MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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America's Artificial Heartland
By EmmaZahn on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 8:07am |
George Gilman’s early A&P stores are the spiritual ancestors of the Whole Foods experience. [...] Before Gilman, pre-industrial consumption was largely the unscripted consequence of localised, small-scale patterns of production. With the advent of A&P stores, consumerism began its 150-year journey from real farmers’ markets in small towns to fake farmers’ markets inside metropolitan grocery stores. Through the course of that journey, retailing would discover its natural psychological purpose: transforming the output of industrial-scale production into the human-scale experience we call shopping.
URL:
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/americas-artificial-heartland/
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Comments
Funny, I read this on flipboard and was about to post it when I saw your link. Great article. I tried to get Venkadesh Rao to cross-post at dagblog a couple years ago, but he wouldn't do it without getting paid.
by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 10:17am
It is an amazing article - Tocquevillian even. Frightening too when you realize how the whole thing only works because of the artifice of money.
by EmmaZahn on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 10:31am
Not wanting to be critical (okay, maybe yes...) but I suspect the use of Whole Foods was because of John Mackey's visibility in heated political debates, especially in the health care debate, not because Whole Foods was a good example for this story.
The reason Whole Foods has that market veneer is because Mackey came out of food co-ops and lived in his original store, so it was natural for the food to be presented in that standard alternate college campus no-frills image. Certainly there have been brand decisions along the way, but it wasn't such a cynical "Wal-Mart presents organic food, yay!" ploy or Wal-Mart's cynical "Neighborhood Market" which is roughly 2/3 Whole Foods' size at this point despite opening just 15 years ago vs Whole Foods' 35 years. Trader Joe's has roughly the same number of stores (~350), the same heritage, and the same revenue as Whole Foods (~$9 billion).
Aldi from 2 German brothers carries the trappings of cost-cutter, no-frills post-war Germany - founded in 1946 from their mother's store, they expanded to be 2 of the richest people on earth, now with 1200 US locations, and food still sold out of boxes - wonder if the Old West general stores did that?
The elephant in the room though is Kroger, with 10 times the revenue & number of stores - $98 billion & 3500 locations including secondary brands. The shame for the article is it would have made the cloud allegory stronger - from Wikipedia:
"Kroger Marketplace is a chain of big-box stores." - think elastic stackable clouds.
"Similar to rival chains Meijer, Sears Grand, Super Kmart, Walmart Supercenter, and Albertson's, and modeled after Kroger-owned Fred Meyer, these stores contain multiple departments. In addition to the grocery department, they contain a Fred Meyer Jewelers, Starbucks, Donatos Pizza, and an in-store bank, as well as sections for toys, appliances, home furnishings, and bed and bath, something that Big Bear once had in their stores in the Columbus area." - yes, Kroger is becoming something of an infrastructure powerhouse plus app store - think Amazon's burgeoning cloud and retail businesses plus hosting others - eCommerce and web portals
"This newest marketplace is the largest Kroger store ever built to date at 147,000 square feet." - yes, these Amazon data centers a few football fields long come to mind.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 1:05pm
Everything you wrote is completely beside the point of the article. Given its venue, Whole Foods and CostCo are much more familiar and appealing exemplars for its target audience. Who cares whether or not they are the most accurate.
By all means, critique the thesis if you feel you must, but please don't just try to obscure it with a barrage of irrelevancies and non-sequiturs. There's an adage for doing that: If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
by EmmaZahn on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 1:39pm
Gee thanks, love you too.
Next time I'll stick with "oh, that was fabulous" fanboiisms, as writing any observations or trying to discuss is considered "completely beside the point" and a "barrage of irrelevancies and non-sequiturs".
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 4:29pm
Guess I was kind of harsh but I expected better from you -- and what you wrote was not really relevant to the article. Made me wonder whether or not you work for Whole Foods or are one of their suppliers, possibly own stock?
by EmmaZahn on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 5:25pm
Whatever. The Rao piece on Gervais is very nice.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 6:06pm
Did you read the whole article? It seems like you misunderstood his thesis. Whole Foods is a perfect example. Trader Joes would have been another one. Food co-ops also represent the "Jeffersonian bazaar," to use Rao's term. They may not be corporate, but they still attempt to mask the reality of mass-produced food with the illusion of a small farm town. This is not necessarily a deliberate subterfuge but rather an attempt to satisfy a human urge.
Rao does address big box stores, of course, but he uses Costco rather than Kroger as his example. Like the yuppie natural food stores, industrial big box stores also peddle illusions, but they aren't as compelling...
You can disagree with his thesis, of course, but given his thesis, Whole Foods is absolutely the paradigm, not Kroger.
PS Rao's writing is apolitical. Your speculation about HCR is unfounded.
by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 1:59pm
To address your PS first, Rao is not completely "apolitical" as you might guess from "Be Slightly Evil", even though it's nice that he doesn't dwell on obvious worn-out political issues and framing.
That the article we're discussing is more based on historical developments requires his normal abstract philosophizing to get nailed to some specifics, which is why I suspected that Whole Foods vibe. Maybe you're right, but I don't get the "masking the mass produced with the illusion of a small farm town" - organic foods have been premised on "small is beautiful", and the original efforts were small often single-farmer produce that cost more but avoided pesticides, preservatives, etc. - yeah, life in the country while in the city. It's only lately that health food has gotten co-opted by big conglomerates and the "organic" label has gotten diluted to often mean much of anything short of raising a pig in shackles - well, that's what happens when WalMart steps into "organic".
I probably disagree with his thesis anyway, but I think he misses some more important issues with Whole Foods - while Trader Joes always seemed doomed or content to be in a hippie niche, it felt that Whole Foods offered something of a larger community and a feeling of "we're winning" - that being vegetarian in the US wasn't just a point of ridicule, that eating shitty produce out of Safeway in the inner city wasn't a foregone conclusion. Yeah, it cost more, and as it grew bigger the choices were often a bit dodgier and closer to regular grocers - but overall I think a lot of people feel they've invested not in a fancy Jefferson interface to Hamiltonian production, but a Jeffersonian face to a half-Jeffersonian production process. Sure, it's alwasy a question of how much bullshit this is - will Brazilian rainforests be saved because we eat more soy, or will some politician put a big tariff on it like they did with Brazilian ethanol, to subsidize yet again our nation-state conglomerate Hamiltonian production priorities.
Anyway, I'm surprised you all feel so sensitive about discussing this - I don't actually think Rao expected his thesis was terribly complete or air-tight, just that he was launching some interesting ideas based around a bit of a premise for a foreigner to muse heading out west (it is summer after all) - something worth a chat. I liked the reminder "we no longer remember phone numbers except our own" - I used to have a huge head like a Rolodex that I prided myself on - I hadn't even realized that the Rolodex had gone empty, or perhaps filled The Shining-style with "all work & no play makes Jack a dull boy" - wonder what Jefferson would think.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 3:46pm
Not sensitive at all. You just misunderstood the article, and I told you so.
Of course, the in-store experience is not the only reason people shop at Whole Foods. The food tastes better, and the organic production methods tend to be less harmful. Rao never suggested otherwise. He simply described why Whole Foods' marketing is effective and what that says about modern society.
by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 4:17pm
I simply noted that Whole Foods' "marketing" is less marketing and more-or-less close to the founder's initial intent, whereas Walmart Market and Kroger Market are complete branded marketing creations. Just because Whole Foods prices are expensive doesn't validate the idea that its an illusion (though Gaultier notes correctly that price is part of the fashion image), and frankly I don't think Costco is trying to create much of a "bazaar" or anything Jeffersonian - it's a Hamiltonian production line with a Hamiltonian veneer, though arguably slightly more moral than Walmart.
Perhaps I spent too much time in Istanbul and have forgotten what in America passes for a "bazaar".
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 4:39pm
So?
by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 5:02pm
Well, assuming that Whole Foods is not out-right lying* to me, the "small farm town" is not a complete illusion as for some produce they tell me exactly which local-ish farmers they buy from. A couple of them I recognize, the others I assume I could find on the internetz if I was interested enough to do so.
*A pretty reasonable assumption since the farmers that they're claiming to buy from would call them on it if it weren't true.
by Verified Atheist on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 3:57pm
Fair enough. It's not a complete illusion--like the Dodge Ram ad. That would be seen as a fraud. Whole Food contains enough truth to make you feel like you don't live in a mechanized society.
by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 4:22pm
I looked but did not find a link to a local feature that started out as a story about a writer's road trip with a chef in search 'pastured' chicken and beef to feature in his new restaurant. The lovely organic farm they visited turned out to be too expensive for the anticipated price range of the restaurant but it did lead the writer from a cute farm website to a local private-label chicken processor whose chickens are raised in houses by independent contractors (the old-fashioned way) but are fed differently. Each brand of chicken has its own blend of feed to satisfy FDA labeling requirements.
No doubt Whole Foods is very careful about who their 'small farm town' suppliers are. Their own brand is too dependent on them to outright lie about but they may not be quite how you picture a small farm town. I grew up in a county with two major enterprises -a cotton mill and chicken farmers. Of the two, the Dickensian mill was the more picturesque, smelled better too.
by EmmaZahn on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 5:56pm
Well, one of our "local" farms is Polyface Farm, about which Michael Pollen wrote a fair bit in his The Omnivore's Dilemma book. In most cases, however, around here at least it seems one usually has to choose between local and organic. Getting both is rare.
by Verified Atheist on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 6:02pm
Sometimes I imagine how different my life would have been if my parents had not left farming for the security of a regular paycheck. It was not a sudden switch. They did both for my first decade. Fresh milk, butter and eggs every day were nice; butchering and eating animals you knew personally, not so much. Tending and harvesting the garden was not so bad; but the same for field crops was misery as was canning surpluses in July-August in Georgia without air conditioning. All that was just for family consumption. They never farmed for a cash crop because my father could make more working for a defense contractor. After my grandfather died, the farming stopped too except for a small vegetable garden every summer.
Not exactly Jefferson's yeoman farmers but only one-generation away, my parents were close enough to it that they could survive on their own if they had to. I think that gave them a sense of autonomy and independence I can only imagine. But they had good reasons for giving it up. They lived through the boll weevil pestilence and the dust bowl. Both remember being hungry at times but it really haunted my mother. They knew first hand how hard and lonely and uncertain farming can sometimes be. When they got a better offer they took it. It worked out for them. Their children are not faring nearly as well. :/ We are far too dependent on, not really strangers, but forces we do not often see or hear much about. That is one reason I liked the article. It pulled back the curtain.
by EmmaZahn on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 7:10pm
Almost forget, I did find this semi-related link:
And it ties back nicely to the original post. Brand names mass produced but privately labeled may be the ultimate marketing illusion.
by EmmaZahn on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 6:11pm
I wish I'd come up with something like this for my architectural orals. Lou Kahn's Served vs Servant space was a dominant meme when I arrived at college, and this turns the entire nation, indeed the world into served (Jeffersonian) and servant (Hamiltonian). The last few years were more about image, semiotics and postmodernism, all of which can be addressed as a manifestation of creating soothing, human-scale buildings that are supported by a background infrastructure.
by Donal on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 7:34pm
I read and followed the author's line of reasoning. If any of you watched this spring on PBS the costume drama about Harry Selfridge and his store in England, that shopping as a entertainment and a chance to be part of a illusion for a few hours was introduced to London by him. Up to that point Brits just shopped because they needed something. He learned his trade at Marshall Fields in Chicago and exported it to England. I always knew this came from our culture but I never thought it was from Hamilton's vision of a money based economy. I have only been to Trader Joe's and Whole Foods once and that has been in the last year. I am getting ready to make my 4th batch of jam this summer. This time it is mango. I was given a bag of mangos from a friend's tree. I think I live from a different cloud or on a different planet. I am still bartering. Enjoyed the read.
by trkingmomoe on Thu, 07/25/2013 - 12:43pm
I'd read that Hamilton label loosely. Basically, Hamilton wanted to develop American industry and finance, while Jefferson idealized agrarian society. These views reflected their geography--New York vs Virginia. England was of course far more industrialized than the U.S. at that time, and all Hamilton's ideas came from London.
by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 07/25/2013 - 1:53pm
Haven't read the article yet, but there must be some serious truth to the WF claims. Their produce is 100 times better than what you find in Safeway or Giant. So is their meat. How else could they produce these kinds of differences if they weren't doing something different...and better (from a food standpoint)?
by Peter Schwartz on Thu, 07/25/2013 - 4:59pm