The Perfect Thing

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness
pub. 2006 Steven Levy
304 pages

I've never had an iPod, but given that Audible was doing a sale this week and that I seemed to be doing an Apple-related set, why not? The Perfect Thing hails the influence of the iPod and shares its history, both how Apple came to experiment with a consumer device and how it used the device to transform the music industry.  It's light "reading" (I listened to it, so the description is imperfect), and its datedness has appeal: this is an Apple book written before the iPhone took over everything else,  written when Jobs had announced that yes, he had cancer, but it was easily remedied with surgery and all was well now.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and pushed the company to focus on just four products -- professional and consumer variants of desktop and laptop computers --  his idea for the desktop computers was that they were to become key components in home entertainment, a "digital hub".  The iMac came packaged with software like iMovie and iTunes to allow users to create their own videos and play music from the computer -- and not just play the CD, but copy music onto the computer to allow the iMac to be a digital music library.  Around the same time, the .mp3 coding format had been established, and there were even clunky attempts at a consumer-marketed mp3 player.  Then the inspiration: what if Apple created its own mp3 player, one that would be designed to  link perfectly with iTunes?

Although its price gave cause for balking,  the device's ease of use and attractive design made it a marketplace winner, changing the way people approached music.   Although CD players had already started allowing for more musical freedom --  make it easy to listen to the same song over and over again, or skip weak songs in an album instead of having to manually fast forward and rewind tape -- the iPod and its clones would make it a breeze.  Although a certain artform was lost in the process (having an album that told a story when listened to in entirety, in order),  most people just wanted to listen to the music they lived, when they wanted it. 

The other great influence of the iPod on music was on the industry itself.   In the days of Napster and Kazaa, the record companies were seeing the rug pulled out from under them, with CD sales following as people were able to just help themselves to goodies out there for the taking -- along with viruses,  malicious jokes, and extremely poor information as people shared files with the wrong artist and title names.  Jobs proposed an alternative: iTunes could be more than a music player and CD ripper;  it could become a storefront, allowing the record companies a way to adapt to the  demand for digital music and maintain an income stream, while giving consumers a safe and legal alternative to obtaining music at a fairly good price -- $0.99 a song. 

Levy is a tech enthusiast, an it's therefore not surprising that he completely dismisses all who look askance at the takeover of people by their little devices.  Are people retreating from one another and reality by losing themselves in their music whenever they feel like it? Sure, and why not? Although there is truth in Levy's statement that moral panics always erupt  around new technologies,  it doesn't follow that there aren't legitimate causes for concern when people put themselves into danger or ignore their family and friends (in their very company) by dropping out.

How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry

Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry-and Made Himself the Richest Man in America
© 1994 Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews
560 pages

I recently watched Pirates of Silicon Valley, a questionably-acted movie based on the rise of  Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and found myself curious about the facts. Did a young Bill Gates really race bulldozers and ram his buddy's sportscar?   Gates is an astonishingly detailed biography of not just Gates himself, but of the computer industry as it developed throughout the seventies, eighties, and early nineties. The book culminates with the release of the then-revolutionary Windows 95, an OS that merited even Rachel and Chandler from Friends pitching it.  The evolution of computing hardware and software overshadow Gates himself, not surprising given that developing software was his singular obsession from high school on.   This mix of biography and technical history makes itself more attractive as computer history than personal, but it still presents a more interesting Gates than "Brilliant, Nerdy Billionare".  He really did race bulldozers, and they weren't his.

Gates is not a rags to riches stories, as young William Gates started off fairly comfortably: his parents sent him to a private school that exposed its older students to computer programming, and one of Gates' classmates there would become his partner in founding Microsoft later on -- Paul Allen. Both were enthusiastic members of a student club called the Lakeside Programmers Group,  who were allowed free computer time -- back when computer users could be billed on how many seconds of computer processing they used --  in  exchange for helping debug programs and and machines.   Being both self-confident teens and curious about what they could do, Gates and his friends also found ways to cheat the billing cycle outside their arrangement -- and when Gates took on the challenge of creating student schedules,  he somehow found himself the only boy in a class otherwise filled with girls.

Even before they were out of high school, Gates and Allen were making a name for themselves as programmers, and exploring the possibilities of this for their future. Their first huge coup was writing a language to use with the first consumer-marketed microcomputer, the Altair.  The Altair was amazing popular considering it had to be assembled, component by component, by the buyer, and that the finished product was initially only capable of blinking its lights. Programming was done not with a keyboard, but by flipping toggle switches.   Although Gates and Allen did attempt building their own computer, one pitched at municipal governments for managing traffic,  their talents lay in software.  Gates was both obsessive and aggressive:  he had no objections to working eighty hours a week trying to iron out bugs, and expected that from whomever he hired later on.  Gates hated to lose, and if that meant selling products he hadn't even built yet-- hadn't even planned yet --  to prevent someone else from making the pitch, he would.  (Hence the reason for those eighty hour workweeks..)  Gates' success came not just from his gifts with programming language, but because he and his partners were so intent on making sales: one of Gates' tricks was to use one product to sell another.  His dream was a computer in every home, on every desk, running Microsoft software. It didn't matter who the manufacturer was: Microsoft did work for both IBM and Apple, as well as smaller computer companies which have fallen away, and Gates' goal was to create a hardware ecosystem where everyone was using a common software, with the effect that devices would be cross-compatible.  A monitor made by one manufacturer -- IBM, say -- would be compatible with a computer made by another firm, like Hewlett Packard.

Gates  delves into an astonishing amount of detail both on the technical hurdles and on the business deals that Gates made: there's an entire chapter on a font battle with Adobe, for instance.  Readers do see the man behind the machine, however: Gates the crazy-competitive, Gates the parsimonous executive who regarded hotel rooms and first class as decadent,  Gates the teenage millionare, Gates the spectacularly reckless driver, Gates the bellicose boss who liked people who stood up and yelled right back at him.    Although Gates is not necessarily the ideal book for someone merely curious about the man, its depth of technical and business history would recommend to those interested in the  microcomputer revolution.  Oh, and the bulldozers? Gates literally saw them sitting in a rural construction yard, discovered the keys were in them, and decided to figure out how they worked. Then he and a buddy drove them around and raced, because that's what you do when you're twenty and it's 3 am.

Related:
Pirates of Silicon Valley, trailer below
CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier

"I got the loot, STEVE!"

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am
© 2011 Robert Gandt
351 pages

How does a world-class airline fall so quickly from the heights that its pilots are accidentally locked in the building when it closes its doors for the last time, forced to jump from a fire-exit door onto shrubbery below?   The decline and crash of Pan-American Airlines wasn’t as abrupt as memory has it, as Skygods narrative history demonstrates, but a drift toward failure that was nearly corrected a time or two but never long enough.   Skygods' history of Pan-Am uses the stories of its captains, executive, and crew to make personal a proud airline’s fall from glory.

Pan-Am isn’t an airline I ever flew on,  closing as it did when I was six, but as a  brand name I heard about it often enough growing up -- and I witnessed the airline’s complete self-confidence in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey.   That complete self-confidence was part of its early pilot culture,  when a airline created by a Navy buff adopted aspects of navy lingo and dress.  The planes were “Clippers”, and their crews wore smart uniforms, answering to their lord and commander in the air --  the Master of Ocean Flying Boats.  It wasn’t just a name:  Pan-Am specialized in overseas destinations, beginning with a Key West to Havana run, and to serve the undeveloped world by air, it used floatplanes or flying boats.  Pan-Am captains were alpha males later running jet engines, often wrong but never in doubt.    Juan Trippe, the effective creator of Pan-Am and its chief for decades, was certainly confident in his own vision and the airline. He  pushed commercial aviation into the jet age against its reservations, twisting elbows and manipulating one company against another, forcing them to do his bidding.  Trippe got what he wanted -- jet airlines that could go faster and over greater distances -- but  at a price. The brutal deal-making  clouded Pan-Am’s  reputation,  making it political enemies, and Trippe’s greatest dream, the 747, would bleed the rest of Pan-Am’s life.

Pan-Am had taken on enormous obligations in creating that fleet, but it had enormous assets, too: it wasn’t just an airline, it owned a pricey chain of hotels.   It was an international corporation with an antiquated culture, however; even in the sixties it operated like a small transport firm from the thirties, with such lax accounting measures that no one could tell what lines were profitable or not. When Trippe was dreaming of doubling his capacity with 747s,   flights to Europe on 727s (another Trippe coup) were flying half-empty.   And those “Skygods”, the captains who ruled their ships with an iron hand? They were getting old, with an easy arrogance made more volatile by forgetfulness.  In this period,  eleven new jets, their crews and passengers, were destroyed in spectacular crashes abroad.     Although Pan-Am would reform its approach to command and develop a stellar safety record,, it couldn’t win back political favor: its old monopoly on international routes was slowly pried away, while the old bar on domestic routes was retained.

Although Pan-Am’s profits dwindled into losses year after year, the  downward spiral seemed to be arrested by another CEO, who closed a lot of low-performing lines and put employees on furlough.  The airline began making money again, only to blow it all  in a bidding war  for a southern airline with domestic routes.  The integration of the two airlines was not handled well,  and from then on Pan-Am’s successive directors kept repeating the other’s mistakes:  they’d sell off a performing asset, use the money badly, and come out worse for the wear.    Pan-Am just couldn’t adapt to slug it out in the domestic markets,   and in gutting its international flights to finance the domestic fight, it essentially consumed itself to death.  Outside matters didn't help, from an oil crunch to an act of very public terrorism that saw Pan-Am Flight 103 smeared across the Scottish countyside. 

I don’t know that any extinct airline enjoys the reputation in death that Pan-Am does, receiving adulation in modern films like Catch Me if You Can and the series Pan-Am.  And then there’s the case of a man who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate a first-class cabin and lounge from a Pan-Am 747 in his garage, then expanded it in a separate building.   Those who remember it -- or those who are simply curious about it -- will find in Skygods an easy but sad  narrative of the airline’s return to Earth.

CBS apparently did a short clip on the anniversary of Pan-Am's closure:

Conquest of the Skies

Conquest of the Skies: A History of Commercial Aviation in America
© 1979 Carl Solberg
441 pages

If ever you wanted a history of commercial aviation in the United States, Conquest of the Skies is it. Beginning with the origins of flight and culminating in the 747, Conquest artfully combines business, social, and technical history. That distinguishes it from other books in this vein, like the tech-focused Turbulent Skies. Written for lay readers, Solberg brackets his history with reflections on how the romance of flight became – through persistent tinkering, reckless adventurism, war, and ambition– a perfectly ordinary form of transportation that shrunk the world, opening global vistas to the multitude.

In the beginning, there was the Post Office. Solberg’s first chapter, of course, is about the Wright brothers’ achievement and the rise of airplane manufacturing in the Great War. The story of commercial aviation picks up in earnest, however, after the war, when the US Postal Service began using the US Army airplanes created for the war to deliver mail. Delivering mail sounds tame and routine, but the early airmail service was anything but. These pilots were still flying by sight, looking for landmarks. In fog they were helpless; in turbulent weather, their canvas-and-wood frames were torn apart. (In 1934, a particularly bad winter caused nearly a crash a day.) Yet the Post Office saw the potential in this sort of delivery, and from this service grew the first commercial air companies. As infrastructure and technology for flying improved – as artificially –lighted “lanes” were created across countrysides, and the problem of aerial radio communication nailed down – a growing number of companies bid for airmail contracts and began creating their own fleets.

Modern readers may recognize the names of companies formed in those days: United and American Airlines are two survivors, and most adults can remember TWA and Pan-Am. Although the airmail contracts allowed for a commercial air company to get started, other opportunities for revenue – like passengers – were required for real expansion. In these days, a flight might carry only a handful of people. Even the larger planes of the pre-jet perio were carrying only 35 at most. In the 1920s, the appeal of air travel was largely in its novelty and speed. No one did it for comfort: in those days, passengers had to suck oxygen from tubes throughout the flight, and were constantly jostled amid turbulence. (The first stewardesses were required to have nurses’ licenses.) As the technology improved, however, the airlines strove to imitate the quality of service aboard Pullman coaches, with meals served on actual plates, and liquor on the house.

World War 2 propelled planes to greater heights, concentrating fifty years of advancement into five. The second world war was an air war, beginning with Stukas and ending with the Enola Gay. From the war came radar, legions of pilots, improved navigation, and steadily-improving aircraft design. More important, however, were the airstrips. In the 1920s, Pan-Am could only cover as much of Latin America as it did through flying boats – “clippers” in a more literal sense than its later landplanes with that name. Boats didn’t need airstrips, just a stable body of water and a dock. But the war had freckled the globe with airstrips, saw airlines other than Pan-Am work the overseas routes, and created interest in what lay beyond the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. When jets entered the picture and airlines began experimenting with an “air coach” model -- carrying a lot of lower fares instead of a few expensive ones -- air travel descended from the clouds of fancy into the real world, a miracle rendered mundane…like automobiles, electricity, radio, and trains before it.

Conquest of the Skies is outstanding popular history, uniting three areas of interest; the birth, growth, and evolution of various airline companies, including their involvement with the government; technical advancement; and the actual experience of flying, from the cramped quarters and head injuries of the 1920s to the cozy comforts of the fifties and sixties. I only wish it went beyond 1963, so Solberg could have documented the flight of the Concorde. While Solberg doesn’t footnote his text, the book concludes with an extensive bibliography.

The Elephant and the Dragon

The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us
© 2007  Robyn Meredith
272 pages

For most of the 20th century, Europe and the United States enjoyed an outsided influence on global trade, in part because  large portions of the world had sealed themselves off, stewing in their own ideological juices and maintaining impoverished populations. As the 20th began to give way to the 21st, however,  the eastern world re-opened. The Elephant and the Dragon begins with a historical note explaining how China and India came to renew their participation in the global economy, then appraises the ways their surging involvement has altered that global system and themselves.  Written and published before the 'great recession' -- observing then things now taken for granted, like offshoring -- the book is presumably not quite as relevant as it was on its publication.  The fundamental transformations Meredith observes, however, are still in effect.

Why the 'elephant and the tiger', instead of 'the Asian tigers'?  Meredith views India's economy as pachydermesque in that while it was slow to get to its feet, slower still to get moving,  it will be all the more harder to stop as it picks up speed.  Its energy will come not from one point -- the Politburo -- but from billions of Indians, driving forward towards the future they want.   India's economic revival came seemingly as a last resort, when in 1992 its leadership recognized that the country was broke.  Although the liberalization that followed allowed India to use its existing resources (a strong number of English-speaking professionals) to better effect,  its lack of more material resources -- infrastructure like highways and modern airports -- prevented it from becoming an instant industrial power like China.   India liberalized at just the right time,  becoming an important part of the expanding information technology sector.  What began with the dot come surge  has continued to the point that India had become the western world's "back office". its workers supplying customer service ,tech support,  computer programming, and the like.  By now (2017), India's economy has grown being merely the support staff of the west, however.

China's own 'liberalization' -- economic, not political -- began in 1978 when Mao's successor realized the middle kingdom was falling far behind the west,  and needed to adopt some of its methods if only out of self defense. (Even during the Mao years, China had learned from Russia's mistakes and so avoided total public control of agriculture.)   Although the communist party's pivot towards capitalism meant ceding constant command of the economy, the Party maintains absolute political control and still 'guides' the economy by establishing long-term goals, like an expansion of the highway system.  Although westerners commonly regard China's trade advantage as being desperately cheap labor, in reality there are many places with cheaper labor.  China combines relatively cheap labor with industrial infrastructure and a government interested in stable growth.

The Elephant and the Dragon is largely oriented toward the world of business, using India and China to illustrate how crucial offshoring and vast supply chains have become to the global economy.  Goods are not simply made in a Chinese factory; they pass from city to city in varying stages of completeness, which is why online retailers can offer so much customization.  "Made in" labels have lost all real meaning, for a given good will have been produced from goods and materials from across Asia, with other components added in by the United States and Europe.  Is a car finished in the United States, but from parts produced in China and Mexico, truly 'made in America'?  

While there are more current books, for someone interested in the course of globalization -- particularly the intermingling of the Asia and western economies -- this is still a good start.

Trade, ancient and modern: from China to the Sharing Economy

Two micro-reviews for you...one on The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia, the other on Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing.

The Silk Road consists of several chapters in central-Asian history, with generous photographs of the landscape or art connected to the region. If readers are interested primarily in the Silk Road's heyday, the volume may be mildly disappointing, as the chapters on exploration, archaeology, and looting in the 'modern' age (19th century and continuing) constitute half the book. There is much of interest, however, and all of that archaeological looting is still firmly connected to central Asia's golden age. I would read it as a supplement to a more substantive history of the Silk Road trade than a history of it, however.

Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing introduces the notion of 'mesh' businesses, which sustain themselves on a great deal of interaction between customers and the business itself, typically involving 'sharing' resources.  Sometimes the business may merely be the platfom through which customers interact with one another -- AirBnB, for instance. The book is written almost as a pitch, urging people in the wake of the Great Recession to consider what kind of mesh businesses they could think of. The author argues that the market is ripe:  because of the recession, trust in traditional brands is or was at an all-time low, and people are more willing to experiment.   Many successful companies were founded amid recessions, says the author, because their founders saw a way to create something useful in the rubble.  Because mesh businesses are all about using goods more efficienctly, they can grow even in an economic crunch: indeed, that's their selling point. Why waste money buying a car when one can be borrowed at-will through Zipcar?  This more efficient use of resources is also more sustainable from an environmental point of view: to use the same example, a Zipcar's pollutants are not only spread out among many people's use, but they and services like Uber mean that cars no longer need to waste their potential sitting around in a parking lot or on the street all day,  consuming space or clogging the arteries of trade.    I found Mesh interesting, but slightly dated, not mentioning services like uber which were technically around back then,but hadn't exploded in popularity the wav they have now.  

Civilian Warriors

Civilian Warriors: the Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung  Heroes of the War on Terror
© 2013 Erik Prince
413 pages

In the 21st century, the line between public and private warfare has gotten a bit fuzzy. I realized this most fully when reading a few cybersecurity books early in the year, mulling over how natural security was imperiled by cyber attacks on private firms or networks, but this fuzziness is also expressed via the world of private military contractors.     Flash back seven or so years ago, when my rage at the debacle in Iraq was white-hot, I would have never read a book about Blackwater, let alone a defense of it from its creator, Erik Prince.  Back then, Blackwater was tantamount with evil. They were lawless mercenaries, the very image of what was wrong with the military-industrial complex.  Finally released from confidentiality agreements, here Prince goes to bat for the company he created and guided through the rocky years of the War on Terror.

I purchased this book because I stumbled upon Erik Prince while listening to some podcast or another, and he sounded perfectly normal. He didn't do an evil laugh even once.  (It helped that the book was on clearance for $6.)  Prince opens with an argument that private military contractors aren't a novelty. His examples are convenient (he cites the Marquis de Lafayette, not the Hessians), but that's to be expected. He also notes that military contractors been put to more use in the 20th and 21st centuries than at any other time, but then wars are a lot more complicated they used to be. There's no more of this telling your peasants with pointy sticks to go stab the peasants with pointy sticks next door, there's logistics and such.  Prince's original idea for Blackwater was to fill the need of the American military for training facilities, since budget cuts closed or limited their options. His training lodge not only provided rented space for shooting ranges, but taught courses to interested service organizations. Prince continually responded to the needs of the US as he saw them in the news, achieving rapid success after the Columbine assaults when he began training police in active shooter response scenarios. (Prince created a school mock-up for them to practice in.)  After al-Queda bombed the USS Cole, Prince acquired a NOAA ship and turned it into a training ship for sailors to practice threat interdiction.

It was their work in Iraq that made Blackwater infamous, however. They entered the area as security guards for the United States' top man in Iraq, Paul Bremer. Later on they would escort other State department officials, and as Iraq was a warzone, that entailed armored vehicles and M4 rifles. As Blackwater grew, it took on other tasks like handling airdrops in their smaller planes. Prince writes that he viewed Blackwater as a military force that had adopted the principles of lean manufacturing, a kind of Fedex to the government's post office.  If Blackwater's security convoys drove aggressively, it was to satisfy their contract stipulations:  no losses. Prince would have practiced more discretion than the government allowed him, but they insisted on ambassadors traveling in flagged SUVs, not beaten-looking Iraqi vehicles. Prince also reviews the several bloody incidents which turned Blackwater into a whipping boy for the Bush administration in the war, arguing that his men were merely defending themselves and that they made for effective scapegoats despite also using their resources  in a few humanitarian causes.

I suspect Prince is correct in maintaining that military contractors aren't going anywhere. In Afghanistan, there are more contractors than US servicemen, and I think it telling that Candidate Obama condemned Blackwater, and then -- when the group served as his security detail in Afghanistan --   President Obama commented that they were getting a 'bad rap'.   If citizens don't want war, but the  security state does, then the obvious thing to do is hire people to do the war bit on the state's behalf, or even better to use drones. Although as a candidate Trump indicated that he was less interested in foreign wars than his competitors,  I wouldn't be surprised if whatever is in the D.C. water leads to military contractors operating discretely in Syria. They're certainly in Iraq now, fighting ISIS -- at least two thousand of them.  They aren't necessarily active combatants, but filling in a lot of the logistics holes that Prince noticed and started finding people to fill here.

I found Prince to be interesting as a man -- rich boy turned volunteer fireman & Navy SEAL, then entrepreneur in his own right --  and his apologia informative about the shifting nature of war as executed   Even if war is a racket, the operation of that racket is worth noting as it changes.

• Related:
• The Heart and the Fist, Eric Greitens. The memoir of a humanitarian turned Navy SEAL, one recently elected as governor of Missouri. 

The Motel in America

The Motel in America
© 1996 Jefferson S. Rogers, John A Jakle, and Keith A. Sculle
408 pages

At some point in high school I pulled out a dictionary to find out what, exactly, was the difference between a motel and a hotel. They seemed much the same to me: "A place to sleep when traveling".  A motel, the dictionary informed me, was typified by guests' easy access to their cars.  It was cars that built motels, or rather motorists: The Motel in America is a history of how the first "auto camps" came into being, in a fairly organic fashion, which follows their maturation from mom and pop shops to national franchises. Also included are special sections on the evolution of the motel room, and a case study of motels and their impact on urban form, using Albuquerque as a case-study.  It's thus a mix of topics with some popular appeal (social history) interspersed with more academic sections, like the comparative brand distribution of various chains.

The story of motels begins decades before the auto-oriented boom of the 1950s,   Americans began touring by car almost as soon as there were roads fit to drive on -- sometimes before --  but downtown hotels didn't lend themselves towards motoring hospitality. They were enmeshed in an urban fabric, after all;  their travelers disembarked from downtown passenger rail stations and got where they needed via trolley or on foot. That 'urban fabric' meant a lot of buildings in a small space, with precious  little to spare for parked automobiles. So people began improvising and camping out on the outskirts, and through the magic of free enterprise, a new business was created to cater to them. One woman who allowed travelers to camp in a grassy area near her gas station put up small cottages for rent -- followed by more cottages, until the cabin rentals were better earners than the gasoline. 'Campgrounds', initially roped-off areas created by cities to keep motor-gypsies from running amok,  attracted food-and-service vendors and quickly became a commercial form in their own right. The first 'motels' were essentially campgrounds with little cottages or cabins that motorists rented for the night; the owner-operators, typically a family, often served meals on the premises. Kentucky Fried Chicken actually began its life as the lunch option of the Sanders Motor Court.

 These auto camps, motor courts, or 'motels' flourished in the Great Depression even as the downtown hotels struggled under the burden of the economy and urban reformers out to destroy them. World War 2 put expansion on pause, but after that -- and especially given the free range of the in-progress interstate system --  the business quickly grew into the network of massive chains  that now fill the continent.  The strings of cabins largely gave way to more space-efficient barracks, though they were organized around pools and prettied up in pastel.While the loss of mom and pop shops can easily be mourned, the chains came into being largely because it was more beneficial for motels to exist as part of a network. That network could be built from the ground up (in the manner of Best Western) or organized from the top down, if  one motel was owned by an especially ambitious and savvy man as in the case of the Alamo line.  Networks of motels could refer travelers along a route to one another,  present a united front against other motels by maintaining uniform standards, and lower their prices through bulk purchases.(They might even purchase the same 'room sets', as furnishings were standardized.)  The authors also cover the franchise approach, used as effectively in motels as in fast food restaurants.

The Motel in America proved itself an interesting little bit of history, demonstrating another facet of the genuinely revolutionary impact automobiles have had on American urbanism. The case study of Albuquerque -- a city which was known primarily as a train layover until it began expanding rapidly through Route 66 and the interstates, with gobs and gobs of motels to service them -- was a welcome surprise.

Related:

• Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in America. Paul Groth
• Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser. Primarily the chapters on auto-oriented restaurants, the first drive-ins. 

Turbulent Skies

Turbulent Skies: The History of Commercial Aviation
© 1995 T. H. Heppenheimer
408 pages

What a century was the 20th, which turned everyday life into the stuff of yesteryear's science fiction. Who would believe at its dawning that one day people would travel the world primarily through the air, soaring through it in great machines made of iron?  Turbulent Skies is a history of commercial aviation in the United States, Great Britain, and (occasionally) Europe. Part of the Sloan Technology Series, it mixes business and social history with extensive commentary on aviation engineering.  Between the generous expanses devoted to airframe and compressor problems to the play-by-play of mergers and expansion plans, Turbulent Skies is a through bit of reference reading.   The author includes as many diagrams of jet engines as he does of the planes themselves, which I found curious.

Turbulent Skies largely focuses on the United States, with occasional chapters on Britain and a few mentions of French and German development.  The chapter on World War 2 features Germany heavily, but this is not a book of aerial strategy; instead, Heppenheimer records the respective powers'  pursuit of jet technology.  (Germany was able to produce the Me-262, a potential fighter that was thankfully squandered as a light bomber.  Considerable resources were diverted from planes to the V2 bombing programs,  again mercifully.)   What leaps out in Turbulent Skies is how utterly the creature of government air travel is. Unlike trains, which had their origin in commercial mining, the first air-commerce companies in the United States  balanced their budgets on mail contracts.  The world wars were likewise a boon to aviation, producing technologies like radar that were put to use in the consumer market. The amount of airplanes produced for military service and then dumped onto the consumer market likewise produced a multitude of small companies buying planes for pennies and trying to build regional empires.  The government  also bankrolled municipal airports and then forbade city governments from making a fuss about the noise. (Mind your business, peasants...)

With such support behind it, little wonder the airplanes had a quick triumph over their transport rivals, the train companies. (The quickness of aerial ascent is made obvious in the life of Juan Trippe: he created Pan-Am in the early days of aviation, and was still its lord and master when the 747 was created.) Of course, air travel had honest advantages -- speed and novelty.  Passenger ships also lost out to the planes, but the industry as a whole survived by shifting its focus to cruises. The seagoing experience, rather than being a comfortable means of transportation, became instead a vacation in itself: the ship was the party.  (Heppenheimer doesn't mention this, but trains tried doubling-down on luxury, too; unfortunately, toodling along at 30 mph speed limits inside cities isn't quite as relaxing as cruising the Caribbean.)     The happy days didn't last forever, though; in the 1970s, oil crises and recession saw some of the mainstays begin to flounder and perish.  The most notable death, prolonged until 1991, was Pan-Am. It  achieved early success by focusing on connecting the United States to the outside world, snagging a government-granted monopoly of the  Central-South American routes.   The recession and energy spike caught Pan-Am at just the wrong time, when it was borrowing billions to launch a vast period of expansion with 747s.  Perhaps it will be revived when we begin passenger service to the Moon.

Though informative, casual readers should be aware this is more about technology and business contracts than the social/human side of air transport.

Related:
Getting There: The Epic Battle Between Road and Rail, Stephen Goddard
The Great Railroad Revolution, Christian Wolmar

Big Box Swindle

Big Box Swindle:  The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses
© 2006 Stacy Mitchell
336 pages

What happened? Where did America go? ..everything's Wal-Mart all the time, no more mom & pop five and dime..

(Merle Haggard, "Where did America Go?)

Growing up in Selma, I was aware of two different 'cities':  one was a coherent downtown core that consisted of attractive if decaying and inactive buildings; the other was a twelve-mile stretch of parking lots, boxes, and neon signs running north of the city proper. We went downtown for the library and courthouse; we went down Highland Avenue for everything else.  Millions of towns across the United States, but especially in the Southeast, have a similar brokenness. They were broken by shining lights, promises of jobs and prosperity, and the lie that this kind of 'progress' is inevitable. Big-Box Swindle exposes the seeming triumph of corporate colonialism not as an inevitable result of market economics, but a  product of tax and  zoning policies pitted against widespread public apathy.  In Swindle, Stacy Mitchell argues that accepting and promoting big-box development is economically self-defeating, and shares the stories of citizens who have taken action to push back.   While unashamedly hostile toward the chain stores, it invites political interest from across the spectrum -- whether from progressives, who fear depressed wages, libertarians who object to the public's money being handed over to private corporations, and conservatives who see  the big-box bulldozers as a threat to community life.

Although the first chain stores appeared in the late 19th century, it wasn't until the federal government began taking a heavy interest in playing with development and transportation that they really took off. From the very beginning, big boxes were supported by big government -- and not just in expected ways. To be sure, when Uncle Sam built interstates out into the country and fixed mortgage practices so that loans inside cities were depressed, and loans outside the city proper encouraged, they benefited -- but that's been covered by all kinds of books, especially Suburban Nation.  Another practice that Mitchell shares is that of the government allowing developers to  write off forty years of building depreciation in only seven to ten years. This urged developers to throw up sites, and abandon them once the tax write-off was no longer available. (This is presumably one reason why Wal-Mart stores have a planned life cycle of sixteen years.) Developers enjoyed (and enjoy) a banquet of political favor: cities buy land for them and sell it to them on the cheap, or better yet seize it under eminent domain and turn it over to development;  most states allow large companies to play tax games with subsidiaries and holding companies, the kind that mean annual tax bills under $300.  And for all that help, these boxes are still propped up by public tax subsidies and  infrastructure  --  roads, power, and water  -- that stress city budgets to the point of bankruptcy, especially when the chains move on and leave a vast parking lot whose wastewater still has to be corralled and treated.

Why did cities do this to themselves? Mitchell argues that most of the reasons offered rarely stand up to scrutiny. The chains' prices aren't particularly lower than their competition, at least not after they've established themselves. At the outset prices are low, mostly to build a customer base.  What is lower are wages, because these stores experience high employee turnover and have zero interest in investing in them.  Because independent stores operate on a margin, even losing 10% of their business is enough to send them reeling into bankruptcy. What's worse, because the chains are part of a national network, they don't bother integrating themselves into the local economy. They're not buying products from local factories,  using local ad agencies,  law firms, and banks. Home Office handles that.  They don't even provide jobs, so much as claim existing ones -- just as they claim the existing demand for their wares.    People's communities become nothing more than dots on a map to be conquered by a national strategy: Wal-Mart, for instance, likes to saturate an area with stores and then close redundant ones once it has become the apex.

Mitchell's concern isn't merely with the local economy and the private use of public money; she has a passionate interest in the communal welfare of people, of the ties that bind us to our neighbors and enrich our lives. Independently owned businesses and their employees are invested in the local community; their taxes support the services, and if their parking lot poisons the water, their owner's kids are drinking it.  At times, she borders on the romantic, bringing to mind You've Got Mail: the small business owners love their customers and carefully choose what they might offer, and have long heartfelt conversations with everyone. The box stores leave you to read labels by yourself, and if you're not buying then get out already.   Mitchell's overt hostility toward the chains means they can do nothing right: at one point, she scolds Wal-Mart for being discriminatory about its stock, choosing not to carry gangsta rap cds;  several pages later she gripes against Blockbuster for not discriminating, and carrying dozens of copies of the latest Hollywood production regardless of its quality, while offering only a few copies of an independent film. Well, dear author, should they be picky about what they stock, or shouldn't they?

Big Box Swindle offers a lot of room for thought, and I approached it with caution. I knew I would be predisposed to agree with the author on some points, being a locally-oriented person, but that same small-is-beautiful stance also made me wary what she might declare as the solution:  federal legislation.  They're the ones who helped create the problem, so my suspicion is that corporations will happily co-opt whatever legislation comes down the pike.  D.C. is their city, not the people's. Happily, however, she doesn't. Oh, she mentions D.C. as a redoubt against the worst of corporate abuses, but the 'solutions' third of her book is almost wholly citizen-politics. There she recounts people organizing to protect their communities against outside colonization, either by changing zoning and tax laws to discourage big-box development, or by banding together in business cooperatives to compete with the boxes' economy of scale.  The closest she comes to urging for national legislation is calling for the states to work together to close off certain tax loopholes.  The focus on local activism means a true empowerment of local communities -- of people becoming the primary actors within their own lives, and not just content to let some bull-in-a-china-shop federal agency try to do it for them.



Related:

• The Strong Towns organization, the founder of which (Chuck Marohn) has illustrated that low-density auto-oriented development, the home field of big boxes, is a tax sinkhole. 
• The Small-Mart Revolution, Michael Shuman
• The Wal-Mart Effect, Chates Fishman
• Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Shell

Now the stores are lined up in a concrete strip

You can buy the whole world in just one trip

Save a penny cause it's jumbo size

They don't even realize

They're killin' the little man

Oh, the little man...

(Alan Jackson, "The Little Man")

Living Downtown

Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States
© 1994 Paul Groth
399 pages

Although today hotels are thought of as places for travelers, at its most basic level a hotel is simply a rented room; an apartment without a kitchen. For much of American history,  the 'huddled masses' filling the cities found homes not in detached houses, but in residential hotels.  Buildings giant and small, dilapidated and grand, they catered to the rich and poor alike. Living Downtown examines what lives were like, as lived in different classes of hotels, and tracks their struggle through the 20th century as they became the target of reformers.  This is a social history of urban life in American cities' boomtime.

Suburbanized America thinks of apartments and the like as exceptions to the rule of privately-owned homes, but as Living Downtown reveals, communal life has a strong history in the nation. Wealthy families saw in hotels a place to enjoy servants without the bother of managing them; ambitious middle-class couples could claim a fashionable address and the opportunity to network with their betters; and the working class found a certain independence in cheap rents that allowed them to move easily in pursuit of work, or maintain lodgings even if they were laid off for a short time. Hotels ranged from grand palaces to 2-penny a day flophouses that even the indigent could afford, provided they found an odd job now and again. Hotels also offered more inherent opportunities for socialization;  those midrange and above typically came with cafes, restaurants, and shops attached;  the wealthy could even find rooms reserved for smoking and lounging about.  Lowly flophouses wouldn't sport such facilities, of course, but they were enmeshed in an urban fabric that catered to the needs of their guests.

Living Downtown finds in hotels abounding interest. After  discussing the lifestyles and attractions of the different classes of hotels, Groth moves on to hotels' place in the overall American fabric. Hotels attracted negative attention beginning the Progressive era, where helpful reformers took it upon themselves to clean up American cities and inflict morality upon them.  The idea that rich society wives could lounge about in hotel parlors, not even bothering to keep house, was too much for reformers to bear, as was the inevitable use of hotels of all kinds as playgrounds for prostitution. Establishing and advancing the ideal of American society being rooted in privately-held, detached homes,  the progressive era saw hotels first constricted in growth by regulation, then smothered altogether by aggressive zoning laws that would eventually attempt to deconstruct American cities, turning smartly-organized social arrangements into sprawl. Granted, there were areas that needed attention -- especially in the area of waste sanitation in poorer hotels -- but more has been lost than gained by idealistic zeal.  In addition to social history, there's a little discussion of business practices.

In 21st century America, where the market for cheap housing  has been all but obliterated by aggressive Federal support for welfare tenements of the kind that destroy cities, Living Downtown is a vivid reminder of the variety of housing approaches that once existed, and a look back into American cities when they were truly dynamic from the ground up.

The Small Mart Revolution

The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition
© 2007 Michael Shuman
285 pages

Independence has long ceased to be the American credo, supplanted by another: efficiency. Throughout the 20th century, small businesses supporting towns and families were devoured by larger firms, big businesses who gave little back to the communities they colonized other than an infrastructure burden and a handful of jobs. But Michael Shuman holds that it ain't over yet, and in The Small-Mart Revolution this entrepreneur argues that the titans have achilles' heels and citizens still have a choice.  A combination of economic study and political jeremiad, Revolution is concise and feisty.

Shuman establishes a dichotomy early on; this is a story of TINA versus LOIS.  TINA is the there-is-no-alternative mentality, the approach the United States has taken on in the modern age; it is the path of chasing and relying on big businesses for jobs, of sublimating the local economy to the globe. LOIS is the alternative, the locally-owned, import-substituting approach. Shuman begins with arguments for LOIS against TINA;  not only do big firms invariably disappoint those who hunt them,  accepting tax breaks and infrastructure put in on their behalf, only to skip town when another city offers an even better deal -- but the money they produce is lost to the host community. A Wal-Mart store forwards its take to Bentonville, Arkansas;  it doesn't invest it in local banks, and most of the wealth is spent elsewhere. Money spent at a local firm, however, owed and staffed by locals, is subject to a multiplier effect.  There are other considerations, like the folly of depending on fragile systems for vital resources. Why should a town rely on food shipped in from California when its own fields can produce enough to support the population?  Shuman is not blind to David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage -- that given communities and places are better at doing some things than others, so towns that have fields and mineral deposits might be better off plopping down a mineral-using factory on those fields and having the food shipped in from a place that only has food to specialize in. This makes perfect sense when thinking about people who want oranges in Michigan; the cost of growing them in greenhouses would be prohibitively expensive when they can buy from Florida and California.  But why should people in Alabama buy pork from the Carolinas when only a generation ago, farms that incorporated livestock and agriculture were the norm?  There are factors other than cost to consider, writes Shuman;  shipping food from one side of the continent to the other is a waste of resources and an abusive of the environment, but the chief fact remains that we can't rely on the world's perpetual stability. Sooner or later a  wrench is going to be thrown into the global economy; it may be a financial crisis or peak oil,  but disruptions are inevitable. Centralization can be efficient up to a point,  but decentralization is the option for health and safety.  Reinvigorating local economies will not only restore vitality to our communities, but is prudent for national security as well.

All that is easy enough to say, but how is it to be done? Sure, a city in Alabama can buy local food --but local shoes? Local computers?   For Shuman, the purely-local economy is a hopeless ideal;  he doesn't wholly condemn big businesses, either,  but regards dependence on them as folly. If lessons can be taken from their business practices, so much the better, but his mission is to restore vitality to local communities, an impossible task without restoring the local economy. After making his initial case, Shuman offers advice on how citizens, small businesses, public officials, national leaders, and even globally-minded persons can rely on and expand local economies.. Chapters are committed to each, and end with a list of actions each kind of activist can pursue.  Individual steps are obvious; visit farmers markets, use local hardware stores, invest money in credit unions -- but business owners can ally together in cooperatives to gain some of the advantages of the Goliaths without compromising themselves or their places. Shuman also explores territory outside the usual advice by urging people to invest locally,  something not easy given legal structures that favor the New York exchange.  Dismantling the obstacles to helping big business flourish, from zoning laws to financial support for corporations that are wealthy enough to pay for their own parking lots, is also key.

This is in short quite an interesting book, of considerable interest to those concerned about the wellbeing of their communities, especially their economies.  While no community will ever stop participating in the global economy so long there is wind to fill the sails of ships,  providing more needs locally is a surer course to  curbing high unemployment and staying adaptable than TINA. Prudence is demanded, but Shuman offers ways we can restore communities without falling too much afoul of economic reality.

Related:
Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn. His blog has commented on growing local jobs rather than
Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale
The work of Wendell Berry, especially Home Economics
Suburban Nation,  Andres Duany et. al
Eaarth, Bill McKibben

Power, Inc

Power, Inc: the Epic Rivalry between Government and Big Business
© 2013 David Rothkopf
448 pages

     

Historians of western civilization are used to viewing its late medieval and early modern period through the lens of a church versus state battle; the reformation owes as much to the desire for German princes to be free of the Roman pontiff’s command as it does belief  in theological purity.  Concurrent with the battle between Crown and cathedral, however, was another war; one between the crown and commerce. In Power, Inc, Alexander Rothkopft gives a history of the modern world, of the economic tides that eventually created polities greater than many states: corporations. The history, which covers economic entanglement in wars of the period as well as the evolution of Law, doubles as a plea for sharper control of corporations by the government. 

      Although Rothkopf draws on a variety of examples throughout the work, his anchor is the Stora corporation. Granted a charter in 1347, what began as a copper-mining operation turned Sweden into a power to be reckoned with during the Thirty Years War, but outlived its beneficiary by continuing to adapt to the modern world long after Sweden had been overshadowed once again by Germany, France, and England.  Although the economic forces unlocked by the scientific and industrial revolutions were initially used primarily for the benefit of the king,  governments soon lost control; the developing rule of law in modernizing country soon triumphed over the king's will, but instead of protecting all parties the law  in America eventually became the faithful servant of corporations. Granted fictional personhood, and all the rights (but none of the responsibilities) thereof,  corporations became 'super citizens' whose globetrotting power now rivals the majority of nations. Loyal to none and increasing free of legal restraints (courtesy of globalization),  their might has prompted nation-states to adopt their methods   But countries are not businesses, and if maximizing economic profitability becomes the standard for good governance we will be in a bad way, riven even more by inequality and utterly beholden to economic titans.

     Power is organized smartly,  linking a breadth of information;  this is a lesson in the rise of the rule of law from military might and kings as well as the tale of the global economy's transition from medieval marketplaces to fiendishly complex financial markets.  The golem-like creation of corporations delivers appropriate horror, but Rothkopf sees the battle between states and corporations as one sided, with corporations cast as the villains and governments diminished victims. Although he mentions the revolving door that sees corporate executives occupying seats within the government 'overseeing'  the businesses they once worked for, and will again when they are out of office,  the way government is used to increase the power of corporations -- through subsidies, or through legislation that smothers smaller businesses but leaves the big-business beasts intact --  are absent altogether. Sterner regulation, even when applied through global bodies, will only lead to more of the same. 

Power, Inc doesn't quite live up to its name  in giving an account of people being pawns between government and business, but it does offer a look as to how corporations are becoming utterly lawless in the global era. 

Related:
No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, better anti-corporate books by Naomi Klein

Why We Buy

Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
© 1997, 2008 Paco Underhill
Simon and Schuster
320 pages

No book on marketing, Why We Buy is an introduction to the novel field of retail anthropology. Young Paco Underhill was once an urban studies student assigned to monitor traffic flow down a given street.  Watching pedestrians interact with the shopping displays and vendors lining it, he had an idea; why not watch the shoppers,  and figure out what about  the goods and services on offer attracted them, and what didn’t?  What made certain products fly off the shelf and others not? That idea was the genesis of his now-successful EnviroSell company, a global operation that’s let him study malls and markets in nearly every continent.  In Why We Buy, he shares some of what he’s learned, offering readers a fascinating look into their own behavior as shoppers.

Why We Buy might as well be titled How We Shop, starting out with an explanation of why its insights may be of value. A store measuring the success a product through sales receipts may be able to say how healthy those sales are, but it can't explain how they were made in the first place, nor is it aware of the opportunities possibly missed. That's where Underhill comes in, studying shoppers' behavior on the floor at length,  using cameras to monitor displays and having paid trackers follow people around in shops noting their every move. It sounds creepy, voyeuristic even, but to Underbill it's strictly business. In three core sections, Underhill explains how the mechanics of human bodies affects the shopping experience, studies demographics and the shopping experience, and examines the 'dynamics' of shopping.  The author's approach is almost like that of a benevolent zookeeper, watching how humans interact with the environment and then offering suggestions as to how it can changed to make them more comfortable and increase sales.  In a chapter that stresses the importance of hands for shopping, Underhill outlines a better strategy for placing shopping baskets than dumping them all in the front: they would be more effective dispersed throughout the store, to be more available to people who started out intending to pick up an item or two but who see more of interest and don't pursue it because their hands are full.  Although shopkeepers may not see it as their job to provide conveniences outside their wares -- seats in a Victoria's Secret, for instance --  humans are an adaptive species whose attempts to meet their needs on their own may disrupt the store.  When waiting husbands and boyfriends decided to claim the window sills of a benchless lingerie store as seats to rest, they spooked every shopper who was adverse to the notion of shopping for bras under a panel of male eyes.  The same is true for items attractive only to children which are placed on top shelves; wouldn't you know it but children have figured out how to stack and climb? So much for the integrity of displays when boxes are tugged out to provide a boost!

Although the information and insights presented here are no doubt valuable to retailers who want to improve their business environment (the book is quoted even in Planning the Modern Public Library) ,  that information is entertaining in its own right. We're a species very much interested in ourselves, and our behavior while shopping is just as respectable as our behavior within a city, in a war, or on a date. I saw myself in more than a few of the observations here, like the overwhelming majority of shoppers who approach a phone and pick it up, not seriously expecting a dial tone but listening intently anyway.  Underhill doesn't seem himself as a marketer, but as an anthropologist, and his anecdotes -- as funny as they are -- only illustrate statistical data.  When he moves away from the data his credibility sharply diminishes; at one point he refers to the reader 'knowing' that grocery stores put staples on the perimeter so that shoppers will be distracted by other goods on the way to them, then uses this to write about products being used as bait for other products. The problem there is that milk and other fresh produce are kept in the back because they're highly perishable and need to be close to the loading bays; there's more to business management than marketing. The book's greatest weakness is a chapter on e-commerce in which Underhill defends his claim in the original book that electronic shopping isn't that big a deal. It's understandable that Underhill would have little to offer on the subject, as his methods don't apply. But to say that online businesses play a minor role or haven't yet devised a means of efficient delivery. in an age where services like Amazon Prime are forcing even big-box stores to shutter up, is fantastically erronous.  He would have been better served conceding the point instead of standing by the indefensible.  Following the dotcom burst in 1997, scoffing at internet retailing is well and good, but in 2007?  That chapter aside, the book is great fun and offers a look at  how commerce will continue to be increasingly dominated by women and aging boomers. 

The Fear Index

The Fear Index
© 2009 Robert Harris
304 pages

Dr. Alexander Hoffman is a brilliant physicist-turned-financier who may be losing his mind.  It’s not as if the software he designed to manage investments in stocks, securities, and the like isn't still successful; it’s turned him into one of the wealthiest men in town, and in Geneva, Switzerland, that’s saying something. It’s just that strange things keep happening, like a book arriving in the post which he apparently bought, using a bank account he had no idea existed, and the fellow trying to eat him.  A near-fatal break-in and a series of inexplicable incidents  unsettle the doctor, on the verge of making a business deal that would catapult him into Scrooge McDuck-like wealth.  To make matters worse, the software he designed is acting increasingly erratic; it’s always had a mind of its own (it originated, after all, from Hoffman’s research into autonomous machine reasoning, or AI), but lately it’s been acting absolutely mental. Billions and billions of dollars are at stake: this is no time for the man of the hour and his ultimate computer to start  setting things on fire. The Fear Index is the tale of Hoffman’s  and the global economy’s dive into madness. Harris' gifts for writing thrillers, usually in historical settings with The Ghost excepting,, translate well to this interesting mix of science fiction and business. The reader is kept as baffled and increasingly alarmed at what's happening to the doctor,  and Harris cleverly ties the novel's events to real-world financial happenings, making this historical fiction of a sort.  He also provides a twist ending that doesn't spoil all the fun, one which leaves readers pondering at what monster has been awakened even as the storyline's problems are resolved.  It's not as stellar as his other works, limited in part by the odd mix of genres, but it's still a fine psycho-adventure.

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.