On a quest for a salty snack the other day, I came across some “Kettle-cooked hand-rubbed spice chips” by Lays. Since I know that anything mass produced will neither be kettle-cooked nor hand-rubbed, I knew that the only true word on the label was “chips.”
In 1981, a bartender bet a customer that he could change the behavior of everyone in the bar by putting a lime in his beer. He won the bet. To this day, thirty years later, people assume that Corona beer is meant to be imbibed with a lime by some ancient tradition or Hispanic ritual. In my experience, Corona without the lime is pretty bad. It’s just a good marketing strategy to move a bad product off them shelves.
I have long been fascinated by how our attitudes and ideas are influenced by marketing. Some time in my twenties, I stopped using deodorant. I don’t smell bad, no one has ever complained. I simply came to realize that the people who made deodorant were selling a false sense of security. And it seemed unnatural to clog up my pores with aluminum chlorohydrate.
As a runner, I often had problems with athlete’s foot and, ahem, fungus in other areas. I spent a lot of money over time on creams, but if I stopped using them, the fungus immediately returned. A kindly doctor gave me the remedy – a hair dryer applied to infected areas daily after showering. It’s free, and effective.
The point is that we have so much that we have to be cajoled and seduced into buying things we don’t need. We have long conquered hunger. We have machines to do most everything except those lowly tasks that we have exported to slave labor in places like China, the Philippines and Vietnam. We produce far more stuff than we need. The marketing dynamics involved in luring us to pay $50 for a branded shirt that can be had for a couple of bucks at the dollar store are intense, imbued in us as youngsters and carried through life.
I get all of that. We’re churning the pot, trying to redirect our hard-earned cash into corporates coffers. We’re consumers, not citizens. Our labor is for one purpose: To buy stuff. So the question I ask is redundant: Why don’t we just relax? We would do just as well working half as hard, and devoting the rest of our time to better pursuits, like reading and volunteer activity, exercise and just hanging out.
We can’t, however. We don’t get to keep the fruits of our labor. Worse than that, we bargain away future labor to 26.99% credit card interest to satisfy immediate impulses. I am so ashamed of us. We allow bankers to elbow their way into our paychecks now and for years to come so that we can have a new shirt, computer, shoes, all incredibly overpriced.
The people who work hardest are our convenience store clerks and gardeners, retail clerks and janitors. We hate our illegals, but do not like paying decent wages. Conservatives love to complain about the leaching class, not knowing that it is much further up the production line than they imagine.
The ultimate expression of the power of that elite leaching class is the slave – these days he is the factory worker who barely subsists on long tortuous hours. Vacation? Benefits? Get real. Slavery by any other name is still slavery, and the people who make our shoes and shirts, computers and baseballs are that – our slaves.
Slavery is the natural byproduct of unregulated markets. But this is 2010, and not 1860. We keep our slaves hidden from view. And call them employees or workers and talk about things like rungs on ladders and stuff. That’s nonsense, but seems to salve our consciences as we go about the business of consuming.
Piece of Mindful 