by Fed up Fed Wed Jul 20, 2011
Some time back, in the early aughts, I worked as a shelf stocker for Safeway. Scintillating work that it was, my mind yet wandered to other things as my hands repeated the same motions thousands of times a night, open box, grip can, stack can, grip and stack, grip and stack, open the next box, on through the dark. As I worked, an observation struck me that seemed at once profound and profoundly pernicious. And it seems, as we grow ever more entombed in partisan rhetoric and entitlement cut kabuki, the thing I learned about people in my ten years in the grocery business seems particulalry relevant to me now. As a matter of pragmatism, shelf stockers and tag girls -- for some reason every file maintenance clerk, tag changer, I ever worked with was a woman -- worked the same shifts on ad change night. It occurred to me, after some time, that whenever the girls changed the shelf tags, they left behind a flurry of special promotional tags that proclaimed "NEW LOW PRICE!"
Of course, promotional tags being hyperbolic by nature, I took no particular offense at their tone, but something about them did bother me a bit, and after a while, my minimal cognitive abilities kicked out an answer: the prices were higher. They were charging more for those items, not less. The tags advertised a new price, that much was true, and the term "low" is certainly subjective enough that it's open to interpretation. But it seemed then, as now, that declaiming the price you just raised a "NEW LOW PRICE," well, that's just dishonest. But it works in marketing, mainly because it turns out that people will, with only a little encouragement, make economic decisions that don't really make any sense, but that can only charitably be described as, "Good enough."
Marketers know a lot about this concept. They even have a word for it: satisficing. It's the idea that rational decisions are hard, while seeking a sense of adequacy minimizes the anxiety of risk and the pain of loss (satisfaction + suffice = satisfice). It's the reason why a simple little sticker can ease the pain of a price increase by reassuring the customer that it's still low, despite their lying eyes. And it works quite well at boosting sales for off-sale items, as customers satisfice themselves with mediocrity rather than do the hard math of maximizing their purchasing power and shopping for actual, rather than perceived, value.
Seeking customer satisficing rather than providing value now dominates retail because it works really, really well. As a matter of fact, as a matter of record, it works just as well in politics.
The American Dream is a Promotional Sticker
In America, we used to do big things. In my grandfather's day, no challenge daunted us, no height impressed us, and no depth ever sunk us. We did big things in big ways, and we did them because great strength requires constant tests. So we sought out the feats no sane nation could tackle, and that's the thing we did. It's why we cut a sea lane across 50 miles of jungle, losing 30,000 men along the way. It's why we corked the Colorado River with the largest dam in human history while simultaneously flailing our way through the greatest economic disaster of all time. And of course, of course, it's why we went to the moon and did that other thing, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. We were hard, and no test of our mettle could break us because we would not relent and the world would bend to our will.
We used to do things only because they were hard and because we were tough. I say used to because, though that blood still pumps in our veins and the potential still plays about our heads in our wilder moments, we've grown timid and soft, complacent in our wealth, callous in our fortunate height. We used to do the hard thing, but some time ago we discovered a fondness for easy and cheap wins. We don't do the hard thing, the big thing. We go out of our way not to.
September 1, 2001, 9/11, was a unifying moment of national outrage at an audacious slaughter of fantastic proportions. It was followed by a time of deep pride and unstinting admiration for those implausible souls who died running into the smoke, and the rescue workers, an unlikely mix of cops and steelworkers and soldiers, whose faces on every magazine cover bore a dark patina of the dust that would later turn their lungs into rock. In our greater days, when we did those big things, this would have been the moment when all our eyes turned from the empty machinations of soulless men who saw only opportunity in our tragedy.
But that would have been hard, and so we sat complacent while our leaders plotted the greatest heist in human history while distracting us all by bombarding a nation of goatherding religious zealots. And because the money was so sweet, the pickings so plump, they put another fireworks display on our teevees and stole more and more from our treasury and thinned the herd at the same time, and all in the name of doing the easy thing endorsed by almost all of us.
And still those wars rage on while our kids die for whatever, and now most of us are clamoring once again to do the easy thing and pull away from commitments we made the day the first bomb dropped. And meanwhile our country is wealthier than ever, but only at the top, and the debate somehow centers on how much to harm the poor and the old and the very young, because asking those very few who have benefitted from a lost decade to help put our nation back upright is some concoction of every sin imagined or invented by men whose grasp on our nation's greatness can be summed up in a Lee Greenwood song, and no deeds of any sort.
We used to do the big things. We fed the poor, cared for the sick. We built grand monuments to our greatness, but we also put profound energy into the least of us. There were days when we knew that a great nation is measured by how well its poorest citizens lived. And so we did the big things and we fought poverty where it lived and we spread wealth around to all who would work for it, and we finally realized Herbert Hoover's dream of a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, and that was the biggest of all the big things we ever did, bar none.
But we don't do the big things anymore. Now we say we're broke, we have other things we need to do, we can't help every poor soul not blessed to have emerged into the world with the correct family and the best of circumstances. We do the small things, the least of things. In today's America, we eschew the grand, shoot for the petty. We don't plant the flag on the moon, we fly it from our car antenna. We don't build grand structures, we let them crumble and fall. We don't do the big thing, or the hard thing, we do the thing that comes first and easiest.
And that is the great tragedy of a great nation whose better days are only behind it by sheer force of will and a little known thing called satisficing. Jesus wept.
Originally posted to Fed up Fed on Wed Jul 20, 2011
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