“Spend enough hours in the Mall of America and you wind up in a sort of fugue state,” writes David Segal in a surprisingly long piece about the future of shopping malls in today’s New York Times. Having spent some time at MoA when I was doing my research, I agree with much of what Segal says about the Mt. Rushmore of American consumerism. But I quibble with “fugue state”. As I under
stand it, a fugue state is a psychiatric disorder marked by temporary amnesia, mindless wandering, a confused sense of time. During my visit, I never for an instant forgot where I was, wandered only semi-mindlessly, and my sense of time was acute. No matter that I was in the company of a delightful local guide – I couldn’t wait to flee.
Monthly Archive for January, 2009
“It is notoriously just as difficult to recede from a ‘high’ standard of living as it is to lower a standard which is already relatively low….”
—Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
A new study conducted by researchers at Ohio State and Illinois State universities shows that we are likely to pay more for something if we are able to touch it first. In this case, the researchers used coffee mugs — a common reward in controlled experiments. Subjects who were able to hold the mug if only for a few seconds placed a higher value on the mug than those who could look but not touch. Said one of the researchers, “significant differences in consumer valuations … begin in a matter of seconds.” To handle is to bond, to bond is to develop a sense of personal ownership — which is certainly why Apple Stores, conceived on the principle of customer-interaction with products, were successful in expanding the brand’s reach, even before the iPhone came along.
This week’s Economist plants barely an air kiss on the cheek of the Lipstick Index. Coined by Estee Lauder’s Leonard Lauder, the Lipstick Index holds that sales of lipstick rise during times of recession, presumably because lipstick is a cheap way to feel rich and glamorous even if you’re out-of-work and down in the dumps. However, there are two problems with lipstick-as-economic-indicator: (1) it’s hard to track lipstick sales on their own, so maybe a broader “Beauty Index” might be a better barometer; and (2) what meager research there is shows no definitive correlation between lipstick sales and economic prosperity. In fact, year-on-year percentage growth of lipstick sales was down dramatically during the relatively prosperous years that lead up to the current crisis.
Shocked at how your favorite once-zaftik magazines have grown anorexic? The magazine business is a mess. Not only has readership migrated to the web, ad pages are in a free fall, to put it mildly. A few months ago, some marketing gurus maintained that the top end of the market, the luxury goods game, would remain relatively recession proof, and that the Guccis, Pradas, Ralphs, and Versaces of the world would maintain their presence in high-end glossy monthlies. Sadly, the 2008 ad-page counts at Conde Nast (la creme de la consumer magazine business) underscore how bad and getting worse the ad picture is. The New Yorker was down 27% in 2008 pages; Gourmet, 23%; Bon Appetit, 16%; Vanity Fair, about the same. Lucky, which is not a magazine in the true sense but a collection of ads in the broadest, was down only 11%.
Outtakes -- supposedly -- but likely better than most, if not all, of the $3-million thirty-second spots coming our way on Super Sunday.
Bankers’ broke babes have formed a semi-serious, ex-spendthrift support group.
Lately I’ve been thinking about buying a big flat screen TV, as we may be the last household in America watching what scant TV we watch on nothing more monumental than a 27″ monitor. But for reasons I never quite understood, I’ve backed off time and again.There is a brief column in the Wall Street Journal today about how we lose “the urge to splurge” the closer we come to actually splurging. The writer, Neal Templin, addresses my situation perfectly. Turns out that he, too, longed for a big screen TV when the prices were high a year or so ago, then lost his ardor as prices gradually declined. Suddenly, he started thinking about all the complications that would come with finally getting the big screen settled in: what to do with the old TV, where to place the new one, etc.Templin talks to Yaacov Trope, a New York University psychology professor, who “likens the process to a trip to the mountains. When the trip is far off, we focus on the scenic view we expect to see. As the trip nears, we begin thinking about all the hassles of traveling there, the mosquitoes that will bite us and so on.”
Are you afflicted by this phenomenon? You’re invited to share the tortured details.
Back in the Fifties my father used a then-common expression when entering any store, restaurant, hotel, or other establishment that had lost favor with its clientele:
“You could shoot a cannon off and not hit anybody!” Today, wandering around a forlorn Michigan Avenue, you could shoot a cannon off in every direction and not hit anybody. Yes, it was cold and windy. But it’s always cold and windy. About the only store with a faint pulse was the Apple Store at Michigan and Huron, where most customers weren’t customers, they were frozen stiffs who’d come in from the cold to get warm and check their email.
In the Fifties, says historian Lizabeth Cohen, we traded in our citizenship for consumership, thus making the U.S. a “Consumers’ Republic”. Our patriotic duty: spend. Fortunately, there were glorious new places to do just that: immense supermarkets and suburban malls, which sprouted like crabgrass across the country. This video captures the wonderment of it all. At 4+ minutes — particularly given the soundtrack — it’s a challenge to get to the end but see if you can hang in long enough to get to my favorite shot: the orange juice squeeze-a-rama.
