by Naomi Klein
And what is striking in retrospect is that in the very years when P.C. politics reached their most self-referential peak, the rest of the world was doing something very different: it was looking outward, and expanding. At the moment when the field of vision among most left-wing progressives was shrinking to include only its immediate surroundings, the horizons of global business were growing to encompass the whole globe. While CEOs dreamed of Big Macs in Russia, Benetton in Shanghai and logos projected on the moon, the political lens for far too many activists and theorists was narrowing so dramatically that with the exception of a brief period during the Gulf War, foreign and economic policy were off the radar screen. In North America, even the fight against free trade was all about protecting Canadian or American workers and resources, not about the possible effects of the trade agreement on Mexico, or the effects other rapid liberalization measures were having in the developing world. When the free-trade debate was lost, the left retreated even further into itself, choosing ever more minute disputes over which to go to the wall. This retreat reflected a broader political paralysis in the face of the daunting abstractions of global capitalism — ironically, the very issues that should have been most pressing for anyone concerned with the future of social justice.
In this new globalized context, the victories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of the furniture while the house burned down. Yes, there are more multi-ethnic sitcoms and even more black executives —but whatever cultural enlightenment has followed has not prevented the population in the underclass from exploding or homelessness from reaching crisis levels in many North American urban centers. Sure, women and gays have better role models in the media and pop culture — but the ownership in the culture industries has consolidated so rapidly that, according to William Kennard, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, “There are fewer opportunities of entry by minority groups, community groups, small businesses in general.”29 And though girls may indeed rule in North America, they are still sweating in Asia and Latin America, making T-shirts with the “Girls Rule” slogan on them and Nike running shoes that will finally let girls into the game.
This oversight isn’t simply a failure of feminism but a betrayal of the feminist movement’s own founding principles. Although the gender politics that I grew up with in the eighties were concerned almost exclusively with having women equally represented in the structures of power, the relationship between gender and class have not always been so casually overlooked. Bread and Roses —the rallying cry of the women’s movement —has its origin in a slogan on a banner in the 1912 walkout of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. “What the woman who labors wants,” explained historic organizer Rose Schneiderman in a 1912 speech, “is the right to live, not simply exist.”30 And March 8, the date of International Women’s Day, was selected to mark the anniversary of a 1908 demonstration in which “women garment workers marched through the streets of New York, protesting dreadful working conditions, child labor, 12-hour working days, minuscule pay.”31 The young women who grew up reading The Beauty Myth, and who saw eating disorders and low self-esteem as the most harmful by-products of the fashion industry, tended to forget those women when we marched on March 8, if we ever knew about them to begin with.
As we look back, it seems like willful blindness. The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women’s and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action. And if the space invaders marched into our schools and our communities unchallenged, it was at least partly because the political models in vogue at the time of the invasion left many of us ill-equipped to deal with issues that were more about ownership than representation. We were too busy analyzing the pictures being projected on the wall to notice that the wall itself had been sold.
If that remained true until recently, however, it is no longer so. As we will see in Part IV, a radical new political culture is emerging in high schools and on college campuses. Rather than calling attention to the house of mirrors that passes for empirical truth (as the postmodern academics did), and rather than fighting for better mirrors (as the ID warriors did), today’s media activists are concentrating on shattering the impenetrable shiny surfaces of branded culture, picking up the pieces and using them as sharp weapons in a war of actions, not images.
Top: Wal-Mart greeter with the human touch. Bottom: The citizens of Warrenton, Virginia, aren’t buying it.
CHAPTER SIX
BRAND BOMBING
Franchises in the Age of the Superbrand
MTV is associated with the forces of freedom and democracy around the world.
—Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone, owner of MTV, October 1994
There isn’t a lot of angst, it’s just unbridled consumerism.
—MTV CEO Tom Freston describes the content on MTV India, June 1997
The branded multinationals may talk diversity, but the visible result of their actions is an army of teen clones marching —in “uniform,” as the marketers say — into the global mall. Despite the embrace of polyethnic imagery, market-driven globalization doesn’t want diversity; quite the opposite. Its enemies are national habits, local brands and distinctive regional tastes. Fewer interests control ever more of the landscape.
Dazzled by the array of consumer choices, we may at first fail to notice the tremendous consolidation taking place in the boardrooms of the entertainment, media and retail industries. Advertising floods us with the kaleidoscopic soothing images of United Streets of Diversity and Microsoft’s wide-open “Where do you want to go today?” enticements. But in the pages of the business section, the world goes monochromatic and doors slam shut from all sides: every other story —whether the announcements of a new buyout, an untimely bankruptcy, a colossal merger —points directly to a loss of meaningful choices. The real question is not “Where do you want to go today?” but “How best can I steer you into the synergized maze of where I want you to go today?”
This assault on choice is taking place on several different fronts at once. It is happening structurally, with mergers, buyouts and corporate synergies. It is happening locally, with a handful of superbrands using their huge cash reserves to force out small and independent businesses. And it is happening on the legal front, with entertainment and consumer-goods companies using libel and trademark suits to hound anyone who puts an unwanted spin on a pop-cultural product. And so we live in a double world: carnival on the surface, consolidation underneath, where it counts.
Everyone has, in one form or another, witnessed the odd double vision of vast consumer choice coupled with Orwellian new restrictions on cultural production and public space. We see it when a small community watches its lively downtown hollow out, as big-box discount stores with 70,000 items on their shelves set up on their periphery, exerting their gravitational pull to what James Howard Kunstler describes as “the geography of nowhere.”1 It is there on the trendy downtown main street as yet another favorite café, hardware store, independent bookstore or art video house is cleared away and replaced by one of the Pac-Man chains: Starbucks, Home Depot, the Gap, Chapters, Borders, Blockbuster. It is there inside the big-box retail outlets each time a magazine is taken off a shelf by a manager mindful of his bosses’ corporate definition of “family values.” You can see it in the messy bedroom of a fourteen-year-old Web master who has just had her fan page shut down by Viacom or EMI, unimpressed by her attempts to create her own little pocket of culture with borrowed snippets of trademarked song lyrics and images. It is there again when protesters are thrown out of shopping malls for handing out political leaflets, told by the security guards that although the edifice may have replaced the public square in their town, it is, in fact, private property.
A decade ago, any attempt to connect the dots among this mess of trends would have seemed strange indeed: what does synergy have to do with the chain-store
craze? What does copyright and trademark law have to do with personal fan culture? Or corporate consolidation with freedom of speech? But today, a clear pattern is emerging: as more and more companies seek to be the one overarching brand under which we consume, make art, even build our homes, the entire concept of public space is being redefined. And within these real and virtual branded edifices, options for unbranded alternatives, for open debate, criticism and uncensored art — for real choice —are facing new and ominous restrictions. If the erosion of noncorporate space explored in the last section is feeding a kind of globo-claustrophobia that longs for release, then it is these restrictions on choice —restricted by the same companies that promised a new age of freedom and diversity —that are slowly focusing that potentially explosive longing on the multinational brands, creating the conditions for the anticorporate activism that will be explored later on in the book.
Constant Cloning
There is a distinctive quality to many of the chains that have proliferated during the eighties and nineties —Ikea, Blockbuster, the Gap, Kinko’s, the Body Shop, Starbucks —which sets them apart from the fast-food restaurants, strip malls and muffler joints responsible for the sixties and seventies franchise sprawl. They don’t flash with the garish, cartoonlike plastic yellow shells and golden arches; they are more apt to glow with a healthy New Age sheen. These crisp royal blue and kelly green boxes snap together like pieces of Lego (the new kind that can make only one thing: the model fire station or spaceship helpfully pictured on the box). The Kinko’s, Starbucks and Blockbuster clerks buy their uniform of khakis and white or blue shirts at the Gap; the “Hi! Welcome to the Gap!” greeting cheer is fueled by Starbucks double espressos; the résumés that got them the jobs were designed at Kinko’s on friendly Macs, in 12-point Helvetica on Microsoft Word. The troops show up for work smelling of CK One (except at Starbucks, where colognes and perfumes are thought to compete with the “romance of coffee” aroma), their faces freshly scrubbed with Body Shop Blue Corn Mask, before leaving apartments furnished with Ikea self-assembled bookcases and coffee tables.
The cultural transformation these institutions have effected is familiar to everyone, but there are few helpful statistics available on the proliferation of franchises and chains, largely because most research on retailing lumps franchises in with independent businesses. A franchise is technically owned by the franchisee, even if every detail of the outlet —from the sign that hangs out front to the precise temperature of the coffee —is controlled by a head office hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Even without industry-wide figures, it’s undeniable that something very dramatic has happened to the face of retail this decade. Take Starbucks, for instance. As recently as 1986, the coffee company was a strictly local phenomenon, with a handful of cafés around Seattle. By 1992, Starbucks had 165 stores with outlets in several U.S. and Canadian cities. By 1993, that number had already gone up to 275, and in 1996, it reached 1,000. In early 1999, Starbucks hit 1,900 stores with outlets in twelve countries, from the U.K. to Kuwait.
Blockbuster, another of the distinctly nineties chains, has enjoyed an even more dramatic expansion rate over precisely the same time period. In 1985, Blockbuster was a lone video store in Dallas, Texas. It was bought by waste-management czar Wayne Huizenga in 1987 and by 1989 there were 1,079 stores. In 1994, the year Huizenga sold Blockbuster to Viacom, there were 3,977. By early 1999, the number had reached 6,000, distributed over twenty-six countries, including 700 outlets in the U.K. alone.
Similar patterns can be tracked for the Gap (and its holdings Banana Republic and Old Navy) and the Body Shop, which averaged between 120 and 150 store openings a year through the mid-eighties to the present. Even Wal-Mart didn’t truly find its feet as a retail powerhouse until the late eighties. Although the first Wal-Mart outlet opened in 1962, the superstore model didn’t take off until 1988 and it wasn’t until 1991 that Wal-Mart —by then opening 150 discount stores a year —surpassed Kmart and Sears to become the most powerful force in American retailing.
This growth spurt was brought about by three industry trends, all of them dramatically favoring big chains with deep cash reserves. The first is price wars, in which the biggest megachains systematically undersell all their competitors; the second is the practice of blitzing out the competition by setting up chain-store “clusters.” The third trend, to be explored in the next chapter, is the arrival of the palatial flagship superstore, which appears on prime real estate and acts as a three-dimensional ad for the brand.
Price Wars: The Wal-Mart Model
In mid-1999, Wal-Mart had 2,435 big-box discount stores in nine countries, selling everything from Barbie Dream Homes to Kathie Lee Gifford skirts and handbags to Black & Decker drills to Prodigy CDs. Of those stores, 565 were “Supercenters,” a concept that combines Wal-Mart’s original discount model with full-service grocery stores, hair salons and banks, as well as 443 Sam’s Clubs, which offer even deeper discounts for bulk purchases and big-ticket items like office furniture. (See Table 6.1 and Table 6.2, Appendix.)
The recipe that has made Wal-Mart the largest retailer in the world, hauling in $137 billion in sales in 1998, is straightforward enough. First, build stores two and three times the size of your closest competitors. Next, pile your shelves with products purchased in such great volume that the suppliers are forced to give you a substantially lower price than they would otherwise. Then cut your in-store prices so low that no small retailer can begin to compete with your “everyday low prices.”
Because everything about the Arkansas-based retailer is premised on achieving an economy of scale, an average Wal-Mart store measures 92,000 square feet, not including the requisite substantial parking lot. Since discounting is its calling card, Wal-Mart must keep its overhead down, which is why the lots for its windowless stores are purchased on the edges of towns, where land is cheap and taxes are lower. Every year of Wal-Mart’s expansion, its new stores have grown bigger in size, and many of its original, comparatively modest discount outlets have been converted and expanded into superstores, some as large as 200,000 square feet.
Another key element in keeping costs down is that Wal-Mart only opens outlets close to its distribution centers. For this reason, Wal-Mart has spread like molasses: slow and thick. It won’t move into a new region until it has blanketed the last area with stores —as many as forty in a hundred-mile radius. That way, the company saves money on transportation and shipping costs, and develops such a concentrated presence in an area that advertising its brand is barely necessary.2 “We would go as far as we could from a warehouse and put in a store. Then we would fill in the map of that territory, state by state, county seat by county seat, until we had saturated the market area,” Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton explained.3 Then the company would open up a new distribution center in a new region and repeat the process.
After Wal-Mart began in the U.S. South, plodding slowly through Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Louisiana, it took a while before Wall Street and the Eastern-based media grasped the magnitude of Sam Walton’s project. For this reason, it wasn’t until the early nineties, three decades after the opening of the first Wal-Mart, that opposition to the big boxes began to mount. The argument against Wal-Mart’s retail style —by now almost as familiar as Wal-Mart itself — holds that bargain prices lure shoppers to the suburbs, sucking community life and small businesses out of the town centers. Smaller businesses can’t compete —in fact, many of Wal-Mart’s competitors claim they pay more for their goods wholesale than Wal-Mart charges retail.
By now, there have been several books written about the effect of the big boxes, most notably In Sam We Trust, by Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Ortega. As Ortega notes, Wal-Mart is not alone in its “size matters” approach to re tailing — it is simply the leader in an exploding category of big-box retailers who use their clout to wrangle special treatment. Home Depot, Office Depot and Bed, Bath & Beyond, which are often grouped together in pumped-up strip malls called “power cen
ters,” are all known in the retail industry as “category killers” because they enter a category with so much buying power that they almost instantly kill the smaller competitors.4
This retail style has always been controversial and was responsible for the first anti-chain movement, which arose in the 1920s. As discounters like A&P and Woolworths proliferated, small merchants tried to make it illegal for chains to use their relative size to extract lower wholesale prices and drive down retail prices. The rhetoric of the time, as Ortega points out, bears a striking resemblance to the language of the grassroots opposition groups that have sprung up in dozens of North American towns when the pending arrival of a new Wal-Mart outlet has been announced.5
On the legal front, charges of monopolistic practices have been cropping up with growing regularity, and not just against Wal-Mart. In September 1997, for instance, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that Toys ‘R’ Us was guilty of illegally pressuring manufacturers not to supply popular toys to other chains. Because Toys ‘R’ Us is the largest toy retailer in the world, the manufacturers agreed; and consumers’ options were reduced dramatically, along with their chances to comparison shop. “Many toy manufacturers had no choice but to go along,” said William Baer, director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition when the case was decided.6 This was precisely the type of situation the FTC was hoping to avoid when, in 1997, it blocked a planned merger between two huge office-supply chains —Staples and Office Depot —stating that the consolidation would hurt competition.
Beyond spawning the category killer, Sam Walton’s legacy has had other, further-reaching effects. In many ways, it was the inhuman scale of the big boxes and their accompanying sprawl —the streets without sidewalks, the shopping centers only accessible by car, the stores the size of small hamlets with all the design flair of toolsheds —that set the stage for the other significant retail trends of the decade. Discount stores were great for saving money but not for much else. And so, as the big boxes expanded into seas of concrete on the edge of town, they generated a renewed hunger for human-scale development; for the old-fashioned town square, for public gathering places that allowed both large meetings and intimate conversation; for a kind of retail with more interaction and more sensory stimulation. In other words, they laid the groundwork for Starbucks, Virgin Megastores and Nike Town.
