence unending to a perpetual treadmill. ()\\ 2 Works Cited Maasik, S., and J. Solomon. Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. Macmillan, 2011. ()\\ 3 1 Reading response - The Self-Storage Self In "The Self-Storage Self," Jon Mooallem states that there is an increasing accumulation of properties that should rather be considered as trash. He states that most of this stuff is from broken marriages, ended engagements, and loss of friends and families. People see the need to store these items with the belief that their existence serves a good purpose. Most of these items are stored in storage facilities and units where they are paid for every month when they can be thrown away to save the space and the money. He further mentions the national furniture habit where he mentioned that a lot is spent on furniture even when the price of furniture has dropped. While a lot of furniture is being bought, even more, are thrown out to be replaced by the new ones. The displaced furniture is, however, still knocking around somewhere hence increasing the rate of unwanted properties. "A 2016 UCLA study found that middle-class families in Los Angeles battling with over-accumulation of goods" (Mooallem, 2011, pp.105). In my opinion, I agree with the concept of self-storage self and the idea of over-accumulation of unwanted property. In the current world, people are buying a lot of property and throwing away the old ones or storing them in garages. In addition to that, people tend to store properties from their dead relatives even when they don't have any use for the items. These items could be recycled or repaired and resold, rather they are left unattended for years and later thrown out hence increasing the number of unwanted items that are rather considered trash. References Mooallem, J. (2011). The Self-Storage Self. In Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. London, England: Macmillan. 1 Reading response - Signs of Life Everything Now In the book Signs of Life by Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, "Everything now" by Steve McKevitt, he talks about wants versus needs of human beings. Humans are living through a time of endless choices where they have many lifetime worth of choices available to be picked. Having everything, however, does not mean that humans are happy or content. With the neverending development, humans cannot swipe needs for wants, and whenever they get something, they still look ahead for more sophisticated versions. A need is something we have to have, such as food, shelter, and clothing, while wants are things that we can survive without but still choose to seek; for instance, a blackberry of BMW. "Needs are rational and permanent. We have always needed and will always need food, water, and shelter" (McKevitt, pp.125). However, wants are driven by emotions and are always changing. One may acquire their desires, but they will always look for much better options once they get accustomed to what they already have. In my opinion, I believe that Steven McKevitt is right when he states that wants are always changing while needs are permanent. Humans need the same things every time, but what they get for pleasure and leisure will always change. It is also true that these wants do not make them happy because there is a purpose behind every want. Humans buy computers for work or browsing the internet; they buy cars for constant traveling, and although these are luxurious items, they still seek more. New models and innovations would always attract human attention; then they would forget what they already have in their possession. 2 1 Reading response - Masters of Desire In the "Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertisement" by Jack Solomon, he states the dream of Americans to rise above the crowd by attaining levels others cannot and attaining a social standard other cannot reach. The American dream has two faces, including communally egalitarian and competitively elitist. The American desire is to achieve social distinction and bask in glory alone. Even though the concept of equality in terms of American Mom, Apple pie, and the boy or girl next door are enjoyed by all Americans, there is always the desire to have a larger bite at the apple pie. The distinction is best shown in advertisements where signs are used to manipulate people into buying different items. The signs shown in the advertisements are the basis of the distinctions. They are not just any signs, but they are status symbols; they either cost a lot of money or possessing them requires influential connections (Solomon, 2011, pp. 154). The object simply sends a signal that identifies one as a member of the high society. In my opinion, I agree with Solomon when he states that everyone is looking for a way to gain more influence and be above the general crowd. This makes sense since, in the current world, people are only viewed by the power they hold or their social status. It is also true that those who have made it to the top of the crowd only care about being noticed; they do not look to see who it is they are attracting their attention. However, as stated by Solomon, the symbolic possessions are the only things differentiating those at the top of the crowd from the general crowd. Without their expensive cars or rare puppies, they would look just like the general public. 1 Reading response - Signs of Life How “Empowerment” Became Something for Women to Buy In the book Signs of Life by Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, according to Jia Tolemtimo's "How "Empowerment" Became Something for Women to Buy," women empowerment is connected to every aspect of women's lives and is mostly used in advertisement campaigns. Random products and activities are confused with empowerment. Women empowerment has been broadened to the political theory of power that viewed personal competency as limitless. Empowerment invokes power while signifying the lack of it (Tolentino, 181). Women empowerment does not have as much potential as it is assumed to have, in most cases; it is connected to personal beliefs such as not listening to men, or doing something that distinguishes one woman from the other. This version of empowerment is disempowering, and in most cases, those who talk about empowerment are already there. Empowerment has become marketable in ad campaigns, just like a woman's body. Ad campaigns sell the idea of women empowerment by introducing aspects in women's lives that make them different from traditional women. In my opinion, I believe that women's empowerment has been used in different ways other than what it is supposed to mean. Empowerment is mainly spoken by wealthy women who are already at their greatest power and not those who really need it. It is, therefore, not aimed at improving the lives of women but promoting different aspects such as body weight, beauty, and wealth. Women empowerment is for those with enough power on their plate, and those who really need it are not granted the opportunity to get it. 1 Reading response - Signs of Life Subaru’s Campaign Strategy In the book Signs of Life by Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, "How Subarus came to Be Seen as Cars for Lesbians" by Alex Mayyasi, he explains how the company used LGBT in its campaigns as a way of turning the marketing outcome. Companies interpret the behavior of their customers in order to come up with a marketing strategy that would attract customers. That is exactly what Subaru did; it interpreted the behavior of its lesbian customers and came up with an Ad campaign that can attract the attention of all its customers. Homosexuality had just been introduced legally into the constitution, but most people were still not familiar with it. At this time, gay-friendly campaigns were limited to the fashion and alcohol industries. At the introduction of the campaign, many people pointed fingers at the company, although the sales increased rapidly. With a closer look into the issue, Subaru realized that all the criticism and threats to boycott the company's cars were coming from people who have never been customers at Subaru (Mayyasi, 186). In my opinion, it is clear that the introduction of LGBT in the world of advertisements turned the tables. It brought out a new point of view to every aspect of life and promoted an understanding of the things that were earlier ignored and criticized. Embracing homosexuality was a brave step for Subaru, and it did not only show support to the minority group but also promoted the company as one that understood the needs of its customers. Those who threatened to boycott and criticized the strategy were believed to have not bought any Subaru products. It is true that those people who discourage and criticize change are mostly those with less information about what the change means to their environment. That is exactly what happened to the automobile company. Essay #1: Consumer Culture Pages: 3-4, not including the works cited page Due: Rough draft (10 points) (Completed draft with works cited nage, no outlines or handwritten copies) Final draft (50 points) (uploaded on Canvas as a Word doc or PDF We have read selected texts in chapters 1 and 2 of Signs of Life in the USA, examining our consumer culture and advertising. Objectives: For this assignment, we will determine the meaning of the signs images, objects, and forms of behavior) in the marketplace synthesizing multiple sources. Prompt: Using at least 3 of the texts from chapters 1 and 2 that we've read and discussed in class, choose ONE of the essay propositions below and center your thesis on the underlined sentence below: 1. Explain how “we” come to be products of our shared cultures, shaping our identity and consuming behavior. This option will focus on how identity is shaped by the products we consume. We will explore the signs images, objects, forms of behavior) of our consuming behavior toward a product and how these products determine our identity and encourage the cycle of consumerism. a. First, choose a product, such as car, clothing, gym membership, and identify how that product speaks to our identity(s). b. Next, examine how marketers shape these identities by the way they advertise them. c. You may need to watch some commercials or view ads in magazines, online, or in newspapers. Then, analyze how these adverts encourage our consuming behavior by what these products/identities say about our society and what it means to be an American. 2. Analyzing a trend, a style, a fad, or a group of advertisements on the same product (e.g. cars, razors, clothes, etc.) and how it speaks to our cultural mythologies. This option will focus on cultural mythologies (i.e. value system or ideologies) by examining the signs (images, objects, and forms of behavior) of a trend, style, fad, or group of advertisements. a. First, identify the trend, style, fad, or group of advertisements on a single type of product. b. Next, analyze how the signs reflect a value system/ideology in our society. In other words, explore what that value is and what that says about us as a society. C. Then, discuss how this value system guides our behavior (consuming behavior, attitude about others, stereotypes, etc.) and shapes our worldviews. Directions: This essay will follow the general structure of an introduction, body, and conclusion with a clearly stated thesis statement. When citing the authors from the textbook, be sure to adequately introduce the text(s) you will be using to support your points by author's full name, title of work in quotations, and a brief summary of the text as it relates to the quoted passage. Use proper in-text citations for textual support and format the essay using MLA guidelines that includes a works cited page for all borrowed material from the textbook as well as any outside source you used. 1 LAURENCE SHAMES The More Factor 1 the A bumper sticker popular in the 1980s read, "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." In this selection from The Hunger for More: Search ing for Values in an Age of Greed (1989). Laurence Shames shows how e great American hunger for more-more toys, more land, more opportunities is an essential part of our history and character, stem ming from the frontier era when the horizon alone seemed the only limit to American desire. Shames is both a fiction author and journal- Ist who has contributed to such publications as Playboy, Vanity Fair Manhattan, inc., and Esquire. Americans have always been optimists, and optimists have always liked to speculate. In Texas in the 1880s, the speculative instrument of choice was towns, and there is no tale more American than this. What people would do was buy up enormous tracts of parched and vacant land, 1. lay out a Main Street, nail together some wooden sidewalks, and start slapping up buildings. One of these buildings would be called the Grand Hotel and would have a saloon complete with swinging doors. Another might be dubbed the New Academy or the Opera House. The developers would erect a flagpole and name a church, and once the workmen had packed up and moved on, the towns would be as empty as the sky. But no matter. The speculators, next, would hire people to pass out hand- bills in the Eastern and Midwestern cities, tracts limning the advantages of relocation to "the Athens of the South" or "the new plains Jerusalem." When persuasion failed, the builders might resort to bribery, paying people's moving costs and giving them houses, in exchange for nothing but a pledge to stay until a certain census was taken or a certain inspection made. Once the nose count was completed, people were free to move on, and there was in fact a contingent of folks who made their living by keeping a cabin on skids and dragging it for pay from one town to another. The speculators' idea, of course, was to lure the railroad. If one could cre- are a convincing semblance of a town, the railroad might come through it. and a real town would develop, making the speculators staggeringly rich. By these devices a man named Sanborn once owned Amarillo.¹ For a fuller account of railroad-related land speculation in Texas, see F. Stanley, Story of the Texas Panhandle Railroads (Borger. Tex. : Hess Publishing Co., 1976). 76Laurence Shames/The More Factor 77 But railroad tracks are narrow and the state of Texas is very, very wide. s For every Wichita Falls or Lubbock there were a dozen College Mounds or Belchervilles, bleached, unpeopled burgs that receded quietly into the dust, taking with them large amounts of speculators' money. Still, the speculators kept right on bucking the odds and depositing empty towns in the middle of nowhere. Why did they do it? Two reasons-reasons that might be said to summarize the central fact of American economic his- tory and that go a fair way toward explaining what is perhaps the central strand of the national character. The first reason was simply that the possible returns were so enormous as to partake of the surreal, to create a climate in which ordinary logic and prudence did not seem to apply. In a boom like that of real estate when the railroad barreled through, long shots that might pay one hundred thousand to one seemed worth a bet. The second reason, more pertinent here, is that there was a presump- tion that America would keep on booming-if not forever, then at least longer than it made sense to worry about. There would always be another gold rush, another Homestead Act, another oil strike. The next generation would always ferret out opportunities that would be still more lavish than any that had gone before. America was those opportunities. This was an article not just of faith, but of strategy. You banked on the next windfall, you staked your hopes and even your self-esteem on it, and this led to a national turn of mind that might usefully be thought of as the habit of more. A century, maybe two centuries, before anyone had heard the term baby boomer, much less yuppie, the habit of more had been instilled as the operative truth among the economically ambitious. The habit of more seemed to sug- gest that there was no such thing as getting wiped out in America. A fortune lost in Texas might be recouped in Colorado. Funds frittered away on grazing land where nothing grew might flood back in as silver. There was always a second chance, or always seemed to be, in this land where growth was destiny and where expansion and purpose were the same. The key was the frontier, not just as a matter of acreage, but as idea. Vast, 10 varied, rough as rocks, America was the place where one never quite came to the end. Ben Franklin explained it to Europe even before the Revolutionary War had finished: America offered new chances to those "who, in their own Countries, where all the Lands [were] fully occupied... could never [emerge] from the poor Condition wherein they were born."3 So central was this awareness of vacant space and its link to economic promise that Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who set the tone for much of the twentieth century's understanding of the American past, would write that it was "not the constitution, but free land... [that] made the democratic 2T. Lindsay Baker, Ghost Towns of Texas (Norman, Okla: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986). Benjamin Franklin, "Information to Those Who Would Remove to America." in The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 242.78 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS type of society in America. -4 Good laws mattered, an accountable govern- ment mattered; ingenuity and hard work mattered. But those things were, so to speak, an overlay on the natural, geographic America that was simply there, and whose vast and beckoning possibilities seemed to generate the ambition and the sometimes reckless liberty that would fill it. First and foremost, it was open space that provided "the freedom of the individual to rise under condi- tions of social mobility."5 Open space generated not just ambition, but metaphor. As early as 1835, Tocqueville was extrapolating from the fact of America's emptiness to the observation that "no natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man." Nor was any limit placed on what he might accomplish, since, in that heyday of the Protestant ethic, a person's rewards were taken to be quite strictly pro- portionate to his labors. Frontier; opportunity; more. This has been the American trinity from the very start. The frontier was the backdrop and also the raw material for the streak of economic booms. The booms became the goad and also the justifi- cation for the myriad gambles and for Americans' famous optimism. The opti- mism, in turn, shaped the schemes and visions that were sometimes noble, sometimes appalling, always bold. The frontier, as reality and as symbol, is what has shaped the American way of doing things and the American sense of what's worth doing. But there has been one further corollary to the legacy of the frontier, with its promise of ever-expanding opportunities: Given that the goal - a realis- tic goal for most of our history-was more, Americans have been somewhat backward in adopting values, hopes, ambitions that have to do with things other than more. In America, a sense of quality has lagged far behind a sense of scale. An ideal of contentment has yet to take root in soil traditionally more hospitable to an ideal of restless striving. The ethic of decency has been upstaged by the ethic of success. The concept of growth has been applied almost exclusively to things that can be measured, counted, weighed. And the hunger for those things that are unmeasurable but fine-the sorts of accom- plishment that cannot be undone by circumstance or a shift in social fashion, the kind of serenity that cannot be shattered by tomorrow's headline-has gone largely unfulfilled, and even unacknowledged. 2 If the supply of more went on forever, perhaps that wouldn't matter very 15 much. Expansion could remain a goal unto itself, and would continue to 4 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Melbourne, Fla.: Krieger, 1976 freprint of 1920 edition]). 293. Sibid., 266. Tocqueville, Democracy in America.Laurence Shames / The More Factor 79 generate a value system based on bulk rather than on nuance, on quantities of money rather than on quality of life, on "progress" itself rather than on a sense of what the progress was for. But what if, over time, there was less more to be had? That is the essential situation of America today. Let's keep things in proportion: The country is not running out of wealth, drive, savvy, or opportunities. We are not facing imminent ruin, and neither panic nor gloom is called for. But there have been ample indications over the past two decades that we are running out of more. Consider productivity growth-according to many economists, the single most telling and least distortable gauge of changes in real wealth. From 1947 to 1965, productivity in the private sector (adjusted, as are all the following figures, for inflation) was advancing, on average, by an annual 3.3 percent. This means, simply, that each hour of work performed by a specimen American worker contributed 3.3 cents worth or more to every American dollar every year; whether we saved it or spent it, that increment went into a national kitty of ever-enlarging aggregate wealth. Between 1965 and 1972. however, the "more-factor" decreased to 2.4 percent a year, and from 1972 to 1977 it slipped further, to 1.6 percent. By the early 1980s, productivity growth was at a virtual standstill, crawling along at 0.2 percent for the five years end- ing in 1982.7 Through the middle years of the 1980s, the numbers rebounded somewhat but by then the gains were being neutralized by the gargantuan carrying costs on the national debt. Inevitably, this decline in the national stockpile of more held conse- quences for the individual wallet. During the 1950s, Americans' average hourly earnings were humping ahead at a gratifying 2.5 percent each year. By the late seventies, that figure stood just where productivity growth had come to stand, at a dispiriting 0.2 cents on the dollar. By the first half of the eighties, the Reagan "recovery" notwithstanding, real hourly wages were actually mov- ing backward-declining at an average annual rate of 0.3 percent. Compounding the shortage of more was an unfortunate but crucial demo- graphic fact. Real wealth was nearly ceasing to expand just at the moment when the members of that unprecedented population bulge known as the baby boom were entering what should have been their peak years of income expansion. A working man or woman who was thirty years old in 1949 could expect to see his or her real earnings burgeon by 63 percent by age forty. In 7These figures are taken from the Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of the President, February 1984, 267. For a lucid and readable account of the meaning and implications of our reservoir of red ink, see Lawrence Malkin, The National Debt (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1987). Through no fault of Malkin's, many of his numbers are already obsolete, but his explanation of who owes what to whom, and what it means, remains sound and even entertaining in a bleak way. sort of The figures in this paragraph and the next are from "The Average Guy Takes it on the Chin," New York Times, 13 July 1986, sec. 3. 2080 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS 1959, a thirty-year-old could still look forward to a gain of 49 percent by his or her fortieth birthday. But what about the person who turned thirty in 19737 By the time that worker turned forty, his or her real earnings had shrunk by a percentage point. For all the blather about yuppies with their beach houses, BMWs, and radic chio salads, and even factoring in those isolated tens of thousands making ludicrous sums in consulting firms or on Wall Street, the fact is that between 1979 and 1983 real earnings of all Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four actually declined by 14 percent. 10 The New York Times, well before the stock market crash put the kibosh on eighties confidence, summed up the implications of this downturn by observing that "for millions of bread- winners, the American dream is becoming the impossible dream." Now, it is not our main purpose here to detail the ups and downs of the American economy. Our aim, rather, is to consider the effects of those ups and downs on people's goals, values, sense of their place in the world. What hap- pens at that shadowy juncture where economic prospects meld with personal choice? What sorts of insights and adjustments are called for so that economic ups and downs can be dealt with gracefully? Fact one in this connection is that, if America's supply of more is in fact diminishing, American values will have to shift and broaden to fill the gap where the expectation of almost automatic gains used to be. Something more durable will have to replace the fat but fragile bubble that had been getting frailer these past two decades and that finally popped- a tentative, partial pop-on October 19. 1987. A different sort of growth-ultimately, a growth in responsibility and happiness-will have to fulfill our need to believe that our possibilities are still expanding. A The transition to that new view of progress will take some fancy step- ping, because, at least since the end of World War II, simple economic growth has stood, in the American psyche, as the best available substitute for the literal frontier. The economy has been the frontier. Instead of more space, we have had more money. Rather than measuring progress in terms of geograph- ical expansion, we have measured it by expansion in our standard of living. Economics has become the metaphor on which we pin our hopes of open space and second chances. The poignant part is that the literal frontier did not pass yesterday: it has 25 not existed for a hundred years. But the frontier's promise has become so much a part of us that we have not been willing to let the concept die. We have kept the frontier mythology going by invocation, by allusion, by hype. It is not a coincidence that John F. Kennedy dubbed his political program the New Frontier. It is not mere linguistic accident that makes us speak of Frontiers of Science or of psychedelic drugs as carrying one to Frontiers of Perception. We glorify fads and fashions by calling them Frontiers of Taste. 10see, for example, "The Year of the Yuppie," Newsweek, 31 December 1984, 16. -The Average Guy."Laurence Shames / The More Factor 81 Nuclear energy has been called the Last Frontier; solar energy has been called the Last Frontier. Outer space has been called the Last Frontier, the oceans have been called the Last Frontier. Even the suburbs, those blandest and least adventurous of places, have been wryly described as the crabgrass frontier. 12 What made all these usages plausible was their being linked to the image of the American economy as an endlessly fertile continent whose boundaries never need be reached, a domain that could expand in perpetuity, a gigantic playing field that would never run out of room and on which the game would get forever bigger and more filled with action. This was the frontier that would not vanish. It is worth noting that people in other countries (with the possible exception of that other America, Australia) do not talk about frontier this way. In Europe, and in most of Africa and Asia, "frontier" connotes, at worst, a place of barbed wire and men with rifles, and at best, a neutral junction where one changes currency while passing from one fixed system into another. Frontier, for most of the world's people, does not suggest growth, expanse, or opportunity. Sou For Americans, it does, and always has. This is one of the things that sets America apart from other places and makes American attitudes different from those of other people. It is why, from Bonanza to the Sierra Club, the notion or even the fantasy of empty horizons and untapped resources has always evoked in the American heart both passion and wistfulness. And it is why the fear that the economic frontier-our last, best version of the Wild West-may finally be passing creates in us not only money worries but also a crisis of morale and even of purpose. 3 It might seem strange to call the 1980s an era of nostalgia. The decade, after 30 all, has been more usually described in terms of coolness, pragmatism, and a blithe innocence of history. But the eighties, unawares, were nostalgic for fron- tiers; and the disappointment of that nostalgia had much to do with the time's greed, narrowness, and strange want of joy. The fear that the world may not be a big enough playground for the full exercise of one's energies and yearn- Ings, and worse, the fear that the playground is being fenced off and will no longer expand these are real worries and they have had consequences. The eighties were an object lesson in how people play the game when there is an awful and unspoken suspicion that the game is winding down. It was ironic that the yuppies came to be so reviled for their vaunting ambi- tion and outsized expectations, as if they'd invented the habit of more, when in fact they'd only inherited it the way a fetus picks up an addiction in the womb. 12 with the suburbs again taking on a sort of fascination, this phrase was resurrected as the title of a 1985 book-Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America, by Kenneth T. Jackson (Oxford University Press).82 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS The craving was there in the national bloodstream, a remnant of the frontier, and the baby boomers, described in childhood as "the luckiest generation."13 found themselves, as young adults, in the melancholy position of wrestling with a two-hundred-year dependency on a drug that was now in short supply. nature True, the 1980s raised the clamor for more to new heights of shrillness. insistence, and general obnoxiousness, but this, it can be argued, was in the a final binge, the storm before the calm, America, though fighting the perception every inch of the way, was coming to realize that it was not a preordained part of the natural order that one should be richer every year. If it happened, that was nice. But who had started the flimsy and pernicious rumor that it was normal? READING THE TEXT 1. Summarize in a paragraph how, according to Shames, the frontier functions. as a symbol of American consciousness. 2. What does Shames mean when he says. "Open space generated not just ambition, but metaphor" (para. 12)? 3. What connections does Shames make between America's frontier history and consumer behavior? 4. Why does Shames term the 1980s "an era of nostalgia" (para. 30)? 5. Characterize Shames's attitude toward the American desire for more. How does his tone reveal his personal views on his subject? READING THE SIGNS 1. Shames asserts that Americans have been influenced by the frontier belief "that America would keep on booming" (para. 8). Do you feel that this belief continues to be influential into the twenty-first century? Write an essay arguing for your position. 2. Shames claims that, because of the desire for more, "the ethic of decency has been upstaged by the ethic of success" (para. 14). In class, form teams and debate the validity of Shames's claim. 3. CONNECTING TEXTS Read or review Steve McKevitt's "Everything Now" (p. 123). Using Maslow's hierarchy of needs (p. 126), write an essay illustrating, refut- ing, or complicating the proposition that "the hunger for more" is driven by the fact that "our needs have been fulfilled and so, for the first time ever, we have an economy that is almost entirely devoted to the business of satisfying our wants instead" (para. 3). 4. In an essay, argue for or refute the proposition that the "hunger for more" that Shames describes is a universal human trait, not simply an American one. 13Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). 15.JAMES A. ROBERTS The Treadmill of Consumption Once, "keeping up with the Joneses" was a neighborhood affair; now, thanks to modern mass media, it's a matter of "keeping up with the Kardashians" - that is, competing with the rich and famous in a never-ending spiral of status consumption. James A. Roberts's anal- ysis of the compulsion to signify "social power through conspicuous consumption” is a sobering read for anyone who has ever gone into debt just to have a snazzier cell phone, like GoldVish's million-dollar118 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS white-gold and diamond offering. A professor of marketing at Baylor University, Roberts is the author of Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don't Have in Search of Happiness We Can't Buy (2011), from which this selection is taken. sumer culture. We may not know our neighbors, but we feel compelled to Using material possessions to exhibit status is commonplace in today's con- make sure they know that we're people of value. As humans we rely on visual cues such as material possessions to convey our status to others and to ascer- tain the status of people we don't know. The quest for status symbols influ- ences both kids and adults, although the objects we choose to display may differ with age. (Cell phones may be an exception that spans all age groups.) For young people, cell phones are seen as necessities, not luxuries. A teen or even preteen without a cell phone feels set apart, on the outside looking in. This is in part because cell phones are a way to stay tightly connected with others (text messaging "blind," with cell phone in the pocket, is one of my favorites); however, cell phones are also important fashion statements and social props. For young people, cell phones are second only to cars as symbols of independence. Many teens see cell phones as an extension of their per- sonality, and phone manufacturers and service providers, knowing this, give them many options to express their inner selves - ways to personalize their ringtone, change their "wallpaper," and customize their "skin," for example, as well as add many apps and accessories. Adults, especially men, are also susceptible to the status appeal of cell phones. Researchers in the United Kingdom studied the use of cell phones after reading newspaper stories about nightclubs in South America that required patrons to check their phones at the door. Club managers found, the stories reported, that many checked phones were props- not working cell phones. To learn more about whether and how people were using their cell phones as social props, the researchers studied cell phone use in upscale pubs in the UK. What they found is most interesting: men and women used their cell phones in different manners. While women would leave their phone in their purse until they needed it, men were more likely to take their phone out of their pocket or briefcase and place it on the counter or table in view of all. Furthermore, like peacocks strutting with their plumage in full display to attract a mate, men spent more time tinkering with and displaying their phone when the number of men relative to women in the pub increased.¹ As long as consumers attempt to signal their social power through conspic- uous consumption, the levels required to make a visible statement of power will continue to rise. If person A buys a new car, person B has to buy a better car to compete; and then person A has to buy a boat as well-and so on. 10 PRY ¹John E. Lycett and Robin I. M. Dunbar, "Mobile Phones as Lekking Devices among Human Males," Human Nature 11, no. 1 (2000): 93-104. 12011030 E F SJames A. Roberts / The Treadmill of Consumption 119 But once basic needs are met there's no additional happiness with additional purchases. The process of moving ahead materially without any real gain in satisfaction is often called "the treadmill of consumption." That treadmill is a barrier to raising your level of happiness, because it causes you to quickly adapt to good things by taking them for granted. 5 Research has shown that humans are very flexible. We tend to get used to new circumstances in our lives-including financial circumstances, both good and bad-and we make such mental shifts quickly. Economic gains or losses do give us pleasure or pain, but the effects wear off quickly. When our situa- tion improves, having more money or possessions almost instantaneously becomes the new "normal." As our store of material possessions grows, so do our expectations. Many researchers have likened this process to drug addiction, where the addict continually needs more and more of the drug of choice to achieve an equivalent "high." This means that acquiring more possessions doesn't take us any closer to happiness; it just speeds up the treadmill. I regret to say that there is a great deal of evidence supporting the existence- and potential harm - of the treadmill of consumption. 15547 If the treadmill didn't exist, people with more possessions would be hap- pier than those "less fortunate" souls who own less. But this simply isn't the case. The "less fortunate" are, for the most part, just as happy as those with more stuff. Big purchases and the piling up of material possessions hold little sway over happiness. Probably the most discouraging proof for this statement can be found in the study of lottery winners. An integral component of the shiny-objects ethos is quick riches. What better way to catapult yourself past your neighbors than to strike it rich with the lottery, right? If you foresee noth- ing but a lifetime of fun and sun for lottery winners, you're wrong. A study of twenty winners found that they were no happier a few years after their good fortune; in fact, some were even less happy than before they bought their win- ning ticket.2 If the lottery can't pull us out of our current torpor, what hope is there for a raise at work, a flat-screen (plasma) television, an iPhone, or a new car (surely the new Lexus would be an exception)? wo lingia or eqrisus 100 ved Trobway.no2009 yd og vart jab odwolgood wo nadimi? Consuming for Status vari One important reason that consumers buy products is to satisfy social needs. Many of us spend a large proportion of our disposable income on so-called status items, and this trend is on the rise as we continue to embrace the shiny-objects ethos. "Wait a minute," some of you might be saying; "hasn't the current economic crisis stemmed the tide of status consumption?" My response to that question is that it never has in the past. Sure, we might mind 2Philip Brickman et al., "Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 8 (1978): 917-27.120 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS our financial p's and q's during the actual crisis, but we have always returned to our profligate ways once we've navigated our way through the economic You need look no further back than the early 2000s, when the Internet bubble burst and the stock market tanked. It wasn't long until our spend- ing picked up again, and with a renewed vengeance. That's precisely what brought us where we are today. Similar economic corrections in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s produced the same results: we tightened our financial belts only to loosen them when the clouds receded. It's really a lot like yo-yo diet. ing. Each time after we fall off the financial wagon we're a little worse off than the time before. Apparently as consumers we tend to suffer from short-term memory loss! 10 Pursuing materialistic ideals is a competitive and comparative process- hence the expression "keeping up with the Joneses." And today, with daily twenty-four/seven media coverage of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, our competition is no longer limited to our neighborhood. Bill and Melinda Gates and the sultan of Brunei have replaced Joe and Irma down the street as our points of reference. To achieve a position of social power or status, one must exceed this expanding community norm. Even the superrich aren't happy. There's always someone with a bigger home or fancier yacht-or, heaven for- bid, a prettier wife. Yes, we even use other humans as chattel in our attempt to secure our position in the social hierarchy! The result of all this social pos- turing is no end to our wants and little improvement in our satisfaction, despite an ever-increasing consumption of goods. And Madison Avenue knows it: after price, status is the principal theme of most advertising.ed Status consumption has been defined as "the motivational process by which individuals strive to improve their social standing through conspicuous consumption of consumer products that confer or symbolize status to the indi- vidual and to surrounding significant others." It is our attempt as consumers to gain the respect, consideration, and envy from those around us. Status con- sumption is the heart and soul of the consumer culture, which revolves around our attempts to signal our comparative degree of social power through con- spicuous consumption. If you don't buy into status consumption yourself, you certainly know people who do. They go by many names, but "social climbers" and "status seekers" will do for now. Climbers and seekers work to surround themselves with visible evidence of the superior rank they claim or aspire to. Most of us, to some degree, are concerned with our social status, and we try to make sure others are aware of it as well. To Status consumption began in the United States as a way for members of the upper crust to flaunt their wealth to each other. Over the past cen- tury the practice has trickled down to the lower rungs of the economic ladder. 3Jacqueline Eastman et al., "The Relationship between Status Consumption and Materi alism: A Cross Cultural Comparison of Chinese, Mexican, and American Students," Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, Winter 1997, 52-66, 58.James A. Roberts / The Treadmill of Consumption 121 Can You Hear Me Now? I thought I had found the ultimate status symbol when I came across Motorola's new $2,000 Aura cell phone. The avant-garde Aura sports 700-plus individual components, a stainless-steel housing, and a front plate that takes the manufacturer a month to create. Add to this list the world's first handset with a circular display (great color and res- olution!), a sixty-two-carat sapphire crystal lens, a multimedia player, stereo Bluetooth, and much, much more. My amazement over Motorola's Aura was short-lived, however. I lost interest when I heard about the $1 million-yes, $1 million-cell phone from Gold Vish (a Swiss company). The phone is made of eighteen- carat white gold and is covered with diamonds. Bluetooth? Of course. How about a two-gigabyte memory, eight-megapixel camera, MP3 player, worldwide FM radio, and e-mail access? Not to worry if a million is a bit rich for you: Goldvish has made available several other phones for around $25,000-no doubt delivered in plain brown-paper packaging to avoid any embarrassment associated with buying a cheaper model.4 People are willing to go into debt to buy certain products and brands - let's say a $2,500 Jimmy Choo handbag -because these status symbols represent power in our consumer culture. Cars, for example, are an expensive but easy way to tell the world you've made it; there's no mistaking which are the most expensive. The problem is that nearly everyone else is upgrading to the latest model as well, so no real increase in status occurs - another example of the treadmill of consumption. Fortunately-note the irony there - our consumer culture, with its vast array of products, allows us many other opportunities to confer status upon ourselves. Media mogul Ted Turner put it this way: "Life is a game. Money is how we keep score."5 BRY: Status consumers are willing to pay premium prices for products that are perceived to convey status and prestige. A high-end Patek Philippe watch is a good example of a product that is - and is blatantly marketed as - a quintessential status symbol. One of Patek's advertising slogans is, "You never really own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next gen- eration." Trust me; you're buying it for yourself. Despite the manufactur- er's claims to the contrary, a Patek Philippe does not keep better time than the myriad of cheaper alternatives on the market; on the contrary, it serves 4Darren Murph, "Motorola Intros Avant-Garde $2,000 Aura, Markets It Like a Rolex," October 21, 2008, www.endgadget.com, accessed October 21, 2008. 5Ted Turner quote, www.quotegarden.com, accessed November 15, 2009.122 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS primarily as an unambiguous symbol of status. To many people, owning a Patek forgone a golden opportunity to do good with the money spent so lavishly signals that you've made it. To me, however, it sends the signal that you've a very expensive watch. It's a zero-sum game no matter how much you make. And, of course, Patek Philippe watches are only one of a myriad of exam- ples I could use to document our preoccupation with status consumption. What about Lucky Jeans, bling (it's shiny), Hummer automobiles (maybe one of the more blatant cries for help), iPhones, fifty-two-inch plasma TVs, $3,000 Chihuahua lap dogs (think Paris Hilton), McMansions, expensive rims for your car tires, anything couture, Gulfstream jets, Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister clothes (for teens and preteens)-even drinking water! No consumer product category has been left untouched. Even the most banal, everyday products have been branded-think $2,000 fountain pens. 15 Today, status is conveyed more often through ownership of status prod- Is ucts than through personal, occupational, or family reputation. This is particu- larly true in large, impersonal metropolitan areas, where people can no longer depend on their behavior or reputation to convey their status and position in society. on money READING THE TEXT 1. Define in your own words what Roberts means by "the treadmill of consumption." 100 100 m 15. 2. How have the mass media affected the desire for status symbols, according to Roberts? 3. What explanation does Roberts give for his claim that economic downturns have a minimal effect on the pursuit of material goods? 4. In your own words, explain Roberts's concept of the "shiny-objects ethos" (para. 7). Obqind READING THE SIGNS 1. In your journal, explore what items count as status symbols in your own circle of friends (these do not need to be the sort of high-end items that Roberts mentions but could be particular brands of jeans, handbags, shoes, or elec- tronic devices). What appeal do these items have for you? Does acquiring them make you happy? If so, how long does that feeling last? If not, why not? 2. CONNECTING TEXTS is irre- ethos" Roberts assumes that the treadmill of consumption versible, that we will inevitably "continue to embrace the shiny-objects (para. 8). Discuss this assumption in class. If you agree, what evidence can you advance to support Roberts's claim? If you do not, what economic or social evidence can you find to refute his belief? Use the class discussion as a springboard for your own essay on this topic. To develop your ideas, you might consult Laurence Shames's "The More Factor" (p. 76) and Steve McKevitt's "Everything Now" (p. 123). smurtors O HoquRichard Huchings/PhotoEdit Jon Mooallem / The Self-Storage Self READING THE SIGNS her in some other kind of activity? 1. Why might girls enjoy playing with a Barbie who shops rather than engaging JON MOOALLEM The Self-Storage Self 103 2. Do you think that having Barbie use a credit card to purchase cosmetics has an effect on the girls who play with the doll? If so, what are those effects? - The Great Recession emptied a lot of homes as their owners were cast into the abyss of foreclosure, but in doing so it filled a lot of storage facilities with the piles of things-some of them mere junk, some of them priceless possessions that most of us accumulate in our lives. In this feature article for the New York Times Magazine, Jon Mooallem visits some of the ordinary folk who have found themselves needing self-storage units in the wake of broken careers, broken engagements, broken marriages, or simply disrupted lives. And the things they hold on to, paying sizable fees to store stuff that often appears to be little better than trash, may be surprising - until we remember that our possessions are an important measure of our lives. Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and is the author of Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story about Looking at People Looking at Animals in America (2013). Statewide Self Storage spreads out near Highway 4 in Antioch, Calif., a sub- urban community between San Francisco and Sacramento. It's a phalanx of long, low-slung buildings separated by wide driveways and lined with red doors. The complex houses 453 storage units and is wedged between a car dealership and a Costco. It was the last afternoon in May, and the sun seared all the concrete and corrugated steel. Statewide's gate opened, and a man named Jimmy Sloan made for the far corner of the property. Sloan, who dresses and styles his hair like James Dean, is a part-owner of the Harley-Davidson repair shop nearby. He rolled open the door of a 10-by-30-foot unit, the largest Statewide offers. It was his ex-fiancée's but still leased under his name, and packed with, among other things, a particleboard shelving unit, some wicker items, a microwave oven, a box labeled "Mickey's Hornet Neon," a floor lamp, a television and a wooden child's bed standing on its end on a desk. It was hard to tell how deep104 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS said. the inventory went. "She hasn't seen most of this stuff in six years," Sloan For five years, he stored most of it above the garage of his house. But he had to borrow on the house to keep the bike shop running, and last year, feeling in over his head, he opted to sell the house and downsize before he zero-didn't make a penny on it," he told me with the kind of ascetic pride fell behind and risked foreclosure. "Pretty much got out of that house at that wouldn't have made any sense before our economically crippled era. Sloan's fiancée insisted he rent a storage unit and move everything over the garage into it for her. So he did. Then they split up. He kept paying the rent on the unit for almost a year - $217 every month. But Sloan finally lost his patience and told her: "You know, we're not even together anymore. This stuff's gotta go." Everything here, he told me, was worth less than what he had paid to store it. "Storage is always a bad investment, any way you look at it," he said. The rent was her responsibility now. But the former future Mrs. Jimmy Sloan never paid Statewide. By now, it seemed likely that the managers would end up auctioning off the contents of the unit in accordance with state law. That was fine with Jimmy Sloan. But he wanted to get in first and make sure that his late father's collection of hunting knives and die-cast toy tractors, which he'd lost track of, weren't mixed in there. And so, to regain access, he'd just walked into the office and paid State- wide what was owed: $460. He'd counted out the cash unresentfully, like a man retrieving his dog from a neighbor's house for the 10th or 11th time. "That stuff is Happy Meal junk," he now said, pointing to a see-through 5 Rubbermaid bin in the storage unit's brickwork of boxes. It was full of brightly colored plastic toys and a pair of hot pink sunglasses that belonged to his ex-fiancée's children. "The kids broke it, played with it once. It wasn't even for Christmas," he said. O bl Sloan had not started rummaging for his dad's knife and tractor collec- tions in earnest; he was still pecking at the concretion's surface, not tunneling into it. But already he'd found a Marilyn Monroe poster and a souvenir road sign for James Dean Boulevard and set them near the door. They were his, from his old living room. He had forgotten about them and wanted to take them home. Soon, he peeled back the top of a huge bin. Inside, I could see a VHS cassette of "American Pie" and a black-and-white toy football with the logo of the Oakland Raiders. "Look at that!" Sloan said suddenly. "A Raider football!" He put it next to the poster and the road sign. Apparently it, too, was just appealing enough to hang on to. The Self Storage Association, a nonprofit trade group, estimates that since the onset of the recession, occupancies at storage facilities nationwide are down, on average, about 2 or 3 percent. It's not a cataclysmic drop but enough to disorient an industry that has always considered itself recession-resistant, if not outright recession-proof. But the collapsing economy created an oppor- tunity, and in some cases an ultimatum, for Americans to reassess the raft of obligations and the loads of stuff we accumulated before things went wrong. и ro ir b T t106 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS seven million American households now have at least one piece of furniture in their storage units. Furniture is the most commonly stored thing in America. The marketing consultant Derek Naylor told me that people stockpile fur- niture while saving for bigger or second homes but then, in some cases, "they I don't want to clutter up their new home with all the things they have in stor- age." So they buy new, nicer things and keep paying to store the old ones anyway. Clem Tang, a spokesman for Public Storage, explains: "You say, 1 paid $1,000 for this table a couple of years ago. I'm not getting rid of it, or selling it for 10 bucks at a garage sale. That's like throwing away $1,000." It's not a surprising response in a society replacing things at such an accelerated rate - this inability to see our last table as suddenly worthless, even though we've just been out shopping for a new one as though it were. "My parents were Depression babies," Litton told me, "and what they taught me was, it's the accumulation of things that defines you as an American, and to throw anything away was being wasteful." The self-storage industry reconciles these opposing values: paying for storage is, paradoxically, thrifty. "That propensity toward consumption is what fueled the world's economy," Litton said. The self-storage industry almost had to expand; it grew along with the volume of container ships reaching our ports. By 2007, a full 15 percent of customers told the Self Storage Association they were storing items that they "no longer need or want." It was the third-most- popular use for a unit and was projected to grow to 25 percent of renters the following year. The line between necessity and convenience -between temporary life event and permanent lifestyle - totally blurred. "There's a lot of junk stored in our properties," Ronald L. Havner Jr., Public Storage's chief executive, told a symposium in New York. But really, there's no way of know- ing exactly who is still [storing their possessions], what they've got locked up and how they feel about it - and, more important, how those complicated feelings might change if the psychology of the American consumer is substan- tially reshaped in a recovery. Tom Litton, for example, still keeps four storage units himself, at two facil- 15 ities, all of them 10-by-30 units. I asked what's inside. "I have a canoe, I have a vending machine, I have a drill press," Litton began. His old lawn mower was in one. (He got a bigger, riding lawn mower when he bought a ranch in wine country.) "I've got some of my old clothes that I probably wouldn't wear any- way," he continued, and some trophies from college. "I also have some old cassette tapes that I produced." The cassettes are like audiobooks, he explained - tutorials on how to get into the storage industry and succeed. He made them before the storage-facility building boom ended a couple of years ago. "They didn't sell," Litton said, "so they're all in storage now." Trac One afternoon in late May, a woman slouched inside one of Statewide's narrow hallways, reorganizing the innards of her unit. She said her name was Elizabeth high-self- no last name given, since, as she told me, "this is not a esteem moment." Most everything here belonged to Elizabeth's parents, who entered assisted living last year, and she needed to clear it out to cut expenses. — She wa it was a she tol Ba of man bit of her ov rear w dead, consp S each hallw hund went Potte inwa out, boxe rent Ford she indu and vac ing ind ave eve ing ste m SC er a br sh e S los," Sloan puse. But last year, before he house at tic pride pled era. over the 7 every we're not cold me, s a bad nsibility w now, it tents of But he hunting mixed in d State- y, like a ne. through 5 brightly d to his even for collec- neling ir road ere his, to take uld see ith the Raider O, was t since de are nough istant, oppor- raft of vrong. Jon Mooallem / The Self-Storage Self - 105 We've been making difficult decisions, and for a lot of us, that has involved rolling up the door of a storage unit and carting property in or out. The storage industry's expansion in the first flush years of this decade was both enabled by, and helped enable, the extreme consumption that defined America then. The people coming through the gates now are defining who we will be when this turmoil is over. The first modern self-storage facilities opened in the 1960s, and for two decades storage remained a low-profile industry, helping people muddle through what it terms "life events." For the most part, storage units were meant to temporarily absorb the possessions of those in transition: moving, marrying or divorcing, or dealing with a death in the family. And the late 20th century turned out to be a golden age of life events in America, with peaking divorce rates and a rush of second- and third-home buying. At the same time, clutter in their parents' basements. the first baby boomers were left to face down the caches of heirlooms and Across America, from 2000 to 2005, upward of 3,000 self-storage facili- ties went up every year. Somehow, Americans managed to fill that brand-new empty space. It raises a simple question: where was all that stuff before? "A lot of it just comes down to the great American propensity toward accumulating stuff," [industry veteran Tom] Litton explained. Between 1970 and 2008, real disposable personal income per capita doubled, and by 2008 we were spend- ing nearly all of it-all but 2.7 percent - each year. Meanwhile, the price of much of what we were buying plunged. Even by the early '90s, American fam- ilies had, on average, twice as many possessions as they did 25 years earlier. By 2005, according to the Boston College sociologist Juliet B. Schor, the aver- age consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and a half days. Schor has been hacking intrepidly through the jumble of available data quantifying the last decade's consumption spree. Between 1998 and 2005, she found, the number of vacuum cleaners coming into the country every year more than doubled. The number of toasters, ovens and coffeemakers tri- pled. A 2006 U.C.L.A. study found middle-class families in Los Angeles "bat- tling a nearly universal overaccumulation of goods." Garages were clogged. Toys and outdoor furniture collected in the corners of backyards. "The home- goods storage crisis has reached almost epic proportions," the authors of the study wrote. A new kind of customer was being propelled, hands full, into self-storage. Consider our national furniture habit. In an unpublished paper, Schor writes that “anecdotal evidence suggests an Ikea effect."" We've spent more on furniture even as prices have dropped, thereby amassing more of it. The amount entering the United States from overseas doubled between 1998 and 2005, reaching some 650 million pieces a year. Comparing Schor's data with E.P.A. data on municipal solid waste shows that the rate at which we threw out old furniture rose about one-thirteenth as fast during roughly the same period. In other words, most of that new stuff- and any older furniture it displaced is presumably still knocking around somewhere. In fact, some 10Jon Mooallem / The Self-Storage Self 107 she told me. "Whatever." She was keeping an eye out for particular family memorabilia, but otherwise it was a long, beleaguering purge. "Just stuff? Like my mother's kitchen stuff?" Boxed haphazardly inside the closet-size space was, as she put it, 53 years of married life. An empty pill bottle and an egg carton lingered on the little bit of visible floor space. "I got rid of all the furniture," Elizabeth said, except her own drafting table, which, she pointed out, had wound up against the rear wall. She was an architect, accomplished but out of work ("Architecture is conspicuously architect-ish methodology. dead, dead, dead, dead," she explained) and was attacking this project with a She had brought with her dozens of new, perfectly uniform white boxes, each bearing the Harry Potter logo in one of several colors. They lined the hallway behind her, still flattened. "When the books come out, there's just hundreds and hundreds of these boxes at every bookstore," she said. "I just went around and got them." She repacked and erected a tidy column of Harry Potter boxes in one corner of the unit. She turned a few others, tops folded inward, into a kind of bookshelf. "This was when The Half-Blood Prince came out," Elizabeth said. "They stack really nicely." She was going to transfer these boxes, full of the few things worth saving, into a storage unit she recently rented in a nearby town. That unit housed most of what Elizabeth owned. Forced to leave her parents' old house and unable to afford a place of her own, she had moved in with a friend about eight months ago. As far as the storage industry was concerned, then, all the contemporaneous chaos of Elizabeth's and her parents' lives ultimately amounted to a wash: one old unit was being vacated, one new one was being rented. In fact, since last year, owners around the country have reported quicken- ing rates of both move-outs and move-ins, making any occupancy rate-the industry's fundamental yardstick-feel kind of arbitrary, like the momentary averaging-out of a blur of activity, with no single, dominant trend (or maybe even logic) behind it. At Statewide, for example, those like Elizabeth rent- ing smaller units-traditionally the backbone of the business - have been steadily leaving. "All I hear is, 'I can't afford it anymore," says Joe Dopart, who manages Statewide along with his daughter Amy and his wife, Evie, a retired schoolteacher. At the same time, though, Statewide's larger units - mostly empty for years-are now completely full. "Every single one, practically, has a foreclosure in it," Amy told me. Others were being rented by endangered businesses, like a coffee shop and a tea room whose owners were forced to shutter their storefronts in Antioch's struggling historic downtown and move everything into storage while they plotted their next moves. The upshot, while this traffic runs both ways in the background, is that 20 Statewide has remained about 88 percent full-about two or three points lower than last summer, right in line with the national estimate. But that may obscure a more meaningful shift. By shaking up the composition of renters, and their reasons for renting, the recession could be quietly tilting the charac- ter of American storage closer to what it was originally: a pragmatic solution108 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS to a sudden loss of space, rather than a convenient way of dealing with, or putting off dealing with, an excess of stuff. Of course, some people don't fit entirely into one category or the other. I found people who had been foreclosed on at most of the storage places I hung around at, and I met many more who were forced to walk away from places they were renting. Among them were two teenage brothers, Luis Jaramillo and Nikolas Aceves, in the city of Stockton, an hour from Sacramento, whose fam- ily was about to scatter to relatives' houses in surrounding towns. And Jason Williams, a 38-year-old father of three who was filling a unit with furniture before he and his family moved in with his stepmother. On one of my first mornings at Statewide, Evie Dopart introduced me to Danielle Johnson, who worked at Dollar Tree and was also studying criminal justice. After her husband left to serve in Iraq, she couldn't afford the rent on their house in Oakland. So she locked everything but her clothes and school- books in storage and moved in with her grandma. "It's O.K.," she assured me, "I'll get another one someday." She meant another house. That was a year ago. Her husband was now stationed in Kentucky, but if Johnson pulled out of school to join him, she would have to repay her student loans immediately and would end up with nothing. "Well," she told me, "I'm just going to finish, and I'll have my degree. He can wait." She seemed incapable of not putting a good face on the situation. "Actually," she told me and Evie, "it's kind of cool living with Grandma. Home-cooked meals are awesome, and no one makes them like Grandma does. "Your family's Italian, right?" Evie asked. "No, we're redneck, though," Johnson said with a big smile. "And I mean rednecks make some really good food. Gosh! My grandma's biscuits and gravy are screaming. Virtually no one I asked, at any level of the business, took seriously the 25 idea that this recession would produce a sea change in who uses self-storage and why. In an industry whose freewheeling success has been so closely tied to the evolving character and prosperity of our society, it can be hard to even talk about storage's future without getting philosophical or patriotic. libsam "I really think there's a spirit that things will turn around," Jim Chiswell, a Virginia-based consultant to the industry, told me. "I believe that my children — and both my children are proving it already- they're going to have more at the end of their lifetimes, and more success, than I've had. And so will their children. I don't believe the destiny of this country as a beacon of freedom and hope is over. And I believe there will be more growth, and more people wanting to have things and collect things." Tom Litton put it another way: "The good news is that your age group" - I'm 31 - "has the same pro- pensity for accumulating crap that I have. You guys got introduced to it in col- lege, and you actually think you really need storage. You see storage the way that we all see cable and Internet access. Maybe the recession really is making American consumers serious about scaling back, about decluttering and de-leveraging. But there are upward of 51, nur all i tali: tou life as Wa sha in op no the int go ax W un of W h h a h n li V a H E 2CHO Jon Mooallem / The Self-Storage Self 109 51,000 storage facilities across this country-more than seven times the number of Starbucks. Storage is part of our national infrastructure now. And all it is, is empty space: something Americans have always colonized and capi- talized on in good times, and retreated into to regroup when things soured. It's tough to imagine a product more malleable to whatever turns our individual life stories take, wherever we're collectively heading. But where are we now? Of all the storage units I toured, one sticks out as being most emblematic of this particular moment. It belonged to Terry Wallace, a 59-year-old veteran with white streaks in his hair and a broad, shaggy moustache who, when I stumbled across his 10-by-30 at a Storage PRO in Stockton, was sitting in a leather office chair, working at his desk under the open door, like a notary in a storefront. Some open mail and a Herman Wouk novel were pushed aside, and the desk was covered with stacks of quarters, the ones celebrating the 50 states. Wallace was sorting them, state by state, got all 50." Then he invited me in. into empty prescription-pill bottles. "I've got 'em all," he said, astounded. "I've A folded-up Nordic Track leaned against the desk, and a bucket of fire axes sat behind him. (After serving as a helicopter mechanic in Vietnam, Wallace worked as a back-country firefighter in Yosemite.) But otherwise, the unit looked warehouselike. Stacked, labeled boxes stretched down either side of the deep, rectangular space with a snug but passable aisle between. This was everything Wallace owned, except the truck parked outside. A year ago, he was living in an apartment in Carson City, Nev., funneling the entire $1,200 he collected in retirement benefits and disability directly into his rent and alimony payments every month. "So I started doing a lot of credit-card stuff," he said. Soon he was $30,000 in debt. ang Wallace hated living in a city anyway, "so because of my debt crisis and 30 my marriage crisis and everything, I moved everything into storage and I just live out of my truck," he told me, resting his hands on his gut. That was June 15, 2008. At first, he rented a second unit across the way and spent a few months sorting, giving away items he didn't need to an organization for homeless veterans. "You can call me homeless," he told me. "But I'm not goofing around. I've got money, but I just want to get this debt down." It was like a cleansing: the storage unit cost about $200 a month. But aside from gas, truck payments and food (he had several boxes of meals- ready-to-eat stocked here), it was his only major expense. He had cut out rent, cable, phone and electricity, and purged all the unnecessary fees from his bank statements. For the last year, he had been camping a lot and driving around the West visiting ex-firefighter friends. He saw a woman in Antioch occasionally. "It's feeling good," he said, "and it's working. That's the thing: it's working. Debts are down to almost zippo right now." He figured he'd be done by Thanksgiving. For a decade at least, storage has been a mechanism allowing Americans to live beyond our means. Wallace was using his unit as a center of gravity, to pull his financial life back within reach. He had even started saving, he told110 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS my style or anything," he said; he'd prefer something more secluded-bigger, me, and was looking into a small condo in a suburb near Lake Tahoe. "It's not and with land. "But I could do that." He missed sleeping in his own bed. He also missed his music collection-and the books and rare coins he had collected. Also, his pins. "Little pins, like flag pins," he explained. "I've got veterans pins, and I've got Rose Parade pins, and pins that I got at fairs." He missed his stuff. "Hey," he said as I left. "I'll call you when I'm getting ready to load the truck." READING THE TEXT 1. How does Mooallem's opening anecdote about repair-shop owner Jimmy Sloan's visit to his Statewide Self Storage unit set a tone for the rest of the selection? 2. According to Mooallem, how has the Great Recession affected the self-storage industry? 4. 5. 3. Synthesize in your own words the various reasons that customers rely upon self-storage facilities. What does sociologist Juliet B. Schor mean by the "Ikea effect" (para. 11)? What does storage industry consultant Tom Litton mean by saying young peo- ple have "the same propensity for accumulating crap that I have.... [They] see storage the way that we all see cable and Internet access" (para. 26)? 6 ni gnivi a READING THE SIGNS 1. In a journal entry, contemplate your own and/or your family's possessions. If you needed to scale back what you own, how would you decide what to dispose of, keep, store, or sell? What would your choices indicate about your priorities and interests? 2. CONNECTING TEXTS Write an essay in which you evaluate the validity of Tom Litton's claim that "it's the accumulation of things that defines you as an American" (para. 13). To develop your ideas, consult Laurence Shames's "The More Factor" (p. 76) and the Introduction to Chapter 1, "Consuming Passions: The Culture of American Consumption" (p. 67). 3. CONNECTING TEXTS In "Everything Now" (p. 123), Steve McKevitt argues that our current consumption habits are "enormously wasteful: a huge and unnec- essary drain on the world's dwindling natural resources" (para. 22). In an essay, write an argument that assesses the extent to which Americans' pro- pensity for accumulating material objects contributes to that drain. Does stor- ing items actually reduce the need to produce more, or does it serve to enable the production of more waste? 4. Despite the economic woes suffered by many of the people interviewed in this article, industry consultant Tom Litton remains confident about America's economic future. What is the basis of his confidence? Write an essay in which you demonstrate, refute, or modify his position. C И15 products that convey prestige and status. STEVE MCKEVITT Everything Now in which it stimulates the desire to buy Paradoxically, although today people in developed societies have more consumer choices, 24/7 access to a global cornucopia of goods, and (thanks to generous credit availability) more sheer stuff, many report feelings of unhappiness, especially when it comes to the stress triggered by working to pay for all that stuff. But while work indeed contributes to that unhappiness, Steve McKevitt argues in this selec- tion that much of it can be credited to massive marketing campaigns designed to convince us that if we only buy this product or that ser- vice, we will be happy. Combining psychology with the technological ability to bombard us around the clock with clever advertisements designed to convince us that our every want is actually a need, current marketing strategies keep us unhappy in order to move the goods. A marketing consultant and author of the book Everything Now (2013, from where this selection comes), McKevitt is working on a PhD at the University of Sheffield. You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy. - ERIC HOFFER, philosopher and social writer What do you want? Whether you are looking for motor cars, mobile phones, holidays or simply what to have for lunch, the range of options available to you can be genuinely overwhelming. With nothing more than a broadband Internet con- nection, you can enjoy immediate and unfettered access to millions of books, newspapers and magazines; thousands of movies and TV shows and almost the entire canon of recorded music. Many lifetimes' worth of content, all of it available at the click of a mouse. Whatever it is you want, you can have it. Everything Now. We are living through a time of endless choices and unlimited conve- nience. We now take for granted the ubiquity of goods and services that can124 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS be instantly accessed, but the 24/7 society we live in- where everything is available practically all the time-is a recent achievement. Everything Now did not happen by chance or overnight. It is the culmination of a deliberate and concerted 30-year drive to increase choice and convenience for every- one. Those of us lucky enough to be living in the developed world today are. at any other point in history. Our needs have been fulfilled and so, for the first time ever, we have an economy that is almost entirely devoted to the business of satisfying our wants instead. The question is: with so much effort dedicated to giving us what we want, why aren't we happier or, at the very least, worrying less and enjoying life more?.. wow grind People do not buy technology, what they buy is functionality. Consumers do not purchase stereos, DVD players and mobile phones because they want the items for themselves, but because they want to listen to music, watch movies, and keep in touch with family and friends. The same is true of com- puters. But in this case there is much more functionality, so people end up buying computers for many different reasons-to work, play games, browse the Internet, edit movies, create magazines and so on. To do this they need to run software. To gain a competitive edge within a crowded market, soft- ware publishers were creating products crammed with features and optimised to run most effectively on the fastest machines available at the time of their 1967 99 release. This was especially true for computer games, which, because of their rich 5 graphics, placed the heaviest demands upon the hardware. If consumers wanted to derive the most functionality from the latest software - in the case of my games, experience the smoothest animation, highest resolution, and most spectacular visuals - they would need the fastest computer, which would almost certainly contain one of [Intel's] microprocessors. WIND SAI However, as Intel's business model demonstrated, it would only be the fastest computer for a maximum of three months. The pace of this process was so rapid that [Intel VP of Marketing] Manfred could be confident that even the best computer available today would not be able to cope with the latest software being published three years hence. The pursuit of functionality-our games-could be used to force consumers to invest in Intel's new technology. Intel was not only creating faster microprocessors, it was also creating the demand for them. bloot tol griio vby jorized W Intel may be a master of the art, but it is certainly not the only company in the business of inventing wants as well as products. Manfred is correct: wants are very different to needs. "Want versus Need" is one of the most basic con- cepts in economics. A need is something we have to have-like food, sleep or water. A want is something we would like to have-like a Big Mac, a Tempur mattress or a bottle of Evian. You might think that you cannot survive without your BlackBerry or your BMW, but you can. It might even be the case that you do need a phone to carry out your work and a car to get around in, but what brand it is and, to a large extent, what features it has are really just wants.ein240422/ Steve McKevitt / Everything Now 125 Needs are rational and permanent. We have always needed - and will always need-food, water and shelter. The solution may change, but the problem is always the same, you can't create new needs. Wants, on the other hand, are emotional, ephemeral and ever changing. Just because you want something today doesn't mean you will want it tomorrow, always want it, or ever want it again. For example, back in 1981, everybody wanted a Rubik's Cube, it was the world's most popular toy, but it is unlikely to ever repeat this feat in the future. This transience creates an opportunity for anyone who is trying to sell us something-whether that's a product, a service or even an idea-and they can invent wants for us as well as the means to assuage them. In 1976, a year with one of the hottest summers on record, almost nobody drank bottled water in the UK (unless they went on holiday "abroad"); we spent less than £200,000 on just 3 million litres of the stuff. Today, each of us drinks an average of 33 litres per year, spending a total of £1.4 billion. We do this despite the fact that tap water is essentially an identical product that is as widely and freely available as it was in 1976. 10 - Manufacturing wants for things like bottled water is what keeps us in a permanent state of dissatisfaction, because only by making us unhappy with what we have today is it possible to persuade us to pay for something that will make us happy tomorrow. In the case of bottled water, its success depended on us becoming dissatisfied with drinking tap water. The basis of this dissatis- faction is usually emotional rather than rational, it doesn't require hard evidence — all that is needed, perhaps, is promoting a notion that bottled water tastes better or using language to suggest it is somehow healthier than tap water. In Intel's case, the continual introduction of new microprocessors means that purchasing a new computer will only briefly appease the existing want for maximum functionality. Likewise, once upon a time, you may have yearned for an iPhone Mk1, but now, several upgrades later with that model nothing more than a distant memory, you've become dissatisfied with your current handset, and can't wait for the opportunity to forsake it for next year's version. It is simple and, as ever-increasing sales of bottled water, personal computers and mobile phones testifies, it has been extremely effective. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a theory of developmental psychology which describes the phases of human growth. It is often portrayed as a pyra- mid, with the biggest, most basic needs at the bottom (air, food, water), then safety issues (health, employment, property), moving up through relationships and esteem (achievement, confidence, respect), reaching self-actualisation at the top (morality, creativity and problem solving). Maslow believed that these needs play a major role in motivating behaviours in Western societies where the individual is paramount. Basic bio- logical, physiological and safety needs will always take priority over the need for respect or self-expression, but once they have been satisfied, the needs higher up the pyramid become increasingly important. As one set of needs is assuaged, focus moves to those on the next level up the pyramid Everything Now is an extreme example of an individualistic society, hence our tendency126 CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS is to be egocentric, focusing on the improvement of one's self and circum- stances, with self-actualisation at the zenith. For example, tackling obesity and associated issues of low self-esteem is a priority in the UK and USA, where food is cheap and plentiful, but in places where food is expensive and in short supply, these problems simply don't exist. There are few branches of Weight Watchers in the Third World and no need, at present, for Western governments to develop famine-relief strategies to feed their own people. Yes we are still innovating, but we are doing so in small steps, not the giant leaps we once were. [John] Smart makes a very interesting observation about the areas in which innovation is taking place: Certain types of innovation saturation might now appear to be occur- ring because our accelerating technological productivity is beginning to intersect with an effectively fixed number of human needs We may observe that as the world develops and we all climb higher on Maslow's hierarchy of relatively fixed needs, those who already have sufficient housing, transportation, etc., are now pursuing innovations on the most abstract, virtual, and difficult-to-quantify levels, like social interaction, sta- tus, entertainment, and self-esteem. Self Actualisation Personal growth, fulfillment Esteem Achievement, responsibility, status, reputation Relationships Family, affection, friends, workgroups, love Safety Health, employment, property, stability, security, protection Biological and Physiological Air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep Figure 1. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs ♦ Pip bernsey St. Martin's Press ***Steve McKevitt / Everything Now 127 It is because we don't really need anything anymore that the focus of 15 innovation has itself turned to addressing our wants instead As Maslow demonstrates, once needs are taken care of, wants can be just as powerful drivers. This is all well and good if we know what it is that we want, but most of the time we don't. Nor do the things we want necessarily have to be good, either for ourselves or for the rest of society. Some people want to smoke, to take drugs or, as a more extreme example, to commit crimes. Needs require rational decision-making. However, the evidence is that decisions about wants are driven entirely by our emotions and these feelings can be so strong that they cause us to overrule or simply ignore rational objections. This combina- tion makes us highly suggestible: easily persuaded by things that engage our sympathies, willing to be told what it is that we want, and then to act upon that information, regardless of the consequences. We should also consider that the people empathising with us-the ones engaging our sympathies and then telling us what it is that we want-are often trying to hawk us a solution as well. You can find examples of this everywhere. Just look at an everyday prod- uct, like toothpaste. We need toothpaste to ensure our teeth and gums remain healthy. On average, people with healthy teeth live longer and tend to lead healthier lives than those who lose their teeth prematurely. Visit your local supermarket and you'll find around 120 different brands of toothpaste to choose from. Some promise fresher breath, others whiter teeth, others health- ier gums. There will be brands for sensitive teeth, for people with fillings or cavities, there will be gels, pastes and powders, but despite this welter of options, each and every one will be virtually identical chemically; essentially the same thing, packaged and positioned in dozens of slightly different ways. The same is true whatever the category, from soap to soap operas. Scratch beneath the surface of Everything Now's apparently endless choice at any point and what you will find is hundreds of virtually identical products. Tooth- paste is really just toothpaste. Nobody needs to have 120 different varieties of intrinsically indistinguish- able products like toothpaste or soap to choose from, and you may argue that nobody wants them either, but these "choices" are offered in a much more Where once there was a category called soap, now there are soaps subtle way. for dry skin, greasy skin, sensitive skin; there is strong soap, gentle soap; soap in a bar, in a bottle, in a jar or from a dispenser; liquid soap, foam soap, hard soap, scented soap, simple soap, plain soap, soft soap and soap on a rope. Now all you have to do is choose one. 86 21 u ovo Things can't go on like this. And that's not some liberal cri de coeur, I mean it literally: they can't. Whatever your views are on climate change, you have to at least concede that we are not going to be able to rely on fossil fuels forever. If we carry on at the current rate of consumption-some 85 million barrels of oil a day, burning through the fossil record at the rate of 20 million years, every year-then we're going to run out sooner rather than later. Well, I'm all for screwing in low-energy light bulbs, buying locally produced peas128 120ديمة CHAPTER 1 CONSUMING PASSIONS and only drinking European wine, if that's what it takes to save the planet, yet I can't help thinking that, in the face of the thousands of freight carriers that are making their way to these shores slowly, but inexorably, from China and India to deliver their precious cargoes of Christmas cracker gifts and trinkets, these Herculean efforts might not suffice! And even if we do discover substantial new reserves of oil and gas to playing гар go as we cards for the next 200 years, there still aren't enough resources for everyone to live as wastefully as we do in the developed world We are currently using w 1.5 times the world's gross annual product every year, which requires us to draw on an inevitably limited and dwindling stockpile of natural resources wed to make up the shortfall. But even as we burn through 50 percent more than we produce, over-fishing, over-farming, over-watering and deforesting go, competition for these diminishing resources is increasing as the huge economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China (the so-called BRIC nations) and those in the rest of Southern Asia and South America become stron- ger. This means that even if those miniature screwdriver sets are still avail- able, they're going to be a lot more expensive. And I do mean a lot more. Economists expect food prices to double in the next 20 years in real terms. Remember, this is the case even if we ignore climate change, which, I'll con- cede, is a bit like ignoring a herd of elephants in your living room. The world we live in today no longer needs either stone knappers or 20 rocket-scientists. It requires people to work out how the music industry can make money from file sharing; how Sunday newspaper executives can con- vince new readers that 500,000 words of content is worth the price of a cup of coffee; how TV channels can survive without relying on advertising revenue. It needs marketers and creative thinkers who can persuade millions of other people that This Brand is exclusively for them, that the next version of this film/TV/video game franchise is really the best one ever, or that some website helps us get closer to the things we love. It needs people who can develop products that are slightly better than the previous version, who can identify tiny gaps in crowded markets, who can think up new ways to package, deliver or sell the same things. It needs people who can find innovative ways of man- aging finance, who can manipulate the money markets, exploit political boundaries and economic loopholes, who can persuade people to leverage their assets, or to liquidate, re-mortgage, plough-back or reinvest, or just to keep their capital moving. But most of all it needs people who can work out ways of getting all of the above to us as soon as we want it. And of course, we want it now. Inventors are innovating as much now as they ever have, it's just that they are solving problems that won't necessarily be rewarded with patents. The inventors are busy doing other things. Not necessarily brilliant things either. For every iPad there is a Chicken Nugget-but both are, in their own way, elegant solutions to problems people didn't know that they had. (19921920GH22A Steve McKevitt/ Everything Now 129 Everything Now is enormously wasteful: a huge and unnecessary drain on the world's dwindling natural resources. By skewing our motivation it has entirely displaced the process of innovation. This is the real cost of changing our focus to wants instead of needs. Everything Now is making it almost impossible for us to address any genuinely big problems we face in the long term. We are not just demand-led, but are busily creating the demands them- selves. We have become so obsessed with inventing and meeting the wants of the individual in the short term that attention has become diverted from the real challenges of meeting fundamental human needs of the future energy of natural resources. and food supply, changing climate, population growth and the sustainable use SOURCES M02A3TTA YORT Bott, David (Director of Innovation Programmes, UK Government Technology Strategy 18 October 2011. Board), "Challenge = Opportunity" The 9th Roberts Lecture, University of Sheffield, Davies, John, "Debt Facts and Figures July 2011," Credit Action, July 2011. Purdy, L., "The Dissatisfaction Syndrome," Publicis, May 2002. BAS msi 2515 READING THE TEXT 1. Summarize in your own words the distinctions between "wants" and "needs," according to McKevitt. 2. What is the logic behind Maslow's hierarchy of needs? 3. How does the marketing of products such as computers and bottled water convince consumers that these items are "needs," not "wants," as McKevitt explains? 101 191hw graudi 4. After describing the world of "Everything Now," McKevitt says, "Things can't I mean it literally: they can't" (para. 18). Why does he go on like this. believe this? 5. What effect has the wide variety of consumer choices had on the relative hap- piness of people today, according to McKevitt? READING THE SIGNS 1. In your journal, write your own response to McKevitt's opening quotation from Eric Hoffer: "You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.' 2. In class, make a list of all the consumer products that you and your class- mates need, and then a list of what you want. What differences, if any, are there between the lists? If you have difficulty categorizing a product as a need or a want, how do you explain that difficulty? 3. CONNECTING TEXTS Using McKevitt's selection as a critical perspective, write an essay analyzing the results of the University of Maryland research study described in "Students Addicted to Social Media" (p. 382). Do you think thethe title of the ad. 2. To whom is the ad directed? What emotions does it play on? Be sure to provide evidence for your answers. What are the "dearest possessions" the ad refers to? 3. This ad originally appeared in 1914. If you were to update it for a magazine today, what changes would you make? Why? JACK SOLOMON Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising When the background music in a TV or radio automobile commercial is classical, you can be pretty certain that the ad is pitching a Lexus or a Mercedes. When it's country western, it's probably for Dodge or Chevy. English accents are popular in Jaguar ads, while a good western twang sure helps move pickup trucks. Whenever advertisers make use of status-oriented or common-folk-oriented cultural cues, they are playing on one of America's most fundamental contradictions, as Jack Solomon explains in this cultural analysis of American advertising. The contradiction is between the simultaneous desire for social superior- ity (elitism) and social equality (populism) that lies at the heart of the American dream. And one way or another, it offers a good way to pitch a product. Solomon, a professor of English at California State University, Northridge, is the author of The Signs of Our Time (1988), from which this selection is taken. He is also coeditor with Sonia Maasik of both California Dreams and Realities (2005) and this textbook. Amongst democratic nations, men easily attain a certain equality of con- dition; but they can never attain as much as they desire. - ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE On May 10, 1831, a young French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in New York City at the start of what would become one of the most famous vis- its to America in our history. He had come to observe firsthand the institutions of the freest, most egalitarian society of the age, but what he found was a para- dox. For behind America's mythic promise of equal opportunity, Tocqueville dis- covered a desire for unequal social rewards, a ferocious competition for privilege and distinction. As he wrote in his monumental study, Democracy in America: When all privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man's own energies may place 121154 CHAPTER 2 BROUGHT TO YOU B(U)Y so is this car" even before we've begun to read it. Rather than being printed on the ordinary, flimsy pages of the magazine, the Allanté spread appears on glossy coated stock. The unwritten message is that an extraordinary car deserves an extraordinary advertisement, and that both car and ad are aimed at an extraordinary consumer, or at least one who wishes to appear extraordi- nary compared to ordinary citizens. Ads of this kind work by creating symbolic associations between their product and what the consumers to whom they are addressed most covet. It is significant, then, that this ad insists that the Allanté is virtually an Italian rather than an American car; as its copy runs, "Conceived and Commissioned by America's Luxury Car Leader-Cadillac" but "Designed and Handcrafted by Europe's Renowned Design Leader-Pininfarina, SpA, of Turin, Italy." This is not simply a piece of product information, it's a sign of the prestige that European luxury cars enjoy in today's automotive marketplace. Once the lux- ury car of choice for America's status drivers, Cadillac has fallen far behind its European competitors in the race for the prestige market. So the Allanté essentially represents Cadillac's decision, after years of resisting the trend toward European cars, to introduce its own European import - whose high cost is clearly printed on the last page of the ad. American companies manufacture status symbols because American consumers want them. As Alexis de Tocqueville recognized a century and a half ago, the competitive nature of democratic societies breeds a desire for social distinction, a yearning to rise above the crowd. But given the fact that thos...
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