Cheap (39 page)

17
agricultural implements, plumbing equipment, and cameras
: Susan Strasser, “Woolworth to Wal-Mart: Mass Merchandising and the Changing Culture of Consumption,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed.,
Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-first Century Capitalism
(New York, The New Press, 2006), 41.

18
hold the attention of the customers it brings into the store
: Anonymous, “Extending Sale of Cheap Goods,”
New York Times
, February 22, 1915.

18
onetime luxuries, such as clocks:
Merritt Roe Smith told me about a monograph he had read of a British visitor traveling around Illinois and Missouri in 1834, expressing surprise that every dirt floor cabin he entered had an “eight-day brass clock” on its mantel. Clocks, handmade by the thousands in large workshops, were status symbols at the time. Smith said they sold for about $1.50 apiece and were considered a luxury.

18
criminal tendency to cheap goods
: David Monod,
Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture of Mass Marketing 1890-1939
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 235. Here Monod is quoting from an article in
Canadian Grocer
, 1904.

18
“vile, awful sweatshop” . . . “plenty of the bargains”:
Ibid., 292.

18
integral to its concept of community
: Paul Ingram and Hayagreeva Rao, “Store Wars: The Enactment and Repeal of Anti-Chain-Store Legislation in America,”
American Journal of Sociology
110, no. 2 (September 2004): 446-87.

19
“would-be dictators”: National Association of Retail Druggists Journal
, April 2, 1936, 397, as cited in Paul Ingram and Hayagreeva Rao, “Store Wars.”

19
“chain-store system fosters must be eradicated”:
Carl G. Ryant, “The South and the Movement Against Chain Stores,”
The Journal of Southern History
39 (1973): 208.

19
than the operators of chain stores
: Robert Spector,
Category Killers: The Retail Revolution and Its Impact on Consumer Culture
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005), 17.

19
“first step in the development of totalitarianism”:
Jonathan J. Bean,
Beyond the Broker State: Federal Policies Toward Small Business, 1936-1961
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 5.

19
heavy graduated taxes on the chains
: In the Pacific Northwest, activist Montaville Flowers attacked the chains in a series of thirty-six half-hour radio broadcasts, and Portland, Oregon, became the first community in the country to pass a municipal antichain store law.

20
Sears shipped merchandise shrouded in plain brown wrappers:
Leon A. Harris,
Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores
(New York: Harper & Row, 1979) 319.

20
“very cheaply and roughly made”
: Robert Kanigel,
The One Best Way,
496.

20
marvel at this criticism
: Although Ford is credited with putting mass production into high gear in his car assembly facilities, he did not personally popularize the term. That distinction belongs to Ford Motor Company spokesman William J. Cameron, who ghost-wrote an article on the subject under Ford’s name that appeared in the
Encylopaedia Britannica
in 1925.

20
to keep his overstressed workforce happy
: Steven Babson,
Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town
(Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 29-31.

20
of its workforce every month
: See John R. Lee, “The So-Called Profit Sharing System in the Ford Plant,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
, 65, Personnel and Employment Problems in Industrial Management, (May 1916): 297-310. This astonishing document, prepared by a Ford manager, outlines a remarkable social engineering scheme created by Ford to maintain control over his employees. Lee describes the eligibility criteria for the Ford profit sharing plan. Workers were disqualified if it was determined that the lavish sum of $5 a day would “make of them a menace to society” and “no man was to receive the money who could not use it advisedly.”

21
automakers were forced to follow suit
: See, for example, Stephen Meyer III,
The Five-Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company
, 1908-1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). For an excellent online synopsis of this period in Ford history, see “The Assembly Line and the Five Dollar Day” at
http://www.michigan.gov/hal/0,1607,7-160-17451__18670__18793-53441—,00.html.

21
five-dollar day; and low prices
: Ibid., 263.

21
to $290 in the early 1920s
: Steven Babson,
Working Detroit,
30.

21
that placed goods and spending at the center of social life
: Charles McGovern,
Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2006).

22
“promise of greater freedom, democracy and quality”
: Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumers’ Republic
(New York: Knopf, 2003). I am also obliged to Dr. Cohen, professor of sociology at Harvard University, for speaking to me at length on the rise of the American consumer movement.

22
but with the more forward-looking “Low prices”
: Don Humphrey, “Price Reduction as a Stimulus to Sales of Durable Consumer Goods,”
Journal of the American Statistical Association
, 34, no. 206 (June 1939): 252-60.

22
corporate greed-heads from pushing them even higher
: See, for example, Cohen, 21-23. Cohen writes: “By the end of the depression decade, invoking ‘the consumer’ would become an acceptable way of promoting the public good, of defending the economic rights and needs of ordinary citizens.”

22
every American believed that he or she had a claim to ownership:
Ibid., 22.

22
“America’s opportunity to serve progress”:
“Who Serves Progress Serves America,” General Motors advertising campaign published in the
Saturday Evening Post
, October 28, 1936, 48-49.

22
“geography, religion, or politics, but by spending”
: Charles McGovern,
Sold American,
p. 5.

22
at the very same low price
: In 1904, Sears Roebuck distributed one million catalogs. By 1927, that number grew to 23 million copies—while the U.S. population hovered at just over 19 million.

23
and downward spiraling prices:
“Resale Price Maintenance: The Miller-Tydings Enabling Act,”
Harvard Law Review
51, no. 2 (December 1937): 336-45.

24
paid fair prices for high-quality goods
: Thanks to YouTube and other online video providers, clips of this film can be seen gratis from any computer with Internet access.

24
first in the nation in private home ownership
: Harold Meyerson, “In Wal-Mart’s America,”
Washington Post,
August 27, 2003, A25.

24
and even used cars
: Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumers’ Republic,
64.

25
surroundings with new goods and services
: Christopher Lasch,
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 138.

26
“both may lead to a totalitarian state”
: Malcolm P. McNair, “Marketing Functions and Costs and the Robinson-Patman Act,”
Law and Contemporary Problems
(Dur ham, N.C.: Duke University School of Law, June 1937).

26
had exploded reaching 25 million homes
: For a comprehensive timeline of television in the United States see “Television History, the First 75 Years” online at
http://www.tvhistory.tv/index.html
.

26
spurred record levels of consumption
: research indicates that media foster commercial attitudes and motivate consumption. See, for example, Heejo Keum et al., “The Citizen-Consumer: Media Effects at the Intersection of Consumer and Civic Culture,”
Political Communication
21, no 3, (July-September 2004): 369-91.

26
“wants that previously did not exist”
: John Kenneth Galbraith,
The Affluent Society
. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 60.

26
“the Sears, Roebuck catalogue”
: Ibid.

27
“sizeable chunk of our business”:
Carl Riser reporting in “The Short Order Economy,”
Fortune
, August 1962. The quote comes from General Foods marketing executive Herbert M. Cleaves.

27
region to carry a particular brand
: Stephanie Strom, “Department Stores’ Fate; Bankruptcies Like Macy’s Overshadowing Strong Consumer Loyalty, Experts Assert,”
New York Times,
February 3, 1992.

28
legal barriers to price-cutting were gone
: In fact, in 1961 four officials of the General Motors Corporation and several General Motors agencies were indicted of conspiring to prevent sales of cars through discount stores.

28
were the most impatient and impulsive shoppers
: Charles E. Silberman, “The Revolutionists of Retailing,”
Fortune
(April 1962): 260. Silberman points out that discount stores in particular were catering to a new wave of male shoppers by opening auto supply, sporting goods, and hardware departments. He writes: “Today men naturally become interested in shopping, for consumption has become too important to be left exclusively to women.”

29
frugal America to a nation in debt
: See, for example, Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumers’ Republic,
124. The author points to a 1959 Department of Labor study, “How American Buying Habits Change,” confirming that ordinary workers who once strove to save now regarded debt as the norm. By 1957 two-thirds of American families carried some kind of debt, and about half of all families owed money for installment plan purchases.

29
an astonishing $5 billion
: D. B. Deloach, “Marketing Through Discount Stores,”
Journal of Farm Economics
, 44, no. 1 (February, 1962): 169-77.

29
women’s clothing, shoes, furniture, and jewelry
: Robert Spector,
Category Killers: The Retail Revolution and Its Impact on Consumer Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2005), 22.

30
stockholder of E. J. Korvette
: Charles Silberman, “Revolutionists of Retailing,” 99.

30
which means “sell” in Yiddish
: Peter Y. Meddling,
Coping with Life and Death: Jewish Families in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 56.

31
tips no higher than 10 percent
: Sam Walton’s personal habits are detailed in numerous profiles and books, but on this and many other things related to Wal-Mart, one particularly reliable source is Charles Fishman,
The Wal-Mart Effect
(New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

31
“the most unorthodox tycoon in the land”
: Murray Gart, “Everybody Loves a Bargain,”
Time
, July 6, 1962.

31
second-story loft on East 46th Street
: Robert Spector,
Category Killers,
18.

32
“eight Jewish Korean War veterans”
: This myth has been debunked repeatedly, but perhaps the most authoritative source is Paul Dickson and Joseph C. Goulden,
There are Alligators in Our Sewers and Other American Credos
(New York: Delacorte, 1984).

32
to avoid legal hassles with the navy
: Gart, “Everybody Loves a Bargain.”

32
the dreary into the fabulous:
An advertisement for Ballantine Ale appearing in
Life
magazine (February 1, 1943, 70) portrays a middle-aged man in suit, tie, and fedora covering his wife’s eyes with one hand and with the other brandishing a brand-new electric mixer—clearly a surprise for her. The ad copy reads: “And how American to want something better—in kitchen equipment or airplanes or threshing machines or what have you. Why, we’re even fighting a war over the promise of a better tomorrow.”

32
“forget that kitchen drudgery forever”
: N. W. Ayer Collection, Series 3, Box 245, Drawer 303, Folder 1943-47, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., as cited in Charles McGovern,
Sold American.

32
shop for more low-price goods
: Gail Collins,
America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines
(New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 403.

33
“secure the utmost for their money”
: Advertisement in
Ladies’ Home Journal
37 (March 3, 1920), 57.

33
A freezer sold for close to $400
: See, for example, this history of appliances:
http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html
.

33
median annual income for a family
: U.S. Census Historical Income Tables, Table F-7: All Races by median and mean income, 1947 to 2005, at
census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/fo7ar.html
.

33
department stores such as Macy’s and Gimbels
: Brian Trumbore, “Discount Retailers,”
StocksandNew.com
, 2001.

33
a
million-dollar profit selling a million refrigerators
: David Halberstam,
The Fifties
(New York: Villard Books, 1993), 151.

33
“parasite and a bootlegger” and, most degrading of all, a “discounter”:
Robert Spector, “Category Killers,” 18.