Every now and then someone gets on the television and says something so stunning that I write it down in the notebook I keep on the lower shelf of the coffee table. Late last year, when using the words “only” and “billion” in the same breath still caught my ear, when the Wall Street people were still cool enough that they gave themselves permission to be smug, one of the stunningly busy financial wizards grimaced into the camera and said this:
The reason the American economy is in trouble is that consumers aren’t buying things unless they need them.
Tuesdays haven’t been the same at my house since. That’s because every Tuesday a bunch of crap I neither need nor want arrives in my mailbox – the one that’s outside, attached to the house. It’s on Tuesdays that I learn about how much I could save by going with Comcast, how dramatically my life would improve if I subscribed to Clear, how much money I could save on pizzas, chicken wings, windshield repair (a huge business in Portland, for some reason) and Atlantic salmon down the road at QFC, provided I use my QFC card and make my purchase by 8 o’clock on Thursday evening. I wish I were the kind of person who takes the whole mess and dumps it directly into recycling, but I can’t. What if a friend has run off to Australia and sent me a postcard? What if an unknown relative has died and left me millions, which I’ll lose if I don’t respond within 30 days?
Those used to be the questions I pondered as I sorted through all the glossy pages, but after that truly insightful comment about our economy, I started wondering about something else. If QFC stopped sending out its weekly garbage, for example, how many people would be out of work? A photographer, for starters, which implies a food stylist. Someone not as fortunate as me in the writing field earns a living crafting copy about grapes and sirloin steak. There has to be a person who dreamed of being an artist who now uses a computer program to lay it out, and someone runs the printing press and puts the inserts into the bundles so that QFC’s weekly contribution can be stacked with the others (they should consider a tighter folding method, I think, because it’s always slightly off). Someone drives the truck. And somewhere in the mix, you can bet there are a few marketing people, one who “owns” the weekly production, who is probably with an agency, and one QFC employee – “in house,” she’s probably called – who has a big title and a big salary for supposedly leading the charge. Every quarter or so I’d imagine they all get together to “synch up” and when they do that they probably rent space and order catering and go out and spend money on some team building foolishness. Finally, I’ll bet there are a couple of assistants whose job is to keep it all running smoothly and then capture everything in a Power Point slide deck that’s quickly and easily accessible to all.
I call this sort of thing backwards thinking. I start where I am and try to calculate backwards, and it is enough to make me ill. Imagine if the entire junk mail industry evaporated. Imagine everyone who depends on telemarketing for a living losing his job. Every Tuesday I receive news of all sorts of goods and services I don’t need, but like a trained dog I now look at it not as the assault it is on so many levels, but as a piece of the economy. That’s awful. But misery really does love company, and last weekend I found some. On one of the Sunday morning programs the subject was food. In this country we’re addicted to twisted combinations of sugar, salt and fat. We eat so much, in fact, that we spend half a trillion dollars on food every year, and it shows. But there was a cautionary note in Sunday’s broadcast that made me feel a little less guilty about making peace – sort of – with the junk mail. Before we go too overboard getting up off or asses in the name of fitness, a reporter reminded me, it’s important to not lose sight of the economy. Recovering from food damage is a $59 billion per year industry in the U.S. That’s a lot of cash for a lot of people who have a lot of power, for now anyhow, to buy a lot of stuff they don’t really need.
The reason the American economy is in trouble is that consumers aren’t buying things unless they need them.
Tuesdays haven’t been the same at my house since. That’s because every Tuesday a bunch of crap I neither need nor want arrives in my mailbox – the one that’s outside, attached to the house. It’s on Tuesdays that I learn about how much I could save by going with Comcast, how dramatically my life would improve if I subscribed to Clear, how much money I could save on pizzas, chicken wings, windshield repair (a huge business in Portland, for some reason) and Atlantic salmon down the road at QFC, provided I use my QFC card and make my purchase by 8 o’clock on Thursday evening. I wish I were the kind of person who takes the whole mess and dumps it directly into recycling, but I can’t. What if a friend has run off to Australia and sent me a postcard? What if an unknown relative has died and left me millions, which I’ll lose if I don’t respond within 30 days?
Those used to be the questions I pondered as I sorted through all the glossy pages, but after that truly insightful comment about our economy, I started wondering about something else. If QFC stopped sending out its weekly garbage, for example, how many people would be out of work? A photographer, for starters, which implies a food stylist. Someone not as fortunate as me in the writing field earns a living crafting copy about grapes and sirloin steak. There has to be a person who dreamed of being an artist who now uses a computer program to lay it out, and someone runs the printing press and puts the inserts into the bundles so that QFC’s weekly contribution can be stacked with the others (they should consider a tighter folding method, I think, because it’s always slightly off). Someone drives the truck. And somewhere in the mix, you can bet there are a few marketing people, one who “owns” the weekly production, who is probably with an agency, and one QFC employee – “in house,” she’s probably called – who has a big title and a big salary for supposedly leading the charge. Every quarter or so I’d imagine they all get together to “synch up” and when they do that they probably rent space and order catering and go out and spend money on some team building foolishness. Finally, I’ll bet there are a couple of assistants whose job is to keep it all running smoothly and then capture everything in a Power Point slide deck that’s quickly and easily accessible to all.
I call this sort of thing backwards thinking. I start where I am and try to calculate backwards, and it is enough to make me ill. Imagine if the entire junk mail industry evaporated. Imagine everyone who depends on telemarketing for a living losing his job. Every Tuesday I receive news of all sorts of goods and services I don’t need, but like a trained dog I now look at it not as the assault it is on so many levels, but as a piece of the economy. That’s awful. But misery really does love company, and last weekend I found some. On one of the Sunday morning programs the subject was food. In this country we’re addicted to twisted combinations of sugar, salt and fat. We eat so much, in fact, that we spend half a trillion dollars on food every year, and it shows. But there was a cautionary note in Sunday’s broadcast that made me feel a little less guilty about making peace – sort of – with the junk mail. Before we go too overboard getting up off or asses in the name of fitness, a reporter reminded me, it’s important to not lose sight of the economy. Recovering from food damage is a $59 billion per year industry in the U.S. That’s a lot of cash for a lot of people who have a lot of power, for now anyhow, to buy a lot of stuff they don’t really need.
