Upscale grocery stores are beautiful.
The food is beautiful. The displays are beautiful. The stores are immaculate.
This is a rich country. Anyone can shop here.
There have always been fancy food stores and up-scale butchers in America, but something new has emerged to service the needs of the "mass affluent." Whole Foods Market is the nationally-known chain. It presents itself as selling "natural" food, organic food, supposedly-minimally-processed foods, responsibly-sourced foods. It is more expensive than general supermarkets like Safeway, but customers in America's vast middle class shop there when they have particular tastes and a bit of discretionary money to indulge them.
There are local versions of the same kind of store. Market of Choice is an example of it in Medford, Oregon, and no doubt similar stores exist nationwide in moderately upscale urban and suburban zip codes. Simple, unprocessed food is cheap in America, a small part of the budget of middle-income customers. The markups are in processed and branded food. Part of the appeal of these stores is gigantic variety in certain categories where there is niche branding, now including beer. In the display shelf below, each beer can has six cans stacked behind it, so that each brand had its own one-can face. I counted 450 different brands in this photo.
There is also a refrigerated section of approximately the same size.
I took photos of the display because it amazed me. I was reminded of that scene in The Great Gatsby, a book commonly assigned to Americans in their high school English class, so part of the national canon. "I have a man in England who buys me clothes," Gatsby said, as he grabbed folded shirts out of his closet and threw them down to Daisy who became covered by them. The wealth. The excess. Look at what Gatsby has, and his freedom to unfold beautiful shirts and toss them. She was led to tears.
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| From the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby |
I am writing about grocery stores, yet the focus of this blog is politics. Let me explain.
I observe political messages, some of which are made in the obvious places, including political speeches, and others are made wordlessly, in tone, demeanor, biography, and actions by political actors. This blog calls it body language. Sometimes an object or event is a political message. I see the beer displays as body language, like the language of Jay Gatsby throwing his shirts.
Surely the merchant intends no political point. It is just a sales display and the denoted unsaid message is simply "Here is beer for sale." But there is a subtext of limitless choice and opportunity to indulge one's finest distinctions of preference. Look at all this! This is a message of vast abundance.
Market of Choice is advertising right now for new employees, to be paid $14-$18 an hour, which is enough income to allow the employee to shop at this store. There are people who disapprove of such excess as shown in this beer display. What waste, what flagrant commercialism! Wasn't that one of the messages of The Great Gatsby, the shallowness and pointlessness of wasteful luxury? After all, it didn't make Gatsby or Daisy happy.
If beer-drinkers have enough abundance to indulge their particular tastes, I say, why not? I am fussy about my melons, so I don't judge harshly people who are fussy about beer. I like abundance. I want everyone to have access to it.
Something isn't working right. I have written about the un-housed people so visible in Portland. Those people on the sidewalks are a wordless political message, too, one as vivid as the beer display that caught my eye. It is a message of the failure of abundance to trickle down.
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| Portland sidewalk |
This country's version of global capitalism is an incredible engine for creating material wealth, but it has not been successful in its wide distribution. Some people are left behind, the struggling working class. Some people are left even further behind, and they live in tents on sidewalks. They create a colorful display of their own, their own body language message.
This is a rich country. There is enough. We could eliminate poverty if we chose to.
Yes, we could end poverty. How? By electing a vast majority of Democrats and the as a result, dramatically raise taxes on the rich and even, middle class. Then create a real safety net for all Americans. Universal income regardless of race, age, whether the person could work or not. It would be a tough sell, but what’s wrong with taking care of all Americans? 90% taxation on the rich is ok by me.
ReplyDeleteIt’s hard to decide what beer when you have that many choices anyway.
Some part of being in poverty is a "state of mind". Some people are destined for it no matter what you do to help them.
ReplyDeleteIf you gave $1 million to everyone, some people would blow through it in a couple of years, and they would be impoverished again. I personally saw a guy blow through $350,000 in a couple of years on alcohol and drugs, and now he's back to living in a car.
You could provide everyone with shelter, but how long would that last? You have to maintain your shelter, it costs money, and some derelicts wouldn't do it.
Two common denominators of derelicts is that they have drug and alcohol problems, and/or they are mentally ill.
Oregon encourages hard drug use through their drug decriminalization program, and Oregon has failed the mentally ill by having a shortage of mental hospital beds.
30 years of Democratic rule in Salem has caused the bums on the street problem today. Medford and Jackson County have had a bum problem for many years, yet both the commissioners and the Medford City Council have failed severely on this problem. You can't fix the problem with lame politicians who have no vision.
I agree with Anonymous…… to a point. Yes, addicts and mentally ill people are in no position to make logical choices about anything; so, no, society shouldn’t be providing cash to them. But how about food, or housing? Derelicts living in tents on the roadsides don’t help anyone’s property values.
ReplyDeleteMy question is this - Is the level of drug addiction and mental illness measurably higher in the US than in other western countries? When one travels to Europe or Canada one doesn’t see the kind of homelessness one sees here. Is there something about our society, or our individualistic ethic that is a causality for so much mental illness and addiction? Or is our country’s not so benign neglect of these populations the difference, compared to the more expansive safety nets of other wealthy countries?
I believe that race plays a huge factor in all of this. In countries with a homogeneous racial makeup, the poor are not the “other,” they are us. What is different about present times is that, especially in Oregon, the face of poverty and addiction is now increasingly white. The meth and pain pill epidemic - and the loss of blue collar jobs - saw to that. Will Oregon, where the face of poverty is overwhelmingly white, respond differently than Mississippi, where the face of poverty is black?
A better comparison would be West Virginia, a solid red state with minimal minority population, and Mississippi, with a disproportionately (for the US) minority population.
I am not Christian but a great many people in this country profess to being Christian. What would Jesus do?
ReplyDeleteFor I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, xI was a stranger and you welcomed me,
36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’
37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?
38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?
39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’
40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
But, but, but these people brought some of it on themselves. They aren't worthy of help. Jesus must not have meant it when he said "the least of these my brothers." He meant the worthy, the people a couple of notches UP from the least. Surely Jesus didn't care about the POOR. He cared about people who had their stuff together. Jesus sounds like a do-gooder, maybe even sort of a socialist. Surely he recognized that the accumulation of capital was essential to material progress and that the strong should dominate the weak. Surely he didn't want the meek, for gosh sakes, to inherit. Get real. Jesus was a hard nosed businessman who founded a great religion representing the interests of the powerful. Christianity took off when the Roman Emperor made it law.
Hate your neighbor, but don't forget to say grace.
After all, it's called "Market of Choice"...
ReplyDeleteWhat do you expect?
I go to Market of No Choice...only has Bud.
Re: "I go to Market of No Choice...only has Bud."
ReplyDeleteNope, I've never seen any store that has only Bud. I doubt other commenter has, too.
Anonymous got it mostly right. There will always be someone at the bottom. This ain't Lake Wobegon.
“It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
ReplyDelete― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Five drunks, five stories. Generalizations about the poor fall apart when you hear their individual histories. You begin to realize that the deserving and undeserving poor are categories in the eye of the beholder only. Some scam the system, others are scammed by the stingy system. No matter what, there is no largess in food stamps, aid to families, free lunch programs, aid to disabled, aid to single men and women drunk and addicted. “In the old days” a family would have to put up the single woman with child and no husband. Relatives supported with $.
ReplyDeleteWe have left the feeble, the weak, the stricken , the old, to the care of the state’s money and walked away. We pretend to be shocked at the tents and homeless, to look away, to walk on the other side of the street, to avoid a conversation and emotional involvement..Keep them on the TV, not in my backyard. Standing in the grocery line a person uses their EBT card and you look at them trying to decide if they are worthy of food assistance, too fat, too mentally alert, in slippers? Certainly not looking for work. Look at their hair and so on. We want to catch those welfare kings and queens, report them, hate them, spit on them for undermining and mocking the American Dream and stealing my tax money. They usually don’t look like royalty with their pit bull and cardboard sign sitting on a milk crate at an intersection. Make them work; make them show up on time; make them get there with missing teeth and urine smelling clothes and dirty hands. Tell the woman to leave the kid locked in the bathroom and clean the office at night. No time for generosity and tolerance, just stay out of my pocket. A relative living with me, no thanks .
An $18 an hour job comes out to $37.400 a year and is $15k under the statewide average income and ~ $8k under the southern oregon average. Make believing this is somehow a livable wage is another example of Southern Oregon selling itself short in the how to succeed department.
ReplyDelete