This book begins with a bit of misdirection, first with its flowery prose, and then with its quant story of the founder of Trader Joe’s.
“And when you start digging into precisely how the people in grocery think, you find one thing open and waiting in the center: the maw. That voracious, devouring hole we feed three to thirty times a day, swallowing and salivating and stuffing, ceaseless in its demands right up to the point we lie in a hospital bed and it gets temporarily assisted by a polyurethane tube. The maw to me, like the sun above interfacing with the chloroplasts below the leaf, is more than just a mouth: it is a secular revelation, a complex of destruction and creativity, anchored in need. It is the sensory cells of the gut. The neuronal charge to acquire. The curiosities, comforts, and cravings we convince ourselves are necessities. It – like the Vedic concept of Self/self – comes in the universal as well as the personal, each of our unique pie holes mere tributaries to some more tremendous vortex right at the heart of the human project.” Quite a mouthful.
This book reveals the fascinating history of grocery stores from dusty bucolic general stores with no brands, no fancy packaging, no prices, and no touching, just some illiterate bumpkin grabbing stuff and weighing it and charging whatever the hell he feels like. It is similar to the restaurant and hotel. When the US built the interstate highway system, it spawned a huge motor tourism industry, but often times unwitting travelers would be screwed over at local restaurants and motels with questionable products and services, and a large portion of one’s income would be spend at restaurants and motels or hotels.
This is how chains and corporate brands took over the US. They offered standardized products and services throughout the country so wherever you traveled, you could trust a Denny’s, an IHOP, a Holiday Inn, or Hilton over a Joey’s Restaurant, or Bob’s Grill, or Highway 50 Inn, or Washington Hotel. What we are experiencing now is a return to the local and regional. With apps like Google Maps, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, you can now trust local and regional places again, and their charm and unique characteristics are quickly trumping the increasingly poor quality of chains and corporate brands.
In fact, the tables have turned once again on minorities who used to be discriminated against at local and regional restaurants and motels. In fact, black people had to rely on a guide book called The Negro Motorist Green Book in order to find places welcoming of them. Today, we hear stories again and again of chains and corporate places discriminating against black customers, seating them in separate areas, providing poor service, having security follow them around, etc. And on top of all this, corporations have embarked on a suicidal business model of cutting costs and wages as much as possible while still eeking out a profit while losing customers. Their model is close to the old Russian oligarch model of selling off all the company’s assets. The CEO doesn’t care, because once the corporation collapses, he just moves on to another corporation like the parasite he is. The stakeholders don’t care. They just sell right before the stock collapses like the parasites they are.
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The author does a really great job of summarizing the psychology of modern grocery shopping: “…saving money becomes an act of loyalty for family, picky acquisition a sign of concern for health, and the decision to buy your child a more expensive but longed-for item an act of love. And, of course, as reward for undertaking this new effort, we get the impulsive treat.”
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The book begins by covering Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s, and it reveals his iconoclast, visionary abilities in addition to his photographic, savant memory. According to Coulombe, “In 1966, I guessed that network television with its 95 percent-plus audience share just couldn’t go any further. America at that time was frighteningly homogenous and I didn’t see it lasting.” While America was becoming highly standardized and homogenous, Coulombe saw the writing on the wall, the contrary demand for customization and specialization that the market is now embracing. He saw it coming decades ahead of anyone else. Instead of everyone wanting what everyone else has, today, people want to differentiate themselves from the lowest common denominator masses, those who shop at Walmart, eat at Applebee’s or Olive Garden, drive American or Japanese gas cars, wear bright prime-colored clothing, and use Android phones. Trader Joe’s is the Apple of grocery stores before Apple existed.
While his competitors were just lazy and copied one another, Coulombe was a ferocious intellectual iconoclast who always asked why and why not. One such example was in his views on race and gender. While his competitors turned down people of color and only used women as secretaries, he employed people of color at every level of his company and assured equal pay for women and jobs outside of secretary.
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The book then takes a dark turn, as it should. One of the most shocking parts of the book is how trucking companies wrangle truck drivers and pressure them into lease-purchase agreements, whereby they have to lease the trucks they drive and rarely stay long enough to own them. They basically become serfs. It’s the same trick as human traffickers. I’ll get you across the border, but you owe me and you’ll have to work for free to pay off that debt. When drivers are recruited, they aren’t told about this, and when they refuse to lease a truck, they don’t receive sufficient miles to make a living. They also need to get an authority which costs $1200 which is like a license to drive trucks. If they can’t afford it, they use the carrier’s authority but get charged a large percentage of their gross. In one example, a driver’s gross was $200K a year, but after all the fees taken out and expenses that aren’t covered by the carrier, the driver only took home $17K.
The worst part of the story is how women are treated in the industry. There is rampant sexual harassment, molestation, and rape, and nobody seems to care. The carriers often blame the victim, and because the recruitment pool is pretty sketchy to begin with, they get away with it. They recruit pretty much from the bottom of the barrel, “homeless shelters, soup kitchens, recovery wards, prison work-release programs.” This also means they’re taking in a lot of mentally unstable people and criminals, and because carriers look the other way when there are reports of sexual harassment or molestation or pressure the victim to retract their claims, the sexual predators remain in the system to harass and molest more victims. It sounds a lot like the British seaman of the past, yobs impressed into service from the bottom of British society.
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But just as trucking companies extract fees from truck drivers, grocery stores extract fees from suppliers for shelf space called slotting fees. “These payments amount to $9 billion a year in industry profit.” “…in January 2017, one retailer was charged $55,000 for 22×12 inches of shelf space. For a single month.” But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Suppliers are coerced into paying promotional fees, advertising fees, and giving the store free product they can sell for 100% profit.
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Because grocery stores became a race to the top with the largest supermarkets gaining dominance, they simply accrued more and more debt to grow larger and larger and they hoped that it would all pay off in the end when they achieved market dominance. By then, they would pay off all their debts by screwing over their customers, their workers, and their suppliers. Sounds like the modern tech industry.
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The book winds ups revealing a lot of ways that people are getting screwed over by modern grocery stores. Another such way is just-in-time work scheduling whereby workers are called up at any time when in need and then dismissed when not needed. As a result, many workers wind up working parttime and cannot take on another parttime job, because they need to be available like a fulltime worker. “Another [study] found that 60% of retail workers said that they needed to be available to fulfill every work schedule that might be assigned in a given week, and that a full third of all retail employees get less than twenty-four hours’ notice for schedule changes.”
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The book also reveals that food safety in America is a farce, and the only guarantee of food safety is a lawsuit after the fact. “…over the thirty-five days it takes to grow a chicken to maturity, the floor of the shed will rise six inches in height simply from the accumulated chicken shit the birds produce, and this chicken shit gives off ammonia gas so strong that the “live catch” handlers who go in to gather the chickens for slaughter have to apply cornstarch to their skin to prevent the ammonia from peeling the flesh off their bodies.”
“I kept thinking of the medieval practice of simony, where the wealthy could pay money to be released from their sins. The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update. The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield, allowing those of us with disposable income to pay extra for our salvation, and forcing everyone else to deal with the fact that on top of being poor, they were tacitly agreeing to harm the earth, pollute their children via their lunch boxes, and exploit their fellow man each time they made a purchase.”
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“Two ideas that are, by definition, in tension. And thus taste – and consumption itself – is bound up in a paradox of sorts: freedom to express the unique self, but requiring approval from the greater conforming community.”
I think a lot of people are confused about American individualism and individuality in general. We are not talking about ‘solitarism’. American individualism is not the desire to go out and live alone in the wilderness, despite the romanticism of this idea by the likes of Thoreau’s Walden or Jack Kerouac’s adventures as a US Forest Service fire lookout. American individuality is actually more hunter-gatherer micro-collectivism contrasted with the civilization macro-collectivism of Southern Europe, the Aztecs, India, and China. Micro-collectivism means that you care about the collective, but only at a local level. You’re an egalitarian that doesn’t believe in complex and large social systems where everyone is stratified and segregated by socio-economic and demographic traits.
It doesn’t mean you want to do whatever you want and damn social conventions and morals and mores and what the neighbors say or what friends and family say. It means that instead of caring what the mainstream media cares about, what your schools teach you, what your government cares about, what corporations care about, you only care about what your friends and family care about. It’s not paradoxical at all. It’s just a different level of collectivism. Humans are intrinsically collectivists, but when they don’t want to be controlled by corporations or government, they’re labelled individualists like they want to go live in the wilderness in total solitude. It’s all a word game like calling a statist a liberal when in fact a true liberal wants to be liberated from the state.
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Just when you thought things could not get worse, you get the story of a young Thai trafficked slave boy on a fishing boat. His best friend was beaten by the captain and thrown off the boat. I recall a very similar story in another book, perhaps it’s the same person who sells his story to anyone who will listen.
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“When shrimp lived in these more confined habitats, their sexual development was stunted by stress. The females simply refused to develop ovaries.” This reminds me of Universe 25, the experiment where mice were thrown together in a small, confined space, and they eventually went crazy and started attacking and killing one another until they all died despite ample food being provided. This reminds me of developed countries with falling birthrates. While I do believe in women’s rights and women in the workplace, it’s also quite possible that the stress of working and climbing the corporate ladder is not only making women want to delay childbirth and family but eschew it altogether.
And one must wonder whether older people in general are much more vulnerable to stress than younger people, so if you are planning on delaying having children, as you get older, you succumb to stress more, and you are less likely to have a child, and if you do have a child, the stress of raising one gets to you more, and you are less likely to have more than one child whereas an uneducated young person is happy to make babies and raise them and deal with the stress one day at a time. After all, we prefer to recruit soldiers young, because not only are they more fit, but they are also more naïve and amenable to the stresses of military life whereas the older you get, the less likely you would even consider joining the military, and if you did, the shock of military life would be so unpleasant that you would more likely try to quit or just never reenlist.
Perhaps one of the most bizarre biological mysteries is how female shrimp, overcrowded in tubs would over time lose one of their eyeballs to the constant rubbing of it against the side of the tub, and as a result, hormones are unleashed leading to the development in ovaries “in as little as three days.” So crafty shrimpers simply snipped off one eyeball of female shrimp to induce the development of ovaries. Perhaps you could replicate this with human females.
The story of the slave boy fisherman has an unbelievable twist. After five years of free labor, he simply asks to leave and is allowed. He works at a shrimp processing plant, but he isn’t paid, because he is charged for electricity and housing, so he returns to fishing where he becomes a supervisor. The author asks if he ever abused anyone, and he denies it, but who knows. This is a story of Stockholm Syndrome where he has adapted to the harsh conditions of slavery and abuse, and then like a prostitute who becomes a madame, he turns around and helps victimize others. I doubt anyone who ever abused people or even killed them would ever admit that to a journalist when they get to share their story again and again as a victim.
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Lest you think slave labor and human trafficking is not a 1st world problem, you may have noticed a boom in Asian massage parlors in your city, at least, I have in Reno. And don’t forget prison labor.
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In the final analysis, the author offers despair. He argues that when consumers demand accountability, the added costs of audits and certifications and all are just transferred to the sellers who are then forced to cut costs in the only place they can, and that is labor, by going from low-paying to slave labor. I find this specious, cynical, unproductive, and profoundly misguided. It does make a difference. Some producers can deliver without turning to slave labor, and with the help of books like this, there will be consumer demand that we know exactly whether the products we buy come from slave labor.
Take for instance Temu. Not only is Temu rife with knockoffs and counterfeits, it almost invariably uses prison labor, their prisons filled with political opponents, Falun Gong followers, and ethnic minorities the Chinese are attempting to eradicate or at least use as free prison labor. As a consumer, you have the incredible power not to download the Temu app. The author would have you believe there is nothing you can do, so you might as well shop Temu. You might as well eat shrimp. You might as well eat factory meat filled with antibiotics, hormones, and fed GMO corn. You might as well shop at Walmart. You might as well drive a Hummer. You might as well buy clothes made in a sweatshop. You might as well vote for a Democrat or a Republican. You might as well invest in petroleum companies, tobacco companies, and buy a blood diamond. I think the conscientious consumer is headed in the right direction, but change does not happen overnight, but change does happen when consumers demand accountability and ethics. We just have to do a better job of it. It doesn’t mean everything is useless, oh woe is me. Give me a break.
Not to the join in the pessimists chorus, however, I would add that in order to be a conscientious consumer, you have to be able to AFFORD to be a conscientious consumer, and I don’t see Millennials and to a much greater extent Gen Zers having any extra disposable income to become conscientious consumers. While Gen Xers may have been able to afford craft IPAs, Millennials often gravitated toward PBR as much for the price as the blue collar irony. Today, with bar beer prices as high as $10, I don’t see many Gen Zers drinking craft beers, and many settle for the cheap corporate variety, or simply buy a 12-pack at home and pre-party.
Fact is, after World War II, Americans became rich, and while there were many high school grads who became rich factory workers, there were also many new college grads who became rich white collar workers who became conscientious consumers. As AI takes over white collar jobs, as white collar jobs pay less, as it becomes increasingly impossible to afford a college education, as older conscientious consumers have no children or fewer children then blue collar migrants, the number of conscientious consumers will plummet and along with them the demand for accountability.
And with AI and robotics, just as with slavery in the American South, this will leave poor people with no jobs or jobs at much lower wages than without slavery or AI and robotics. The fantasy of universal basic income is like telling poor white Southerners that plantation owners will share some of the profits from slavery with them. You think? In fact, I imagine the poor white Southerners are naïve and gullible enough to pick up guns and fight for their wealthy Southern counterparts in a contrived civil war again. If you will, Donald Trump is much like the Southern plantation owner who tells them that he is one of them, that he will fight for them, that they need to take up arms and fight the evil cross-bred urbanites who don’t believe in slavery and racism. And we’ve witnessed history prove that the illiterate white Southerner was willing to risk his life to fight for the rich Southern plantation owners, despite the fact that they neither employed him nor cared for him, just as Donald Trump could care less about poor, white rural folk. W Bush didn’t care for poor black people during Katrina, but nobody is willing to accept the fact that Trump really doesn’t care for poor white people. In fact, in reading his biography, his older brother who didn’t want to work for his father at first, became a poor white person who crawled back to his father for work and ultimately killed himself from drinking. Trump views poverty as a punishment for disobedience. He will not fight for the poor, just as he never fought for his brother.
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The author sounds like a Brit in that he’s cynical and snide and doesn’t really think improving yourself amounts to anything more than a better version of yourself capable of doing nothing. First of all, we shouldn’t be so depressed and upset that the world is the way it is. We have this false impression that nature is like Disney and no one suffers, and when animals are eaten alive, they miraculously go into shock and feel nothing. That’s all horseshit. They feel horrific pain and suffering, and so do factory animals cramped in small spaces and torn from their parents or torn from their offspring.
Nature was cruel and horrible before humans, but only through human vocabulary. Without human vocabulary, nature was just atoms bouncing off one another. Pain and suffering was neither good nor bad. Humans came along, and because we are perhaps the most social creature, we created ethics which was a magic trick. We are allowed to be ethical to one another, to those we feel belong in our group, and then we are allowed to be horrifically cruel to outsiders. All along, nature has been horrifically cruel and in some cases with social creatures, quite kind and loving, but even then, a social animal under duress, like the mice in Universe-25, can be transformed into cruel monsters. So the baseline is that life is full of pain and misery and suffering, and we are lucky to experience sporadic joy, love, kindness, and happiness, but only within our own groups. We are ethical hypocrites who are happy to kill and incarcerate people of a different ‘race’ or religion or political opinion or simply other species we consider to be food and not pets. That is the starting point.
The question is not, why can’t we be the nice and loving and peaceful beings we are supposed to be. We were never supposed to be that. Nature isn’t much about that stuff. That was a human invention to incentivize us to work well with people within our group which overtook the planet. The question is, why not expand that group and expand our kindness, sharing, and love with more and more people and more and more species? That’s how we took over the planet to begin with, by ever expanding our social groups from tribes, to villages, to cities, to nations, to global alliances. Why not improve upon nature? Why not take a tool that was designed to make us super cooperative within our own groups and extrapolate that to a tool that makes us super cooperative outside our groups? Why not march toward universal altruism and kindness and love? If we can afford to do it, and it benefits us all, why not?
The answer is quite clear. There is a small cabal of humans who still think that ethics is only a tool to incentivize cooperation within their group of elite, rich assholes. They think of everyone outside of their group as prey, livestock, slaves, cheap labor, low class peons, peasant stock, what have you. They have most of the wealth, most of the media, most of the politicians, most of the regulatory agencies, most of the military generals, most of everything, so you can see that wresting control from them to be kind and nice to everyone will be an uphill battle, but what else is there to do but give up, collaborate, try to join them, fight amongst ourselves like they want us to, and become unhealthy, lonely, miserable, cynics like the author? Somehow I think those in power are more than happy to see educated people resign themselves to despair and cynicism, English style.
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