By James Slone

“The customer is always right.”

Thus spoke department retail mogul Harry Gordon Selfridge, coining a phrase that would be blazoned across the sky in triumphant revolutionary letters by an insulated and cocky consumer class- contemporary capitalism had emerged out of the slippery primordial placenta of markets and magazines, creating that most repellent and fearless parasites of our culture: the self righteous browser of trinkets, consumer of fat and cholesterol, the pissed off redneck ready to strangle his hapless migrant victim for charging 4 cents extra on their Big Mac, none other than the messianic customer who will rape the planet, soil the oceans and napalm the forests, all in the name of rock bottom prices. The worst part is we’re all a part of the amorphous horde, a gelatinous Lovecraftian evil that strangles the earth in a banality of evil that would have made Hannah Arendt shirk away.

Our culture takes it as plain spoken truth that whatever the customer says goes. But the utopian vision of a shopper’s paradise where everyone’s lust for savings are fulfilled with sugarplum dreams and sterile muzak is decidedly dystopian to the hapless sod, the besieged wage slave behind the counter, squeezed between the old fashioned enemies of capital and the stampede of drooling, hostile customers. Marx liked to talk about market forces and the capitalist class out there exploiting labor, and some of his later followers like Antonio Gramsci talked about cultural hegemony, about a proletariat and a bourgeoisie mentally poisoned and brought into agreement with an inequitable social structure by their own consent. What few could ever anticipate was the full extent to which the very buyers of goods and services would become an oppressive force.

Having worked for a certain giant corporation and having read the comment cards of customers, I was continuously struck by the utter lack of self regard, the complete absence of social propriety, and the really annoying self-righteousness of the average customer. In this world of fast food and instant gratification, empathy is the most profane word. “Oh my vanilla bullshit was lukewarm, and ruined my day. I demand to be compensated!” or “Garcia didn’t smile at me or make eye contact. I was so offended I couldn’t even enjoy my drink!” To a fairly large chunk of the population of this country, a slightly off drink is enough to break their heart in two and inspire hard rock ballads- it’s all spectacle in the theater of complaint. Of course all this is vague and doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. But it is. This mentality is linked to the worst dynamic of global capital, the most disgusting truth, and a point people like to miss.

The consumer is the major source of most of our problems, social, political, cultural, or otherwise. Yes, the big bad evil corporations lie and deceive- at this point it’s accepted wisdom, it’s like some Taoist truism that the Confucians just can’t manage to destroy. Go to any glib, sarcastic asshole in America, and they’ll tell you about evil magnates, labor camps, and pharmaceutical companies and how they’re like totally testing drugs on like Africans man, and so what? That large scale private companies are exploitive mongoloids out for a buck is a point of fact- we’ve all seen the environmental degradation, income disparity, and nihilistic exploitation they pump out, we know the media wing are propagandists out to brainwash us. We’re all cynical. But we’re what makes the Machine everyone’s raging against work. We know, we just don’t care.

The customer wants three things: toys, instant gratification, and low prices. That’s their whole agenda- if the companies stop producing toys, providing quick and accessible access to them, or selling them at outrageously low prices, urban chaos would break out within weeks. Customers can live without their shiny objects for a time, but how long before the rampaging hordes slash and burn their way through Super Target, stuffing their shambling carts with pre faded jeans and Playstation2s? The fact is the customers want their shit and they want it now. And while they bitch and moan, and produce litanies about the corporate behemoth that crushed their will to live, they secretly love the beast and want nothing more than to suckle on the She-Wolf’s teat. If prices were always low and everything was made available, as any utilitarian worth their salt would argue, eternal bliss would set in and bovine stupidity would reign supreme.

On one card I read, a customer demanded that my chattel masters lower their chocolate beverage prices to be more affordable to the little guy, you know, the one American in Skankhole, Georgia, who doesn’t have a 5 dollar bill to burn on cheap disposable food. And in the next sentence (the very next thing that burns through this customer’s synapses at the speed of light), he demands higher wages for the chocolate producing slaves in Africa! Somewhere in his walnut sized simian brain the contradiction between these two sentences fails to connect. He wants his luxury goods to be cheap but doesn’t want labor to be exploited to make that possible. And this is no exception, this is like half of American talking. This is a splendid little example of the insidious whole. Make candy fall from the sky, but don’t cut wages to do it!

The fact is Americans don’t give a shit one way or another where our goods come from. We pat ourselves on the back for making the world a better place by spreading our spending and growth disease over the planet entire, and yet have no concern whatsoever about what makes it all possible. Minimum wage for all, but don’t sell my bananas and coffee at prices that reflect it. If anyone in the tropical zone could actually feed themselves anymore and live at human levels, a cup of coffee would cost 10 dollars in this county, and Billy Bob can’t have that, can he? He got himself some mouths to feed and the $27.00/hr the mill pays is scarcely enough. Nonsense. If people had to buy things at blood cost in this country the economy would tank in a cataclysmic depression, but that’s why this country exacts its own blood cost, in Central America and elsewhere, to ensure that it doesn’t come to that.

Mainstream market economists like to talk about cost in terms of demand. The demand for the object, when computed with production costs, etc. determines the price. This is all predicated on the flawed assumption that consumers are rational creatures who know damn well what’s best for themselves. How humane and sensible!. And how monstrously untrue. Customers know nothing about what they need; they only understand what they want and must have. They want digital cameras and ironic statement clothing, glossy handbags and plastic novelties, the latest pop punk disaster and hamburgers the size of their fat heads. These people would slaughter millions for cheap troth slop and a mattress made out of NASA-developed springs. These people cast their votes for atrocity when they refuse to change their lives. Keep the cola flowing, don’t stop the faucet, and you can burn down the rain forest.

To make this experience communal, go to a Burger King during busy hours and watch the commotion. Depressed faces and momentary glimmers of happiness when they make it through the line, the angry senior with the fixed grimace eyeballing the Latino cashier, worried he might get shortchanged, the impatient yuppy looking at his watch, hoping to deliver his payload of greasy death on his family like napalm over the Mekong. Many of these customers will fill out a customer response card and claim that the service ruined their day, telling tortured stories about how they had to exchange their order or someone failed to call them “sir.” This is our way of life. We’re willing to have the fry vat operator fired or the gas station attendant reprimanded, and indeed, thousands killed, maimed, or tortured, to make sure that the $.99 coffee and tater slime we ordered is delivered in under two minutes to the cavernous abyss of our hungry maws.

jmslone@gmail.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 7:42 pm and is filed under The Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.