The Annual Retail Bailout
Patriotic Consumerism
by Steve Himmer
By 1980, years of corporate hubris had delivered Chrysler Motors to the brink of bankruptcy. Chairman Lee Iacocca went to Washington with his tin cup in hand, and painted Congress a picture of the automaker as a vital beacon over the darkened economic landscape, and of American manufacturing as a bastion of our national values and virtues. In the process, he convinced legislators to pass the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act to bail the company out. The familiar mantra that what’s good for car makers is good for America had been taken to heart as never before: Congress’ decision told the country that Chrysler, in a sense, was America, a source of identity as much as of wealth.
A few years later, the company had bounced back on the strength of their K-car, the affordable, reliable embodiment of Iacocca’s vision. It was as unlikely symbol of national identity as this country has ever had, and it came--at least for my family--in an equally unlikely shade of cranberry. Pulling up to school in a K-car never impressed anyone, and drag races were out of the question, but this humble triumph of function over form became a pinnacle of practicality in a society soon to be overtaken by excess.
Two decades after Chrysler’s comeback, airlines made a similar appeal to Congress following the attacks of September 11. However ubiquitous reports of labor disputes and mismanagement had been for years, they argued, terrorism was to blame for their problems. Congress agreed, and supported the struggling industry to the tune of 15 billion dollars. Airlines had, in fact, suffered from the economic fallout of terrorism, and the bailout was likely in the country’s best interests, but the argument to do so relied--as it had for Chrysler--on linking corporate well-being to national identity: airlines, like the rest of us, had been attacked. Keeping Continental aloft became more than economic good sense, it was now an act of patriotism.
While airlines were lobbying for Congress’ money, the rest of us were being lobbied for ours. Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that Americans could help the post-9/11 recovery by “going shopping,” and Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle told us the moment had come to “buy that car.” In October 2001, as the holiday season arrived in stores, Margaret Carlson wrote for Time Magazine that, “The Greatest Generation got to save old tires, dig a Victory Garden and forgo sugar. The Richest Generation is being asked to shop.” If we weren’t shopping as hard as we could, Carlson suggested, we weren’t doing our part for the country--buying boxed sets of M*A*S*H reruns had never been so important.
The economy did need a boost, but making patriotism dependent on a willingness to spend ourselves into debt marked a significant shift in American identity. Carlson’s evocation of the 1940s’ home front ignores the difference between saving old tires and buying cars we don’t necessarily need: the former gets maximum value from what we already have, while the latter demands waste and irresponsible spending. Her proposal could have come directly from the credit industry, in which cardholders who pay off their balance each month are called “deadbeats.” That ironic reversal implies a similar moral duty to spend, and to do so foolishly—if you aren’t buying beyond your means, you’re neither a good patriot nor a good person. This is especially true in the holiday season, when news reports tell us how much the average shopper expects to spend on gifts—$738 in 2005, up 5.1% from last year—and encourage slackers to catch up, urging us into the malls on Black Friday still groggy with turkey hangovers and, store managers hope, with our appetites transferred from poultry to products.
Important as it is, even that burst of post-Thanksgiving consumer comes late in the season for retailers. Holiday promotions have been creeping toward summer for so long now that even noticing is a cliché. Attendant reports on how vital those few shopping weeks are to the economic health of the country are equally easy to take for granted, but the subtext is worth noticing. In October, economist Mellody Hobson told Good Morning America viewers how crucial a big shopping season is this year after setbacks like Hurricane Katrina. The implication is hard to ignore: shopping has become an extension of the charity shown to those impacted by natural disasters. Responsibility for bailing out industry has passed from Congress to the gift-buying public, and we’re being asked to pay for it on credit. Asked to believe, in other words, that it is possible to get something for nothing despite being taught the opposite for generations.
Americans revel in being the progeny of pioneer stock, and romanticize the self-sufficient lifestyle we imagine our ancestors lived, building homes with hand tools and feeding themselves through hard work and hunting. It’s an identity far from the reality of most of our lives (and the lives of most of our ancestors, because even Daniel Boone wasn’t as much like Daniel as Boone as we like to imagine) but we cling to it as part of our national psyche, whether by watching westerns on weekend afternoons or through the purchase of Hummers. It is also an image grossly at odds with reckless waste and intentional debt, the collection of things we don’t need, and the supposed necessity of bigger houses to hold both those things and the things we will replace them with when they break.
In my office there are the laptop I’m writing this on, a desktop plugged in but seldom used, a second desktop under a pile of books in the corner, and a seventy-some year old typewriter. The laptop will, before long, become as obsolete as both desktops are now, and I will happily—excitedly, even—purchase a new one. The typewriter, on the other hand, works as well today as it has for many years, or at least it would if I ever used it. Underwood built it to survive a fall from the windows of a skyscraper (which must have been more likely in the 1930s, when departing stockbrokers had no parachutes at all, let alone golden ones) rather than plan for it to break and be replaced.
I assume that the obsolescence of each product I buy has been planned for by the manufacturer, though I can’t say I’ve seen any proof that this is true. What I have seen evidence of is my own planning: I expect everything I own to break or become obsolete, and I expect more expensive items to be replaced sooner—computers before desks, and televisions before coffee tables—so I’m not particularly surprised when it happens. When something breaks I do what I can to fix it, but there’s a point at which I buy a replacement rather than cobble the original together with duct tape and bailing wire, or whatever the pioneers might have used.
Yet when Chrysler breaks, or an airline, we are surprised. For all the lip-service economists pay to Charles Darwin and the survival of the fittest, as much as we extol the virtues of unfettered competition, we’re reluctant to accept those ideals when the company threatened is embedded in our national identity. The vision of ourselves as patriots duty-bound to overspend is no more accurate than our romantic image of pioneer life, but it’s a vision we’ve been sold at an increasing price from one year to the next, and our belief in it makes struggling retailers a national failure rather than an economic adjustment--we are all to blame when a store closes its doors, and guilt-driven to spend more at the rest.
It’s easier to bemoan the commercialization of the holidays than it is to avoid overspending when they arrive. It’s even easier, amidst all that bemoaning, to miss what’s really at stake: the redefinition of being American as being in debt, and the yearly exhortation to spend becoming so deeply entrenched that we take it for granted as easily as we do the extended shopping season. The National Retail Federation reminds us each winter how desperately they need our dollars, but with holiday spending already as high as it is—over 222 billion dollars in 2004, with greater expectations for 2005—the annual appearance of merchants with turned-out pockets suggests that if there are deadbeats at the mall, they aren’t us.
It may just be a sign that my annual dose of optimistic holiday cheer has, like everything else, come earlier in the season this year, but here’s hoping that when we run to the Black Friday sales--or crawl, depending how much we ate on the day before--we will shop like K-cars rather than Hummers.