My boss called me from a phone I would not recognize, so, when I picked up, thinking that I had won some Publishers Clearing House windfall, it was John, asking me if I’d get the dairy section ready for Good Friday, saying, “Make it Hollywood.”
Well, I do not want to work an extra day and lose writing time with 74 articles on my clipboard and 4 novels in the works. But, I want John to let me have two weeks off to tramp around the Rockies in September, so I said, “Yes.”
“Make it Hollywood,” seems kind of hyperbolic, comparing a local grocery lineup in a working class backwater of a smallish state, to the centerpiece of global culture, to the Sacred City of the Secular World.
It does make sense. What John wanted me to do was make it look pretty, not process an order, but make something look better than it is, so that the urge to consume will take hold of the customer and increase sales.
On the surface this is to the mutual benefit of retailer and consumer. But the greatest portion of gain is had on the margin of the lie. The greater the brand loyalty of a product the less profitable to the seller and more expense to the buyer, with the manufacturer of the lie [such as Coke or Pepsi] making virtually all of the gain.
What I am merchandising is not food, not commodities, but labels, the last, least actor in a remote confidence game. Most of the dollars that flow through my hands in the form of packaged consumer goods are being spent to recover and reward advertising and labeling, to keep the consumer seduction cycle going.
For instance, the best selling yogurt is whipped with air and corn starch to affect an image of value.
The best selling cheese is not cheese, but a confection of oil, additives and dairy solids, called “cheesefood.”
Of the actual cheese, yellow cheese is preferred by three out of four customers. People think that cheese is supposed to be yellow, and will argue with us all day long that it tastes different or is “bad” when white, as if cheese were made from cow’s urine, not milk.
Of the cheesefoods available the national brand is priced a full dollar more and outsells the exact product [perhaps made and packed by that same company] by 4 to 1.
For every cheesefood purchase of a white cheesefood, 10 yellow purchases are made.
On the east coast only two companies pack sugar. In the mid-Atlantic market virtually all sugar is packed by the same Baltimore refinery. The store brand bricks of 4-pound sugar sometimes come mixed with the name brand as pack runs change.
Good luck convincing a customer that Domino and Richfood sugar are both packed five blocks away at the same plant.
So, I concluded by morning, as I looked at my consumable sand castle emblazoned with brand loyalty banners, if the majority of us are so easily fooled as to the substances we eat, how could we not be lead astray by these same methods, which have prepared us since childhood to act impulsively, in direct opposition to our own self-interest?
How can voting in such a consumerist matrix by anything but a sham?
