“I grew up swearing I’d never live in New York,” the woman beside me explains.
We’re waiting for a reading to start at a bar in Crown Heights – two strangers somewhere in our 30s. She’s from New Jersey, the state just next door, has been here two years now.
“We’d say it was where people go to lose their humanity. So I moved to the midwest instead, and got married.”
She pauses to take a sip of her drink. I wait.
“Then I got divorced. One day I woke up and was like, I guess I move to New York City now.”
My new friend works in research for Walmart – the multinational retail corporation that captured nearly a quarter of total grocery spending here in 2023.
“Ah, like consumer research?”
“Exactly. I research trends in beverage consumption. It’s a free service we provide to all our beverage suppliers.”
It is a consumer trend in this country that people are drinking caffeinated soda.
For the modern American living a fast-paced lifestyle, it is important to maintain energy throughout the day. Energy drinks continue to show solid growth, with demand sustained by the consumer need to be productive even when faced with the impact of rising inflation on consumer spending.
My lover cracks a can of CELSIUS from his fridge in the morning before logging in for work: sparkling green apple cherry, 200mL caffeine. He and his housemate live in a block of luxury condos that was recently converted from a Catholic school because the people rallying for affordable housing weren’t able to influence the Diocese. There’s a gym in the basement and an Amazon locker in the lobby – production amenities / consumption amenities.
I blanche in disbelief at this in-home integration, this infrastructuralisation.
“I have Amazon Day,” he explains.
“What’s that?”
“Well if I order four things in a week, it only comes once in one package instead of four.”
Amazon Day is a free delivery option for Prime members that lets them choose a day of the week for their orders to arrive. You can select “Amazon Day” at checkout for eligible items, and then choose any day of the week. You can also save the selected day for future orders and make Amazon Day your default delivery option.
It is a consumer trend in this country that people are shopping on Amazon.
75% of Americans pay for Prime subscriptions; 25% of Americans get an Amazon parcel delivery at least once a week.
Amazon Apartment Hubs, like the locker in the residential lobby, guarantee safe and accessible delivery – but cost $20 to 30k to install. The building has to pay for them though: Amazon won’t, even though its drivers report what hell it is to have to deliver over 300 packages door-to-door at a single multi-storey address under a restricted timespan.
Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon and the second richest person in the world. Earlier this month, a report revealed that half of Amazon warehouse workers aren’t making enough to cover the cost of food and housing.
The CEO of Kellogg’s thinks that these people should eat Froot Loops for dinner.“The cereal category … tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure,” said Gary Pinick, who is a multimillionaire. “We’re advertising about cereal for dinner.”
It is a consumer trend in this country that people are buying more cereal.
“The US cereal market has benefitted from … increased prices,” reads a Mintel report.
Turn that weekly dinner dread into cereal for dinner instead! invites Kellogg’s social media campaign. We are providing you and your family with a chance to win $5,000 and a year’s supply of iconic Kellogg’s cereals, including Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops and Frosted Mini-Wheats. Share a photo on Instagram of your family enjoying your favorite Kellogg’s cereal for dinner with #kelloggscerealfordinnerentry!
Kellogg’s Froot Loops has 64% more sugar than other cold cereals and still contains five artificial dyes that the company said they’d stop using by 2018: Red 40, Blue 1, Yellow 6, Yellow 5, and Red 3. They also contain butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) – an endocrine disruptor linked to cancer that is illegal in cereals in Europe and Australia.
“If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable,” says Gary.
I walk into a supermarket in Flatbush and head to the “dinner” aisle. A box of Froot Loops is $7.99. If I buy them on Amazon, they’re $6.99. At Walmart, they’re $3.98.
I ask my friend who manages a food co-op about the most important thing we can do for food security in this country.
“Stop shopping at Walmart. That’s literally it,” comes the response.
He’s right – but when 24 million Americans live under food apartheid, and more than one in three are struggling financially or actively in crisis (a recent study found that less than 40% of people here have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1000 expense), it’s more complex than segregating consumers into those who care and those who do not.
Focusing on the supposed ethics of individual consumer preference overlooks the fact that most do not have the liberty of exercising that preference – whether that’s due to money, time, accessibility, whatever. In the words of writer Andrew Lee, it also “ignores the socio-economic and political structures within which those preferences prevail”.
It is a consumer trend in this country that people are trapped in cycles of convenience and cost, caught between conflicting ideals and economic realities, forced to rely on systems that cause their destruction
–
a
positive
feedback
loop.
Don’t Call Them Consumers! They’re Human Beings! declares Senior Vice President and Chief Design Officer of Pepsi, Mauro Poricini, in a linkedin post.
I have always been fascinated, for example, by how the US retailer Target calls its clients guests. For many these people are simply consumers; for the Minneapolis-based chain, they are sacred guests, welcomed into one’s home and treated with care, attention, empathy, and respect.
Calling human beings “consumers” runs the risk of depriving them of their humanity, ending up by viewing them merely as business entities to whom you are selling a product, in order to make them consume it for profit.
If you want to read more about it, you can find my book here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1523002883?tag=randohouseinc7986-20