So I’m clawing my way back from a computer snafu that’s cost me a lot of time the last two days (and that may have cost me a few lost emails, just so you know).
But somehow I got sucked in this morning to spending half an hour watching Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech from 1979. It’s been getting some attention lately because of his comments about the energy crisis. But the whole thing is kind of fascinating — the passion of his tone is pretty startling, he seems flat-out pissed sometimes. (On the other hand, his fist-pumping is pretty ineffectual.)
Anyway, one little sound bite:
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
Cut to: The 1980s!
Anyway, the energy stuff is interesting, not so much because of his specific policy proposals, but because of the force of his argument that it’s a real crisis, “a clear and present danger,” etc. He’s practically yelling at that point.
Quite a performance. But let’s face it, Americans didn’t want to be lectured in 1979, any more than they do today.
Powell’s asked me to write an essay for their newsletter, in connection to Buying In. Here’s a short outtake:
On a cultural level, I understand why people want to wall off consumer culture into its own category, something we don’t have to take all that seriously. Critiquing what we buy and why tilts into the commercial marketplace in ways that just don’t feel as serious, as, say, critiquing works of art — even if the definition of “works of art” has gotten pretty fluid. (Somehow a quasi-scholarly critique of Battlestar Galactica, for instance, seems more like what we think of as criticism than a deconstruction of who buys Red Bull, and why.)
But consumer culture is serious….
Read the whole thing here.
Last week I read this NYT article about the latest retail data, for May. “Sales of retail goods and services rose 1 percent in May, double what economists had expected.” Wall Street rallied as on what was seen as surprisingly good news. Since reading this, and some other stuff that I’ll get to, I’ve been mulling the relationship between the consumer mood, consumer spending, and the broader impact of the business of branding. It’s going to take me a few paragraphs to draw this together — and even then I end with questions. So if you’re interested, bear with me on this. Read more
SHOCK VALUE:
The Kleenex of stun guns brands balances sleek gadgetry with “take-down power.”
This week in Consumed, a look at the newest and most consumer-friendly version of … the Taser.
That would be “the Taser C2 Personal Protector, a model that is, if not exactly kinder and gentler, then at least more innocent-looking. Also: it’s available in pink and in a leopard print.”
Why the new form factor for the device?
“We finally listened to the customer,” Taser’s Steve Tuttle says. The customer was not comfortable carrying something that would cause people to dive under tables yelling, “Gun!” if you took it out in a restaurant. The customer liked sleek gizmos, and vibrant, fashionable colors. The customer wanted something light and small enough to put in a handbag. Of course, the customer still wanted to propel tiny electrodes up to 15 feet, affecting “the sensory and motor functions” (as the company Web site puts it) of whomever they strike, with “incredible takedown power.”
Read the column in the May 18, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
Almighty Dolor:
As Americans, we like the greenback, but as investors, we’re a little more willing to go where the money is
This week Consumed looks at spending money — on other forms of money.
Currency prestige has a long history in the context of nation-states, but the idea that individuals might find some forms of money more desirable than others is less familiar. Perhaps rising awareness of the falling dollar is changing that.
There is a way to, in effect, spend your dollars on other forms of money, and apparently the number of people doing so is increasing. …
Read the column in the May 11, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
Design For Dreaming
[ –> Details on Sponsored-Film Virtual Festival are here.]
Design For Dreaming is the final entry in this virtual festival — and probably the best-known one. It’s even been mentioned on BoingBoing.
In part I assume this is because the film is — on one level — perfectly ridiculous, featuring a sort of Audrey Hepburn type who is “Delighted!” to see new cars that are “Oh so beautiful!” or whatever. It’s campy and funny. We all love to look at this sort of thing and snicker at how naïve people used to be. And without question, Design For Dreaming is absurd. But … I think there is more to be found here than that. Read more
EMPOWERING BY DISEMPOWERMENT
How satirizing corporate doublespeak gets a promotion in a time of layoffs.
Despair Inc. It sells scores of posters satirizing the banalities of the motivation industry. The business first became Internet famous a decade ago, but has proved remarkably durable, with sales climbing to around $4.5 million last year.
And possibly its worldview is resonating in a lot of cubicles and offices just about now: the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently calculated that U.S. employers cut 80,000 jobs in March. Meanwhile, Despair’s sales are up about 15 percent this year. “We do see some people are buying because things are getting bad,” says Justin Sewell, a co-founder of Despair. “They’re Googling things like ‘despair’ or ‘failure,’ and we’re popping up.”
Read the column in the April 27, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
[ –> Details on Sponsored-Film Virtual Festival are here.]
“America is busy now!” this curious film, “The Machine: Master Or Slave?“, begins.
What seems at first like exciting propaganda about the “mighty crescendo of production” revolutionizing the World War II-era United States turns out to be something a little more complicated. What will happen, the film asks, when the “defense emergency” is over, and all the machines used in that effort will instead be used for “making goods people need for living”?
Rumors of layoffs, fear of lost jobs and, perhaps, a return to the pre-War economy – that is, the Depression. The villain: “the new labor-saving machine.” It’s good news for the stockholders, but not so good for the workers. There’s a long montage of machine efficiency, scored with frantic music. That’s the problem: The machines are too efficient! Consumers aren’t buying fast enough! Read more
To Market, To Market.
[ –> Details on Sponsored-Film Virtual Festival are here.]
For reasons that aren’t clear to me, part one is in black and white, part two is in color.
“Like the waters of a mighty ocean, people also represent a mighty force,” announces the narrator of “To Market, To Market,” a 1942 film commissioned by General Outdoor Advertising Company, identified in The Field Guide To Sponsored Films as a “major billboard and poster company.” The point of the film: “to convince ad buyers of the value of outdoor advertising.”
After all, the “mighty force” that people represent, the narrator continues, is “known as consumer power.” Read more
In his recent NYT Magazine cover story examining the Supreme Court’s tilt toward business interests and laissez-faire attitudes, away from interference in the marketplace and regulation, Jeffrey Rosen notes that this tilt echoes an “elite consensus” — but not necessarily a mainstream one.
If anything, America may be entering something of a populist moment. If you combine the groups of Americans in a recent Pew survey who lean toward some strain of economic populism — from disaffected and conservative Democrats to traditional liberals to social and big-government conservatives — at least two-thirds of all voters arguably feel sympathy for government intervention in the economy. Could it be, then, that the court is reflecting an elite consensus while contravening the sentiments of most Americans?
So do we listen to the elites who tell us to trust the marketplace?
Or do we listen to the marketplace telling us that sometimes intervention from on high is a good idea?
I suppose my view would be that while I think Rosen is absolutely correct in saying the elite believes in market-based solutions, he’s on shakier ground in asserting that the broader public doesn’t; as far as I can tell, the crowd’s view on these matters seems to whipsaw depending on the specific issue at hand, in ways that are often inconsistent.
But you know, as long as I’m mentioning this article, I heartily recommend it to those who have heard, or who perpetuate, certain glib assertions that we live in the golden age of consumer empowerment. Sure, it’s neat that the crowd can complain about customer service on blogs, or “collaborate” with multinationals by giving them business ideas or creating branding content for them. But meanwhile, I kinda think the systematic undermining of product-liability laws, for instance, just possibly might have more important implications on the question of consumer power vs. business power.
Very smart column on credit-card debt by my one-time colleague from the Fortune days Joe Nocera in the NYT this morning. He picks up on a recent theme explored by Business Week: How the current credit crisis will affect that workaday form of debt so many of us carry around in our pockets — the credit card kind.
One theory of course is that in a kind of echo of what’s been going on in the mortgage market, consumers will soon be unable to pay their bills, on a scale that will threaten the businesses of their debtors (in this case, card issuers).
Nocera has a different, and I think more convincing, view. He knows a lot about credit cards and the role they’ve played in quotidian economic life in America since the 1960s — it’s one of the fascinating threads in his excellent book A Piece of the Action.
In the column he explains what’s been going on with credit debt in more recent decades. “Since the early 1980s, debt has gone from 80 percent to 133 percent of disposable income, according to Kathleen Keest of the Center for Responsible Lending,” he notes. At turn of the 21st Century, he continues, this trend slowed somewhat, “because the housing bubble had begun, and with it came a shift from credit card debt to home equity loans. From 2000 to 2006, Americans borrowed a staggering $1.3 trillion from their homes. By comparison, credit card debt rose much more slowly.”
By the end of 2006, however, the housing bubble had ended, and so had the ability of homeowners to use home equity loans. But it was hard to turn off the debt spigot entirely because so many people had become accustomed to living beyond their means.
Sure enough, it was right about then that credit card debt began climbing. In 2004, for instance, credit card debt grew at a rate of $6.25 billion a quarter. In just the fourth quarter of 2007, it grew by $20 billion. Total credit card debt stands today at about $950 billion. That is still not close to the $11 trillion in mortgages, but it’s within spitting distance of auto loans.
This sounds ominous. And for many individuals, it probably is ominous. But as Nocera points out, there’s a big difference when it comes to comparing mortgage companies and credit-card companies: “The credit card industry is fully aware of what is happening, and is making adjustments — if you want to call them that — to control its loan losses.” That is, it’s raising rates, imposing new fees, and so on.
Indeed, even though people who are already in trouble are likely to default, there is a whole other category of credit card users who are likely to become profitable for credit card issuers: those who usually pay off their balances every month, but because of the recession find themselves needing to go into debt. That ability to do so may be costly, and surely will breed resentment, but it will also wind up saving the credit card companies. Heads you lose, tails they win.
Hey, I didn’t say it was an uplifting column. I said it was smart.
See what you think. Here’s the link again.
[Related: More recent Business Week piece on credit card issuers starting to balk at working out deal with strapped consumers via credit counselors. “Some analysts suspect issuers are increasingly worried about losses,” BW says. One of its experts says there will be more (consumer) bankruptcies as a result.]
Posted Under:
America,
Consumer Behavior
This post was written by Rob Walker on March 15, 2008
Comments Off on Credit-card debt: Nocera’s (convincing) take
To follow up an earlier post, here’s another bit from a recent New Yorker story about consumer behavior and political behavior. A John McCain piece mentions one of his strategists, 37-year-old Steve Schmidt:
At other times, Schmidt comes alive as a sort of political Rain Man. During one back-of-the-bus conversation, he explained that in 2004, when he was working for Bush’s reëlection, “we targeted voters not where they lived but how they lived their lives, in the same way that credit-card companies do.” He went on, “And so we know, for instance, that among independent voters there are life styles and behaviors that identify them as Republicans or Democrats. For example, the GMC Yukon is a Republican vehicle, and Volvos and Subarus are the most Democratic vehicles. Republicans have Fiji water preferences, versus Democrats, who have Evian water preferences. You have a huge grouping of consumer data, so you can micro-target messages to common groups, finding pleasure points and anger points on issues.”
I don’t think it’s any surprise that Volvos are supposedly more Democrat-ish than Republican-ish, but what about that Fiji/Evian split? What’s that about?
One of my favorite topics is the flipside of the supposed confessional, privacy-indifferent nature of Web expression: The amount of Web expression that is not only un-confessional, it’s somewhere between self-marketing and flat-out lying. So this story in today’s WSJ about people who crib from the profiles of others on social networking or dating sites made my day:
Online daters feel pressure to stand out and believe they must sell themselves like a product, say researchers at Georgetown, Rutgers and Michigan State universities who are conducting a joint study of them. “You are not making money off of somebody else’s work; you’re just trying to market yourself,” says self-confessed copier Jeff Picazio, a 40-year-old computer-systems manager in Boynton Beach, Fla.
Businesses have even cropped up to sell people elemements of a marketable personality. One, the WSJ says, “offers 12 ‘proven’ profiles for $4. Sample: ‘There is a shallowness, a fakeness to much of the “‘singles scene.”‘”
Worth reading.
Jack Shafer’s fine piece in Slate — In Praise of Horse-Race Coverage — gives me the inspiration, or maybe the intellectual cover, to admit something. Everybody knows that campaign coverage is ridiculous: Too little focus on substance and policy, too much emphasis on image, personality, and “the horserace.” Even after reading Shafer’s piece, I would not really disagree. But even so, the fact of the matter is: I love the horserace.
I don’t mean to suggest that I think it’s all that useful in making a decision about who to vote for. But as Shafer says: “Even if the press corps had abandoned substance, no voter is more than a mouse click away from detailed policy papers and unfiltered campaign speeches by the candidates. If you’re not an informed political consumer this year, you have nobody to blame but yourself.”
What I love about the horserace is the story, or the stories. Not the supposed meta-story that various observers are always trying to extract from the drama, the Big Meaning about What Americans Want. (That story is always the same: “This is the greatest country in the world – and it’s in desperate need of fundamental change.”) What I find riveting is specifically the most horseracey of the horserace stuff: The tactics, the machinations, the personal dramas, the surprises, the petty spats, the cheap shots, the armchair psychoanalysis, the endless deconstruction of a certain remark or background image in a political spot that may or may not have a hidden double-meaning, etc. It’s like a soap opera, or a serialized 19th century novel. Such great characters! Clinton, Obama, Romney, Huckabee – all would make a fine protagonist in a tale of triumph or heartbreak. And that’s what they are! Only one will see his (or her) dream realized – but at what cost? And as for the others: Their hopes will be dashed! I empathize with (almost) all of them at one point or another, including people I wouldn’t vote for on a bet.
What about the constant wrong turns of the horserace press, which is forever headfaking and reshuffling the story of what’s supposed to happen next and how it’s all going? I love the wrong turns! That’s where the suspense comes in. Sometimes the narrative veers so drastically and so quickly — yesterday’s “conventional wisdom” is proven so wildly wrong — that it’s like a soap opera that has to be implausibly revised because one of the lead actors just got a movie deal and left the show. Or, to go a little more highbrow, maybe the horserace press functions as a kind of unreliable narrator. Either way, it’s part of what keeps me engaged.
Anyway, Shafer makes a better case than I ever could about why anti-horserace critiques are wrongheaded. You can check that out and decide for yourself. I guess I could say I’m glad that he’s staving off any threat to the horserace I enjoy so much — but really, we all know it’s never going away. So figure out who you want to vote for… and then enjoy the show.
According to aptly named website Mark Lives In Ikea:
Comediean/Filmmaker Mark Malkoff’s New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.
I don’t think it’s all that surprising. Perfect example of co-promotion.
Site says he “moved in” today and will be there through Saturday. Posting videos, etc.
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