The Destruction of Our Consumer Economy: Shopping Ain’t What it Used to be

By

David Gottfried

The eroticism and elegance of postwar middle-class shopping

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The relevance of this clip may be apparent at the end of this essay

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Capitalism has many flaws, but it is usually seen as having done  a great job of providing a plethora of products at a minimum of price.   That was, to some extent, true in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  That is not the same today.   Going shopping today is an unmitigated drag.

David Halberstam was a brilliant journalist and an honest one.  In “The Best and the Brightest,” his scholarly yet exciting expose of the roots of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Halberstam may have appeared rather left wing as he excoriated our Vietnam debacle.   However, in “The Fifties,” he may seem a tad conservative as he lauded what capitalism had done for American living standards in the post war era.

In “The Fifties,” Halberstam says that capitalism, in the post war era, made the good life available to the middle class.   The middle class moved from Jackie Gleason’s Brooklyn  tenement, in the “Honeymooners,” (A sit com about a working-class family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn) to split level homes in the suburbs.    Our prefabricated homes and our mass market mode of living may be seen by more urbane types as having been tacky, and the more erudite and dismissive folks may think it was characterized by fat matrons sporting flashy, gaudy furniture that imagined it was the second coming of the Court of Louis the Fourteenth, but the fact of the matter is most Americans, including your author, preferred living in a private home, in a suburb, with a plastic swimming pool and lawn chairs and a barbeque grilling cheap hot dogs from the A & P.  We preferred this to proletarian penury and it’s five-story walk-up apartments, and roaches and rodents raiding our kitchen pantries. 

In the Fifties, capitalism meant more consumer goods, more televisions, ovens, stoves, cars, carpet cleaners and everything Judy Garland dreamed about when she visited the land of Oz.   Of course, John Kenneth Galbraith told us, in “The Affluent Society” (1957), that capitalism merely succeeded in selling us stuff that we did not need, and that we only thought we needed stuff like cars because advertising created “false needs.”   However, Galbraith, no matter how many years he spent eating crepe suzettes (Footnote 1)  with Jackie Kennedy in Harvard Yard, was wrong.  We do want and need washing machines and automobiles, etc. 

The expansive, free-wheeling economy of abundance that we had achieved made us feel rich enough, and strong enough, to be progressive and birthed the liberalism of the Sixties.

Of course, that was all a long time ago.   If one reads old journals and articles from the 50’s and 60’s, the American economy was viewed with awe.  Although there was dire poverty in the Fifties and Sixties, it was almost incontrovertibly believed, at that time, that America had enough wealth to make everybody, at the minimum, comfortably middle class.

Today, this optimism is considered delusional, just as the dreams of JFK’s Peace Corp are now considered delusional, and Americans are told, incessantly, that they must accept greater limits. And just as Americans must put up with greater limits on salary hikes, Americans have been encouraged to put up with more and more mediocre and perhaps even downright dangerous products.

In a word, going shopping isn’t what it used to be.   The Great Middle-Class Stores which were emblematic of the Fifties are gone.   Once, working and middle class people were as happy as a pig in shit at places like EJ Korvettes (A department store chain that, supposedly, was formed by eight Jewish Korean war veterans, but according to David Halberstam, that was a rumor designed to attract the Jewish shoppers situated close to the first stores in New York) where one could find stylish clothes, sturdy and attractive furniture and imagine that one’s home would soon be as fine as the Cleaver’s family home in “Leave it to Beaver.”   Now, one can go to Bloomies, or one can go to Target, and the stark class division between Bloomies and Target reminds us that we are becoming more like the Banana Republics to the South of us, where there are the rich, the poor -- and the middle class is increasingly the stuff of legend. 

But enough abstractions.  Let us consider the garbage they are now selling us. 

The cheapo store in my neighborhood is a Target.   The commodities they sell are sheer insults.

Every single pair of pants for sale has the material of very thin nylon laundry bags.   They look a lot like the black pajama bottoms the Vietcong wore during America’s Indochinese misadventure.  They might be good if one were acting in a play based on the Vietnam War, but if one wore them on the street, the shabbiness of the pants will make one look like such a doofish dolt that at best one will be laughed at and at worst the police will arrest one for vagrancy.  

Of course, thin, cheap nylon has its purposes, and cheapo stores, like Target, used to sell laundry bags, made of the same material, which could hold 2 to 4 cubic yards of laundry, for a few dollars.  They still sell laundry bags, but now they can’t hold 1 cubic yard of laundry.

The cheap shops also sell what are often called floor lamps, and are sometimes termed “torchiers,” as a word like “torchiers” lends the sort of continental sophistication which will jack up the price.  These lighting fixtures generally have a life expectancy of a few months.      

These stores also invariably sell shoes that are case studies in entropy as they tend to fall apart into disassembled rubbish within a couple of months.  

The cheapo stores also sell a) aspirin tablets that are supposedly buffered, but the buffering agent is not listed, b) antihistamines that invariably bear an expiration date written in white ink on a white background with characters that are, at most, two millimeters long, c) something that is advertised with a picture of  a bagel and cream cheese, suggestive of lox, but whose packaging indicates that although it is an animal from the water, it is not salmon and certainly not smoked salmon, and d) stuff that looks like shrimp but is, according to the packaging, some other beast entirely.  For all I know they are dramatically enlarged bacteria that have assumed gigantic proportions by means of radioactive matter from Three Mile Island.

I can hear the rebuttal: The FDA will block the sale of unsafe foods and drugs.  Of course, that’s a lot of wishful thinking  because a) Since Tzarina Nancy Reagan became Empress, the FDA has endured consistent and repeated cut backs (I once read that nowadays the FDA has a grand total of 40 people to inspect all imported foods and drugs) and b) smart political theorists have known, ever since the publication of Galbraith’s aforementioned "Affluent Society” in 1957, that regulatory agencies are often “colonized” by the businesses they are supposed to regulate.  For example, Lawyers and scientists on the payroll of drug companies make a whole lot more than the guys who work for the FDA, and sometimes FDA employees may approve drugs prematurely because they want to get hired by private enterprise. 

Although the FDA may approve drugs prematurely, FDA approval may make it impossible to prevail in a product liability action if you are hurt by a medical product as the United  States Supreme Court ruled, in the Medtronics case, that a judgment for a Plaintiff in a medical products liability case was NULL AND VOID because the FDA, by ruling that the product was safe, precluded any state court judgment to the effect that the product was unsafe.   In other words, the American consumer is getting fucked from both ends.  

Given the miserable way in which the three branches of government adjudge whether products are safe (The legislative branch establishes weak regulatory agencies that can’t crack down on unsafe products, The judiciary says that no court can consider a product unsafe if a weak and willowy regulatory agency has considered the product safe, and the Executive branch is, if a Trumper,  fomenting a coup and, if a Democrat, giving a speech in which he sounds as if he is weeping.) business is free to sell us shittier and shittier shit.  Sorry for all the fecal images my prose my provoke, but I just had a shitty frozen dinner, am contemplating all of the carcinogens and other toxins the dinner consisted of, and I have decided that frozen food is the gastronomic equivalent of shit.      

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Footnote 1:

Ft note1:  I don’t mean crepe suzettes literally.  I am just lampooning wealthy liberals through food stuffs which I have never had the good fortune to eat.   Crepe Suzettes was indelibly etched in my  consciousness shortly after I had reached the age of 7, in 1964, and heard the theme song of “The Patty Duke Show,” which contained these immortal lyrics, “Kathy adores a minuet, the Ballet Russe and Crepe Suzettes…”   

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