Satisfaction Guaranteed

Satisfaction Guaranteed: the Making of the American Mass Market
© 2004 Susan Strasser
348 pages

America was born of the frontier, its citizens people who by necessity often manufactured their own household requirements.  This was the case throughout most of the 19th century: even in cities where people could purchase articles like candles and clothing.  But by that century’s end, a revolution was in the process – a consumer revolution in which virtually every household good, from food to cleaning solutions, came from factories. Even more remarkably, however, those goods weren’t even coming from the factories through familiar faces at local groceries: they were entering the lives of people through new mail-order schemes and colossal supermarkets. Satisfaction Guaranteed examines how a few entrepreneurs transformed Americans’ lifestyles and marketplace.

Like Never Done and Waste and Want,   Satisfaction is chiefly focused on social history, and together the three examine various facets of Americans’ transformation from producers to consumers, of how a nation of nominally self-reliant farmers and merchants became one of employee-consumers and big business. Unlike her previous workers, however, here Strasser presents a critical business history, rather like Straight Out of the Oven or Cheap.  To explain the success of the new businesses, she demonstrates to readers how they created completely new business and marketing practices, like ‘market segmentation’ – targeting particular products within a brand to specific demographics.  Another novelty was that of the brand name or trademark, which could be used to build a reputation for quality. They also depended on new technologies and systems, either material (in the form of railroads that allowed for mail-order companies to flower and deliver cheaper goods through volume sales) or legal, like court decisions that made corporations easier to form and much more effective at managing interstate businesses. Strasser places the most emphasis on marketing, however, for it was marketing that introduced Americans to completely new goods (‘Oleomargarine? What kinda cow makes that?), marketing that coaxed them into trying it even when their local grocers didn’t want to stock it, and marketing that gradually lured them into not only using products, but becoming dependent on them. Marketing is why invention is the mother of necessity.

Although Strasser regards consumerism as wasteful, she doesn’t rail against the giants that promote it – indeed, depend on it. There are no villains in this piece, though she’s plainly sympathetic to the small businessmen, like the neighborhood grocers and general store managers, who were at first forced to keep goods on their shelves they had no experience with , and then driven out of business when large chains like A&P Groceries invaded. (Ads of the day directed potentials customers that if their local firms didn’t carry Crisco or the brand in question, they should forward the names and addresses of those firms to the corporation, who would see to it that the goods were offered for retail.)   The new branded products didn’t offer storekeepers much of a profit margin, and eventually corporations began seeing local retailers as obstacles to reaching as broad a customer base as they possibly could – and that was the goal: not meeting needs, but devising any way to create and capture new markets. Whereas once Americans produced things in-house to satisfy their needs, now they were consumers who bought whatever ensnared their interests – and following the ‘credit revolution’, they didn’t even need to be limited by what they could afford.

Strasser’s previous work has been lively yet comprehensive, and Satisfaction Guaranteed largely meets those standards.  Covering the intersection of business practices and lifestyle,  she focuses more on new approaches business management than on lifestyle, the usual center of attention,  which may broaden her audience to those interested in business in general.  This by no means detracts from its appeal as an introduction to the origins of mass consumerism in America, however.

Never Done

Never Done: A History of American Housework

© 1982 Susan Strasser

365 pages

Every time I turn around there's something else to do

Cook a meal or mend a sock or sweep a floor or two…

(“Gonna Be an Engineer”, Peggy Seeger)

Never Done: A History of American Houswork is a history of the American home, focusing on the work done within it, one which demonstrates how households became centers of consumption, instead of production.  It’s a marvelously meaty work, divided into sections that not only show how chores evolved, but other elements within the household – like the now abandoned practice of taking in boarders.  But more than a history of the home, it’s the story of American housewives, whose labors used to provide material value, not just aesthetic comfort;  their  chores carried meaning beyond keeping the carpet free of dust and the dishwasher full.  

            Those who complain about the chore of laundry today – “Put the clothes into the washer! Take them out! Put them into the dryer! Take them out!! When will it ever end?” are, in a word, wimps.  Maintaining a household’s laundry- - clothes, towels, sheets – used to entail an entire week of labor, beginning with extended soaks before laborious hand-washing period, which included a separate ‘bluing’ phase to preserve the whiteness of said sheets. And at the same time, mother laundress would be cooking full meals from scratch, often tending a fire to do – and depending on where she lived, usually fetching entire tubs of water per day to do the washing, cooking, and cleaning with. And the cleaning! Cleaning meant more than washing the dishes and dusting the tables. Cooking with fire or oil meant soot, and processing food from scratch produced grease, and this soot and grease got everywhere; little wonder spring cleaning was seen with such dread. And at the same time, household materials had to be produced – preserves for the winter, candles for the night, clothes for the children. And we complain about vacuuming!

            Such labors were eased first by fundamental innovations – the introduction of indoor plumbing,  gas lines, and electricity – and then by convenience appliances (washing machines, which in their first stages still required an awful lot of work)  gadgets (which did most of the work) and still later by completely processed goods (ready-made meals, disposable utensils) that took the work out of it completely.  After having witnessed the demands of household labor prior to the late 19^th century, the appearance of such aides is welcome….but the avalanche of consumer goods that appears in the final chapters gives one pause.  As industry left the home – as the services that ran it became things to be purchased –   the home and housework lost its meaning;  decaying into chores,. Strasser covers the response of women to this, the attempt to elevate Home Economics to the status of business and industry by making it more ‘efficient’’ – but ultimately, the home was abandoned as women chose instead to pursue careers, and in fact had to help pay for all the new services and products they were being acculturated to expect. After growing up on canned biscuits, after all, who wants to start making dough by hand? 

            Although our lives have plainly become easier, there’s a certain wistfulness to the author’s writing; in some of the interviews, mothers express regret over some of the way their lives have changed. One in particular misses the time she spent with her kids washing dishes after supper; such moments of togetherness are increasingly hard to find, and emphasized the importance of the family taking care of one another’s needs; a childhood chore like keeping one’s bedroom straightened doesn’t make that connection.  Strasser is more distinctly uncomfortable with the reduction of wives and mothers – of people in general – into consumers, something she presumably explores further in Satisfaction Guaranteed, and touched on  in Waste and Want.

            Never Done was Strasser’s first work, and it's quite an introduction. It's slightly more academic than Waste and Want, but considering how broad an audience Waste and Want was written for, that's not saying much: this is still very lively, closer to narrative history than textbook -- and yet it's carrying as much information as a text, covering virtually everything that happens within its walls.  This is wonderful social and domestic history.

             

Waste and Want

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
© 2000 Susan Strasser
368 pages

     Consider your trash can. In all likelihood, you cannot imagine not using it. What else would you do all with the trash generated in the course of day to day living? And yet trash cans haven't always been a fixture in our homes; until the 19th century, people invariably fond uses for whatever extraneous materials they produced, so much so that waste was an anomaly  But now,  disposing of it is a mammoth task, handled by the government and large corporations. In Waste and Want Susan Strasser reveals how waste rose to such heights, and despite its subject matter it manages to be charming rather than 'offal'.

Throughout most of human history, material goods have been too precious to waste. Every article represented hours of hard labor, where that work was invested in the sewing of clothing,  the milking of cows, or the manufacture of pottery. Economy forced prudence, not to mention self-reliance:  people made their own candles out of cooking fat because they needed candles, and like all skill made objects they were not easy to come by, being either rare or expensive. If an item broke, it was repaired; if beyond repair, it was put to future use. Clothes were extensively modified to extend their lives, and passed down through the generations (as were most household items). Cloth remains too small to be used in clothing could be sewn into quilts. Food scraps were fed to animals, who converted refuse into more food -- and if nothing else, the items were burned as fuel in the family hearth.  Even if a given family didn’t possess all the skills and time required to recapture the value of every scrap, local economies thrived on communal recycling. But all that changed with industrialization.

Although the first factories, like paper mills, inserted themselves into the garbage cycle seamlessly -- using refuse like rags to produce paper -- soon the industrial process broke a circle of endless reuse to the one-directional “waste stream”, the stream that has turned into a torrent by the 21st century and is fast filling up landfills, incinerators, and the open ocean. This disruption began as industrialization became increasingly efficient through economies of scale: large operations that relied on waste for their manufacturing (like the paper mills) demanded too much to be satisfied by communities: instead, they had to be fed by other factories, and the trash of the common people fond itself without an outlet. Transformations in the home (like gas stoves) removed the use of garbage as fuel. Factories also made consumer goods cheaply: as they became abundant, they lost value. Why repair when you can replace?  In the 20th century, companies seized on that idea and encouraged it, first through changes in fashion (cars replaced by new models every year, the only real distinction being aesthetics), and then through Planned Obsolescence, wherein items were manufactured with the intent of their breaking down within a relatively short time frame  and requiring replacement. (They could be repaired, at first, but then someone hit on the bright idea of engineering every part in a given machine so that they would all begin breaking down at roughly the same time…)

The results? Trash -- lots of it. Dealing with the trash has required new technologies and systems of organization to cope with it. The pressing demand for waste management is mitigated (ever so much) by recycling, but our pitiful attempts at reusing resources are nothing like those our ancestors managed. Recycling is a meager flame overwhelmed by the mighty ocean of garbage that consumerism encourages and our economy relies on. The amount of waste necessitated by modern life is staggering: next time you visit a grocery store or supermarket, consider how almost every item in the store comes in a cardboard box, and inside it may be goods wrapped in plastic. We cannot possibly find uses for so many boxes, and what on earth would we do with even one ice-cream wrapper, let alone the dozens or hundreds we are liable to rip off in a year?

Waste and Want is a fantastic little  bit of history and indirect social criticism.  While garbage is on the cover, it’s really a history of us, of how we relate to the world through our use of its material resources and how that has changed. It’s a fun read, sure, but by its end one can’t help but be impressed by the fact that waste is an issue we must think about. Environmentalism aside: in this era of austerity, how can we possibly justify throwing way so many resources and even consuming more resources to manage the waste?  It behooves us to act more responsibly, and as the 21st century progresses I can only hope that our worsening economic condition will force a rebirth the prudence of our forebears.

Related:
Cheap: the High Cost of Discount Culture; Ellen Shell
No Logo, Naomi Klein