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. 

A Consumers' Republic

A Consumers' Republic
© 2002 Lizbeth Cohen
576 pages

What is the meaning of citizenship? To the Romans, and to the early Americans, citizenship was an exclusive state of being that depended on owning land, and so a stake in society. In the early twentieth century, however, as suffrage waxed more universal and markets were flooded with goods made for the masses, citizenship took on a different meaning. To be a citizen of a modern, capitalist  democracy was to be a Consumer;  voices rang out most strongly at the marketplace, not the ballot box.  In A Consumer's Republic, author Lizbeth Cohen examines the way the burgeoning consumer market effected political activism.  Beginning with consumer activist groups who protested high prices amid the Depression, her history examines the Civil Rights and feminist movements through the lens of consumption.  Consumer equality, not income distribution, would create a classless society. Women fought for the right to have their own bank accounts and lines of credit in addition to equal wages;  blacks labored for just prices in stores as well as unhindered access to the vote.  This is an account of social, political, marketing history, intertwined together.  Consumption didn't just serve individual desires; as Keynsianism became the dominant economic philosophy, intellectuals and citizen-consumers alike saw their compulsive buying as not only fun, but patriotic: their every new gadget grew the economy.  The consumers' republic began to die in the 1970s  and 1980s amid economic turbulence; even though people continued to buy more and more,  the political aspect of their purchasing, the meaning they had given it, fell away, both because the economy no longer responded as Keynes promised and their motives became more purely self-focused and only tangently connected to the thought of improving the nation's fortunes.

  Although occasionally touching on the negative aspects of the rapidly expanding consumer culture -- the growth of suburbia, for instance --  A Consumers' Republic is not a polemic raging against consumerism, and effects open to interpretation,  like the consequences of consumerism on citizens' peace of mind, are not touched on. It has a scholarly feel, though a 'popular' look;  the art is well-done, including plenty of large black and white photographs that demonstrate the point at hand, and stylized headings that bring to mind advertisements from the 1950s. One particularly effective illustration shows the evolution of advertising in Ebony magazine from the 1950s to the 1970s, as white-owned haircare manufactures realized that (1) blacks were a market and (2) that black people were a different market. They gradually transition from a white model demonstrating hair treatment lotion to a black model advertising products related to 'natural' hair.   Republic is a fascinating look at another side of the rise of consumption,  impressively thorough in that respect, and free of scathing criticism if not critical substance.

Free to Choose, Born to Buy (and Left to Die)

In the past two weeks I've been reading a series of books which connected together despite being on disparate subjects. Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, published in the 1970s, argues for a completely free market -- that is, one with no regulations, tariffs, government licenses, public financing, etc. Friedman follows initial chapter on the power of markets with sections that compare the effects of government attempts to improve safety,  protect consumers against defective products, raise wages, etc.  Time and again he made good points about market efficiency,  but the general attitude advocated is extreme. Friedman is not nearly as extreme as other free marketeers: he respects the potential power of monopolies and advocates for free trade so that potential monopolies are always disrupted from outside, and  (staggeringly, for the 1970s) acknowledges environmental hazards.  Although I'm often tempted to agree with him on principle, in practice caution is warranted. While Friedman is correct in pointing out that people who buy defective products will not be likely to purchase them again,  consumer-driven corrective measures aren't always the best. What would he make of malware, for instance, which invades people's computers and then pretends to be an anti-virus program, which will rid the obvious infection for a fee?   On the whole, this work makes the same arguments as Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, but Sowell was far more thorough.

A much different view was taken by Juliet Shor, whose Born to Buy examined the commercialization of childhood. After providing a history, an overview of the tactics, and an examination the consequences, Shor argues -- pleads, as a parent -- for regulation and taxation to reign in the corporate invasion of schools, the ubiquity of product placement in television, the insidious attitude in advertising that encourages kids to not only seek approval by buying things, but to assert their coolness by badgering their parents into buying them the latest and greatest -- advertising that blames the parents for being  mean and the cause of their child's misery if they don't. Released in the same year as Susan Linn's Consuming Kids,  Shor's work contains more concrete data, but is not quite as helpful:  Linn focused on especially destructive themes and counseled parents on how they could make decisions in their household and in conversations with their children to counter consumerism and premature sexualization.  Shor largely passes by  media sexualization and only looks at government regulation to reign in the abuse. Considering that the Supreme Court regards corporation as people who can dump however money they'd like into elections,  I would not count the US government as an ally in this fight.   Born to Buy is still very much worth reading, though, just for the numerous interviews with marketing execs, many of whom (parents themselves) left the business when they could no longer reconcile their work with their consciences. (With good reason:  their usurpation of child psychology and carefully planned invasions of home and school borders on villainy.)  A quotation from one:

"Banks [,a marketing agent], believes buzz practitioners are just getting started.
'We'll have ten or fifteen more ways of encircling the consumer in ten years [...] surrounding almost every move you make, that would be the ideal.' Asked about consumers who didn't like being marketed to, Banks didn't hesitate. 'Covert messaging. Use their friends.'"

Born to Buy was published in 2004. Nine years later, 'Banks' must surely be pleased with the ubiquity of facebook, which converts our friends' passions into ads for us, projected across the internet via plugins.

And lastly there was The Working Poor: Invisible in America, which profiled the millions in America who do their damndest to fulfill the promise of the American dream, but cannot seem to escape poverty.  David Shipler attempts to find out why, and realizes the answer is...complicated! Yes, shockingly, a societal problem has nuance. Poverty cannot be reduced to bad character nor oppression inherent in the system. Instead, it's a little of both. More extensive comments on this piece will follow this week.

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.

Brand Failures

Brand Failures: the Truth about the 100 Greatest Branding Mistakes of All Time

© 2003 Matt Haig

310 pages

        What helps a brand succeed – or makes it fail? Brand Failures attempts to divine out the secrets to success by examining one hundred products or companies which have tanked. Some were new, others ancient, still others new ventures backed by established titans – but failure comes to all.  Each of the book’s one hundred sections features a different American or British brand. The sections vary in length: New Coke, which starts the work off, features a history of Coca-Cola and Pepsi’s competition, setting the stage for why Coca-Cola made the decision it to rework its product, but the book’s midpoint is taken by a series of paragraph-long sections which are more a list of humorous advertising mistranslations than proper chapters. The longer chapters end in list of lessons learned, from the patently obvious (“Advertising is important”) to the more insightful (“Don’t clone your competitors”) .  Some of the lessons conflict: while the author asserts at the start that in the Age of Branding,  actual products matter little compared to the power of the brand, the way it makes people feel.  Hence, while people in blind taste tastes may have preferred New Coke to classic coke and Pepsi,  when the actual product was rolled out, people acted poorly: it wasn’t the coke they had been brought up with. They had been told “Coke is It”, and were now expected to believe that Coke wasn’t It.  

         Despite the author’s deemphasizing the value of a product, numerous examples demonstrate that it can’t be ignored, either.  Haig uses Beta-Max and VCR to back up his belief that quality isn’t particularly important: while he stresses the audio and video quality of the Betamax tapes,  his account also mentions the fact that whole movies could not fit on such tapes.  The quality of the picture doesn’t equal the quality of the product overall.   To whom these lessons are to be imparted is uncertain. While they’re ostensibly aimed at business personalities attempting to launch or expand a brand, would such personalities really be reading a work written for popular audiences?  Wouldn’t marketing executives be paying more attention to marketing journals?  I’m particularly interested in the way marketing works so I can evade its tricks, but I found the work more entertaining as one of business history, for some of the products released were truly weird. In the 1950s, for instance, Dodge produced a car marketed for women: called La Femme and covered in pink inside and out, with floral patterns on the seats, it looked like something even Mattel would  be reluctant to foist on Barbie. (The lesson of this section: don’t patronize customers.)

            This breezy and entertaining book may be of use to budding entrepreneurs, but I suspect most readers who be those wanting to be amused by business misadventures, which it certainly provides.

Salt, Sugar, Fat

Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
© 2013 Michael Moss
480 pages

Between the fresh produce, meat, and dairy sections that ring the perimeter of the average supermarket,  millions of unique foodstuffs are offered and advertised. But their apparent variety is a lie, for the bulk of these food products are nothing more than combinations of  three additives: salt, sugar, and fat. In this book named after the unholy trinity,  author Michael Moss  offers a history of how these additives came to dominate so much of the American, and now global, diet, one which also examines the nutritional consequences of each. Its combination of dietary science, history, marketing, and politics signals out a few products in particular (Lunchables take a beating) and pose the question: if the creators of these products avoid eating them, why shouldn’t we?

I developed an avid interest in this topic after my doctor urged me to reduce my salt intake, a bit of advice that led to me avoiding supermarket interiors in general, preparing most of my meals from fresh produce and meat. Avoiding salt meant avoiding almost everything else, from obvious junk food like potato chips to ‘health’ food like cereal and canned vegetables.  I started losing four pounds a week, eventually a little over 120 after four months. The lesson that processed foods are a health catastrophe, evidenced in the book, needs no further development for me, but Salt, Sugar, and Fat was doubly interesting for given so much attention to how these foods were marketed. Although companies like Coca-Cola whine about consumer choice when government entities attempt to regulate them with a view towards improving the public’s health, their self-serving defense of free choice is given the lie by their deliberate attempts to cultivate cravings for their specific products,  both through advertising saturation and by adding ingredients which light up the pleasure centers of our brain and compel us to see more, even at our own demise. Can a nicotine addict really say his continuing purchase of cigarettes is one made freely?  The 20th century has turned this trio of elements, each healthy in the right proportions, into narcotics. (Fittingly, many of the food companies featured in the book are owned by a tobacco company, Phillip Morris.)

But these companies -- General Mills,, Kraft, Pepsi, and others -- depend on these additives for more than enticing customers to come back again and again.  They need food that can stay on the shelves for weeks and months, surviving trips across the  globe on ship and truck,  and taste and feel exactly the same way time after time.  That means preservatives like salt and sugars, and it also means denaturing the foods so they don’t go and rot, and then applying more stable fat to make sure no taste is lost.  Salt, sugar, and fat not only alter the taste of foods: they change their appearances and how they feel in our mouths. Moss is given the opportunity to try name-brand products offered without the additives, and never records a positive experience: one might as well be eating soggy cardboard for all the pleasures these ‘foods’ bring.   In the light of such experiences, one can’t help but agree with Michael Pollan, who refuses to call things like Cheez-Its  food, and who instead refers to them as edible, food-like products.   If these items taste so abhorrent without the inclusion of ingredients harmful to our health in these amounts, why exactly are we eating them?


While the  aggressive marketing of these goods and their physically addicting nature is largely to blame, it helps that they’re convenient and  cheap, far cheaper than ‘real’ food.  Although on the whole Salt, Sugar, and Fat is a robust book, it misses a step when Moss tries to work out the solution: he never mentions the subsidies that allow additives like high-fructose corn syrup (featured in the Sugar section) to be so cheap on the shelves to the consumer, and thus more enticing to parents with a tight budget than bunches of red-leaf lettuce and broccoli. Considering that Moss spends time demonstrating how parts of the national government are at odds with one another -- one urging us to consume more of the same product to help "American farmers", while another urges us to consume less for health reasons -- it would have fitted in there nicely. Another answer to the mystery of our eating trash is the magic of branding: Naomi Klein's excellent No Logo demonstrated how certain companies have gotten rich not by producing quality products, but by effectively mystifying people, by associating their products with good feelings, popularity, or wealth, and the importance of brand loyalty pops up several times through this text.

Salt, Sugar, and Fat  makes a powerful case against processed foods, one which those with an interest in health (or marketing) will find fascinating.


Related:
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
Why We Get Sick, Nesse and Williams
American Mania: When More Isn't Enough, Peter Whybrow
No Logo, Naomi Klein
In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

Mmm, dopamine!

No Logo

No Logo: the Case Against the Brand Bullies 

© 1999, 2009; Naomi Klein

544 pages

The political and financial turmoil of the past few years have seen a rising tide of anger targeted against the political power of wealthy corporations. Little wonder: since the crisis erupted in 2007, millions have lost their jobs, yet the corporate officers of these failing businesses continue to award themselves extravagant bonuses, in some cases with taxpayers' money.  And there is no help to be found in the government;  anti-corporate protesters in New York and elsewhere have been set on by police, and the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be "people", whose freedom of speech in the form of campaign donations should not be limited in the least. (And those actual people who express their own freedom of speech by impeding corporate actions? If their protests are judged to have caused $10,000 in losses, they are deemed domestic terrorists and join the 10% of Americans already in prison.) No Brand  is a sharp criticism of corporations, but one from a different era. First published in 1999, she scrutinizes brand corporations first for their business model, which emphasizes style rather than substance, before examining their invasion of public space and notorious legacy of abusive labor practices.

As a child, I scoffed at my classmates’ obsession with the Nike brand. My derision was born not of any preternatural consumer consciousness; my parents simply were not the kind to pay for overpriced t-shirts. For that is what they were; a Nike t-shirt is not made of magic cotton that repels water, heals wounds, or bestows upon its wearer +2 Armor. The same is true of its synthetic products, aimed toward actual athletes: while they may wick sweat and keep users comfortable, they do it no better than those manufactured by Champion or generic brands. Nike has never advertised its gear on the basis of superiority, like washing detergent. And yet early this spring, when shopping for athletic clothes, I went to Amazon and simply typed in “Nike”. I was interested in all manner of sports apparel, and Nike…was sports.

Therein lies the basis of Klein’s criticism.  Brand companies aren’t about quality, they’re about Ideas, and consumers are not paying money for superior merchandise but are instead buying into an image of themselves, of something they want to be. It’s a formula that has given religions and political ideologies success for thousands of years, and today it is the approach of almost every major corporation. But because their products don’t advertise themselves the way quality products might, these brand corporations have to push their product aggressively, and in the section “NO SPACE”, Klein details how brands are using not just conventional media, but putting up advertisements in schools. While parents might merely resent a company taking advantage of a financially struggling school system to hawk its shoes,  this branded invasion is literally dangerous when school cafeterias become hosts to McDonalds annexes and Coca-Cola gains exclusive distribution rights. Children become a captive audience to advertising; their values are those introduced not by parents or concerned teachers, but marketing execs who are grooming the next generation of consumers.

 Because the companies chiefly concern themselves with pushing their Image, and give little attention to the manufacturing side of things, rampant labor abuses escape their notice completely. The abuses are familiar to anyone conversant with the term sweat shop:  long hours, marginal pay, no rights, and no tolerance for anyone who resists the abuse. Even in countries which have something resembling human rights laws, they are often moot where corporations are concerned. In the Philippines, for instance, there exist economic development zones, little islands of virtually zero regulation where the only rules governing corporations are those they impose upon themselves. Shockingly, with their only motivation being profit margins, exploitation is rife.

But in the United States and Europe, citizens’ groups are working to give these companies another motivation. In “NO LOGO”, Klein covers the growth of activism against these companies, showing how boycotts and government actions have forced Nike and other companies to take responsibility for the labor costs involved in their products. This activism isn’t limited to aging hippies or idealistic college students, either: certain groups have met success in stirring up anger in decaying urban areas, among young black men who dream of making a success of themselves by wearing Nike shoes.

 No Logo is as mature a critique of brand corporations as one might ask for – sharply pointed, but not a screed. She builds her arguments up slowly and steadily, allowing the facts to present the case instead of passion.  The result is disturbing and damning, yet encouraging. Definitely a work to remember. (For those who have read the original, Klein updates it with a section that declares President Obama to be the first superbrand president...with the problems therein.)

Something from the Oven

Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

306 pages

© 2004 Laura Shaprio

     The latter half of the 20th century saw the United States convulsed with social change. Millions of women and blacks who found their role temporarily elevated during the Second World War, when they were called upon to serve in uniform and in the factories, could not simply return to being second-class citizens after war’s end. In Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in the 1950s, Laura Shapiro covers the beginnings of women’s liberation and the feminist movement in the context of America’s changing food market, bookending the text with the question: do women like to cook?

            Initial previews led me to believe this book’s subject was the changing food market itself:  an industry that had to meet the demand for food that could be safely shipped around the world to follow the Allied armies found itself at war’s end with a lot of output and nowhere to sell it  -- unless the civilian market could be expanded considerably.  To do that, advertisers had to convince women to accept their TV trays as dinner, and their new confections as real food. They urged women to reconsider what cooking meant as a craft when women were already beginning to question what cooking and homemaking meant to their lives in general. What did it mean to be a woman?

            Women were not altogether excited to adopt the new foodstuffs. Despite food magazines’ almost-triumphant declaration that old-fashioned cooking was dead, defeated by Scientific Progress,  those same magazines’ letters reveal that women were still looking for traditional recipes. They added the novel products in sparingly, as substitutes for the “real thing”. It was not until the mid-to late fifties when another generation of women came of age – women who, as children, ate the new processed foods without judgment and regarded them as normal – that the substitutes started gaining more traction and replacing the ‘real thing’ in regular use.  Similarly, women reappraising their own role in the home did so at first only reluctantly, until the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminnine Mystique spotlighted the “problem with no name” – and gave women the courage to start speaking  more stridently.  Shapiro sees women as coming of age in this period, and their changing relationship with food reflected this. Cooking would not define their lives, but they would also not be patronized to by businesses which attempt to reduce their role in the house to that of simply warming up product from the grocery store.  Cooking was a skill to take pride in, and ultimately women triumph in Shapiro's narrative by becoming the arbiters of both how to incorporate novelty and tradition, and of their own fates.

             Something from the Oven is a bit like gazing through near-transparent stained glass. The food market is certainly an interesting lens to view the birth of feminism through, but unlike a telescope, here the lens -- like stained glass -- is visible, and sometimes it got in the way of the focus on women. This is a book about women and feminism, but culinary marketing and food culture sometimes overshadow the main subject, so the essential point of the book never comes into sharp focus despite appearing very interesting. It's fascinating, yet frustrating.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
© 2012 Peggy Orenstein
260 pages

When did every little girl become a princess to be bedecked in pink and fawned over? Such is the question posed by Peggy Orenstein, author of numerous books on issues of motherhood and raising women. The answer is at least twofold. First, advertising toward girls in general has emphasized coy, yet overt sexuality, even to the very young: and secondly, in the early 1990s, the Disney Corporation realized there was a lot of money to be had in developing a line of princess goods.  But this isn't really a book on advertising: Orenstein is more concerned about what the princess culture is doing to the minds of girls. The substance of the book is an examination of  how girls view themselves and each other in society.

 What makes a princess special? There's no answer. A princess is special just because. She exists solely to be an object of attention: her specialness is not the result of her accomplishments, her skills, her talents, her character, or anything substantial.Therein lies the problem with the princess culture, for it influences girls to aspire to be objects of appreciation. Their sense of self-worth is an external fair, subject not to what girls feel themselves capable of, but how girls feel others respond to them. If they are not regarded as Special, they feel worthless. Distracted by the quest for attention, they don't bother with the kind of self-growth that would merit attention, or  be fulfilling on its own. Substance is placed by superficiality. This is particularly troublesome in the case of sexuality: in Orenstein's words, girls learn to aspire to be desired before they have desire (of that kind) on their own. Orenstein sees this as a problem for girlhood in general, because the princess culture has utterly hijacked what it means to be a girl. If a helmet isn't pink, it isn't a girl's helmet. If a mother scorns all the fluff, her inadvertent lesson to her daughter is that it's not okay to be a girl.  This being the problem, her solution -- in addition to reversing Reagan's deregulation of children's advertising -- is for parents to focus on teaching girls how to live for themselves, and not for the approval of others; to define themselves and not try to fit Disney's definition of a girl.

Orenstein is a fun author, especially as she covers beauty pageants for four-year-olds and facebook, using phrases like "Sesame street walker".She's also one who has to practice what she preaches, for her own daughter Daisy is one of the afflicted: the account conveys her desperate frustration in trying to raise Daisy to be a strong person in an environment swamped by odious messages in the advertising. It shares themes with Consuming Kids and So Sexy, So Soon and covers similar ground. What So Sexy, So Soon referred to as "age compression", Orenstein calls "KGOY", Kids Getting Older Younger. This refers to the way kids are attracted to objects advertised to older children, hence kiddie thongs and Barbie in the toddler aisle.  Of obvious interest to the parents and guardians of young women, and quite readable. 

Books in the News

Every so often I see news articles which touch on subjects I've been reading about; I used to link to them in weekly review posts from time to time, but I may start doing it in this format.

For Consuming Kids:

Advertising offers struggling schools a lifeline (USA Today)

Financially struggling schools nationwide are increasing the volume of advertising that children see in the halls, at football games and even on their report cards.
School administrators say that with a public unwilling to adequately fund K-12 education, they’re obligated to find new ways to keep teachers in classrooms.
“We know that we can’t continue to only look at ways to cut, we also need to be innovative about the assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue,” says Trinette Marquis, a spokeswoman for the 28,000-student Twin Rivers Unified School District in McClellan, Calif.

For Asphalt Nation  and Suburban Nation:
States eye new motorist taxes: miles you drive could cost you (USA Today)

States are looking for new ways of taxing motorists as they seek to pay for highway and bridge repair and improvements without relying on the per-gallon gasoline tax widely viewed as all but obsolete.
Among the leading ideas: Taxing drivers for how many miles they travel rather than how much gasoline they buy. Minnesota and Oregon already are testing technology to keep track of mileage. Other states, including Washington and Nevada, are preparing similar projects.
The efforts are being prompted by the fact that gasoline taxes no longer provide enough money to pay for roads and bridges — especially when Congress and many state legislatures are reluctant to increase taxes imposed on each gallon. The federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon hasn't been raised in nearly two decades.

For The Shallows
Some caution texting is ruining art of conversation, Martha Irvine

Statistics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that, these days, many people with cell phones prefer texting over a phone call. It's not always young people, though the data indicate that the younger you are, the more likely you are to prefer texting.And that's creating a communication divide, of sorts - the talkers vs. the texters.Some would argue that it's no big deal. What difference should it make how we communicate, as long as we do so?But many experts say the most successful communicators will, of course, have the ability to do both, talk or text, and know the most appropriate times to use those skills. And they fear that more of us are losing our ability to have - or at least are avoiding - the traditional face-to-face conversations that are vital in the workplace and personal relationships."It is an art that's becoming as valuable as good writing," says Janet Sternberg, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York who is also a linguist.

So Sexy So Soon

So Sexy So Soon:  the New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids
© 2008 Diane E. Levine, Jean Kilbourne
226 pages

For me, the filthiest show on television is Toddlers and Tiaras. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned: I'm generally repulsed by the stereotypical idea of 'sexiness' in western culture -- provocative clothes, made-up faces, and posed behavior. What attracts me to a woman is more an internal matter: I like character, strength, and self-respect. Perhaps I dislike the idea of sexiness because it's only about sex, missing the real substance of human relationships altogether. In any case, as objectionable as I find sexiness in general, to see children attempting to invoke it is outright horrifying. Although parents and guardians tend to be protective of their children and have always worried about the declining morality of the younger generation, since time began, surely today's problems are extreme enough to not be dismissed as the simple historical pessimism of the old.  We live in a world in which Victoria's Secret markets g-strings to little girls, where the toys are hookers, and top 40 stations play songs like "I'm Sexy and I Know It". This is a far cry from Aristotle kvetching about rebellious teenagers.  So Sexy So Soon is similar to Consuming Kids in that it examines the effects of advertising upon children. However, it is much more narrowly focused (on premature sexualization) and written with a greater emphasis on helping parents address the problem, primarily through communication.

The authors are not prudes: they acknowledge from the start that human beings are sexual creatures from the moment of our births. There is nothing the matter with sex or children being curious about the differences between men and women: has any generation of tykes not wondered where babies come from, or played the equivalent of "doctor"? The essential point of So Sexy so Soon is that advertisers are using sex to sell products. They're not interested in educating children about sex, let alone guiding them towards sexual responsibility. Their only concern is manipulating children into thinking sexy is a concept they should be concerned about, and to realize it they must buy these products or listen to this music or wear this makeup. So what if kids grow up with warped attitudes toward sex, gender roles, and their own self-worth?  So what if little  children, in the process of trying to emulate adults, start talking about oral sex and grinding against one another?  Sex sells -- even to kids.

Levine and Kilbourne both write with an eye toward helping parents. While moderating the home environment is crucial, they stress communication. At least one of the authors specializes in parent-child communication, and she advocates asking open-ended questions to find out what kids know, and letting them know that if they're confused about the barrage of messages they receive through television, music, and the Internet, that they can express that confusion with an adult without being judged. Children are the victims of premature sexuality, not its creators. Political action is also necessary: marketers and companies must take responsibility, because the tide of garbage they produce in their quest to maximize profits is overwhelming parents, setting their children against them. That tide has been building since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan  deregulated child-targeted advertising. The same agency which allowed the problem to transpire should be held accountable for fixing it.

So Sexy So Soon is of eminent interest to parents; both it and Consuming Kids are eye-opening works that detail the problems of childhood advertising. I would read them together.

Consuming Kids

Consuming Kids: the Hostile Takeover of Childhood
© 2004 Susan Linn
288 pages

To some, children are the joy of our lives; a refreshing source of curiosity, energy, youth, and joy. To others, they are nothing but grist for the mill. In Consuming Kids, child psychologist Susan Linn reveals the scope and consequences of the increasing commercialization of childhood, which effects more than just parents. It is a profoundly disturbing book; were I a parent its revelations would horrify me. But it demands to be read.

Consuming Kids opens at a conference in which children are the focus -- or rather, the target, because this is a marketing conference, where the latest psychological insights into the minds of children are put to good use. "Teenagers are socially anxious; build on that." These marketeers are family scientists as well: they cite a study about the importance of the Nag Factor, wherein the 'pester power' of children is tapped to manipulate parents into taking the kids to a given restaurant or frequenting a particular store. (That same study featured in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and provoked my interest in this subject.) Linn is a psychologist by profession: she cares for children and is sickened by the way that studies done with good intentions -- to understand children's motivations -- are being perverted to use by companies which essentially profit by targeting vulnerabilities, like the aforementioned anxiety of teenagers or the fact that children cannot tell the difference between an advertisement and a factual program, let alone think critically about the content of said ads.

Linn devotes the bulk of the book to examining the consequences of child-targeting advertising: the promotion of consumerism among children, the idea that things will make them happy; the sinister way that they are conditioned to favor certain brands through cartoon figures and "role model" spokespersons like Ronald McDonald;  the rise of childhood obesity amid the expansion of advertising of candy and processed food to kids;  the use of violence and sex to capture attention; the rise of childhood addiction to alcohol and tobacco,  and the corruption of the public sphere, from PBS to the schoolroom. (The latter section makes this  work of interest to everyone, not just parents.)

I've read other works with a bone to pick with advertising of one kind or another, but I rarely enjoy them and never review them because prior reads have been so sloppily done; they consist mainly of one person idly complaining for paragraph after paragraph. This is certainly not the case with Linn, who tempers her passion with professionalism and focus. Her introduction immediately shares her sense of unease with the reader, and then she develops her many substantial criticisms. Hers is a convincing argument, not a rant, and it ends with impressive sections evaluating what our response should be. After examining advertising's relationship to free speech, she then points out that this is a particularly nonpartisan issue. It doesn't fit neatly into a party box: this kind of marketing has negative consequences for everyone save the firms targeting the kiddies. She then ends with a chapter detailing what we can do at home, in the community, in schools, in the marketplace, and as members of polities both large (the nation) and small (the city).

Consuming Kids is a magnificent piece of work; I would only fault it for being slightly dated with regards to references to advertising through the Internet and social media; most of Linn's concern is advertising through television and the schools. Otherwise, she's golden, offering a comprehensive criticism that is both passionate and moderate in tone. Highly recommended to parents and anyone concerned about the welfare of children and society.

Related:

Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal
© 2001 Eric Schlosser
362 pages

I underestimated Fast Food Nation. I'd expected a heated attack on the subject from a nutritional standpoint, but Eric Schlosser's history and overview of fast food's origins and impact is far more substantial than I had ever anticipated. The United States doesn't have a national cuisine of its own, but it has been most successful in exporting an approach to food across the world. The global presence of the McDonald's corporation has allowed American values to conquer the world in a way no military effort could ever rival. Such conquest is not to our benefit, as Schlosser's work bears out.

After beginning with the history of how fast food evolved, supported by the United States' auto culture and beginning with "drive-in" restaurants, he then charts the industry's rocketing success. The key behind every chain's success story is efficiency: applying the mindset of the factory to the restaurant. This means assembly-line preparation, the standardization of portions, a dependence on pre-processed food ("meat" arrives at these stores dessicated, in vacuum bags, and requires the addition of water to resemble ground beef again), amd immediate access to huge quantities of cheap foodstuffs just to start. (They're cheap for a reason:  standards at slaughterhouses and feedlots tend toward the horrific.) A hostile attitude toward labor also seems to be a key component: jobs are broken down into a series of mindless tasks which require little training, and a worker with little training also has little power. Wages are kept depressed to ensure maximum profits, and thus there's little wonder that these places are staffed by people with few alternatives, like teenagers. That the national chains aren't keen to provide sick leave, medical insurance, or vacation days goes without saying. There are, however, exceptions to the exploitative tendency, most notably in Schlosser's account the In-and-Out company. The same abuse of labor occurs in the chains' principle suppliers; Schlosser writes that Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) would be distressed to learn how little had changed since his 19th century  expose of the food industry's labor and health conditions.

Even more impressive is the widespread influence of these fast food chains. Schlosser attributes their ever-increasing demand for food, and their success in selling it, to the growth of the power of agribusiness. The fast food chains were such rewarding customers that their suppliers were able to establish a hegemony over the markets for beef, potatoes, and so on. As the chain stores destroyed smaller restaurants, so did their suppliers-- the corporate farms -- destroy smaller, private farms.  Economic power goes hand in hand with political corruption, which Schlosser also covers. More insidious is the growth of food-related advertising. I should think that food is so important that it doesn't need advertising, but fast food apparently needs it -- and is aggressive about spreading the work.  The chains anchor their future success in their ability to turn children into loyal, lifelong consumers,  and the growing financial weaknesses of cities and suburban municipalities offers them a new market:  advertising in the schools!  When the brands work together, combining products (toy companies and restaurants, for instance, or McDonalds in WalMart), their profits become even greater. We might applaud such  cleverness were  it not for their abusive labor policies, negligent heath standards, and political opportunism.

Fast Food Nation is an impressive work, revealing the ways that the industry affects the lives of every American, even those of us who avoid it for health or other reasons. Schlosser's coverage is extensive -- exploring nearly every facet of these businesses, from their origins to their supply lines, business practices, and labor policies.  It is both thorough and pointed, and prompts readers to consider -- what is the true cost of the 'value meal'?

Highly recommended to Americans.

Related:
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
Sugar: the Bitter Truth
Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin