Dave Badtke’s Blog

Because English 1 starts off focused on advertisements, which Neil Postman considers our new theology,  I’m reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell to get me into the mood of discussing our consumer-driven society.

One of the themes of Shell’s book is that cheap goods, which used to be forbidden by law during the fair-trade days before World War II, demand ever cheaper goods, which have brought us to our current state in which “Technology, globalization, and deregulation have made competition a death march.” And since “Many companies have had no choice but to reduce costs almost continuously” and “Since payrolls are the single largest expense of most businesses,” skilled jobs become fewer, livable wages are harder to find, and benefits are increasingly not part of an employment package (51).

This is to say that our desire for ever-cheaper goods is undermining our ability to educate, support, and employ our citizens.

This I think I knew, but I didn’t suspect that cheaper prices go hand in hand with less accommodating service.

I had thought it strange, for example, that the McDonald’s on East Second Street in Benicia didn’t install shades on its southern-facing windows since these windows extend from floor to ceiling, letting the sun heat the high tables right next to the window like an oven in the afternoon when sometimes I stop — I admit to this failing — to get one of those cheap $1 hamburgers.

It used to be that one could sit farther away from window tables in booths along the back wall, but then they remodeled and reduced the number of seats beyond the range of the scorching afternoon sun.

Odd, I thought, until I read Cheap. First there was the Gruen-transfer effect, named after retail-landscape architect Victor Gruen who created in the 1960s the first malls that were designed to welcome customers like a park to their gardens and in some cases even caged birds. For a while this worked, because people who spent more time in the mall ended up buying more, but then people actually began treating malls like parks. Now teenagers wander the malls with their friends and seniors nurse a cup of coffee for the better part of a morning without buying anything more (94).

So Gruen transfer was replaced with the Golden-Arches approach to social engineering:

At McDonald’s and many other fast-food restaurants, the lighting tends to be unflattering fluorescents, and the seats are bolted to the floor at an awkward distance from the tables. The purpose of this is not to prevent theft of the chairs, as many think, but to discourage elders, teenagers, and other undesirables from getting comfortable and congregating for hours over a small coffee, or an order of fries. Discomfort does seem to keep the customers churning; on average, fast-food patrons spend only eleven minutes at their tables. (The optimal fast-food customer — as defined by the fast-food industry — takes no table time at all but does a quickie through the drive-through.) (95)

So perhaps this explains the oven windows as well: in order for a business to sell cheap goods and make a profit, more and more goods must be sold in less and less time, so people who like a business so much for its environment that they want to spend more time than money can kill the business’s bottom line.

Have you noticed that there seems to be more Starbucks with drive-through windows? Does this also explain ubiquitous background music and over-scented stores that encourage us to get our business done and leave?

Household debt vs. GDP by Columbia business professor David Beim

You may have heard the conversation with David Beim, professor of business at Columbia University and NPR’s Adam Davidson, a conversation that was repeated on This American Life. Since the approach on these kinds of programs is to juxtapose happy talk, “journalists” giggling over Ken-Burns-like music that metonymically attaches itself to our emotions like cancerous tumors to our brains, you like me may have been scared silly by the claim that our household debt to GDP raio became the same in 2007 as it was in 1929: 100%.

This chart tracks the relationship between household debt and gross domestic product. You’ll see two years when Americans’ debt becomes 100 percent of GDP — 1929 and 2007. It’s the chart that made Columbia professor David Beim say:

“The problem is us. The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be. The problem is us… We’ve been living very high on the hog. Our living standard has been rising dramatically in the last 25 years. And we have been borrowing much of the money to make that prosperity happen.”

Laura Conaway

Beim referred to this graph as a pair of hockey sticks. Remembering that this plot is against time, to me the pair of peaks looks more like an avalanche. Note where the debt ratio ends up by the beginning of WWII, roughly 20%.  So either everyone paid off their debts, which we know didn’t happen, or everyone defaulted on their debts, their toxic assets to use today’s term for bad bank debts, and lost everything.

What I find most perplexing is the fluidity of economic interpretation. This seems like an incredibly important graph, yet we’re just hearing about it. What I don’t understand is why it’s important, a problem economics frequently seems to have. I’m looking for the fundamental constants and equations of the field, but keep finding instead a field that likes to suck us in with mushy ideas and false choices.

In other words, if we look at a good working model of how a productive society should function, what should this ratio be? Is this debt ratio a problem because Americans have been sending all their debt-leveraged cash overseas to buy flat-screen TVs and automobiles from Japan, anything small that’s boxed from China, and high-performance cars and knives from Germany? If instead we were buying these same goods from Americans made here in America, wouldn’t that be just fine since the profits would be taxed and our infrastructure and citizens would benefit?

It seems to me that the bigger problem than debt is that we can’t buy an American flat-screen TV or an American high-performance, reliable car or an American coffee maker packaged in a box made in America. And the reason we can’t do this is because American workers are no longer making what we want to buy, whether we buy with cash or credit. This strikes home in my classrooms because even if my students wanted to make a reasonable living making things, they couldn’t: those businesses are gone. Instead they need to work at Starbucks for the health benefits where they learn how to make a venti latté when the customer asks for a big espresso with milk and foam.

I’m not against globalization; I’m against the kind of greed and quarterly profit reports and ethical deficiencies that have been the philosophical cornerstone of Reganomics since 1980. It’s because of this economic philosophy that values money and profit over human needs and aspirations that a dollar spent is too often a dollar sent elsewhere with no structural benefit to your family and neighbors and friends and community and state and country.

Because PCs have always been less expensive than Macs, because businesses favor PCs over Macs, because over the years I’ve bought software for PCs that would cost a lot to buy again for Macs, because I long ago worked for GE when it decided to put a rather worthless Windows PC on everyone’s desk — we would turn it on, look at the crude Windows, sniff it as though it might be something dead that we should bury in the grass beyond the parking lot, and go back to working on our Unix-based Sun workstations — because of all of these reasons and more that I’ve forgotten, I long ago began purchasing PCs so that my home and work computers would be compatible.

Years later here I sit writing my blog on a PC, but with a change today since Steve Jobs yesterday announced that Apple’s Safari browser was available for PCs. Analysts were underwhelmed. They were looking for a big announcement, but all they got was a browser. Down the stock price went.

But wait — could there be something more here, I wonder, as I type away in a window in this new browser? For years I’ve been saddled with a marginal operating system that always manages to crash at the wrong time or that makes networking harder than it should be or that just pisses me off because the software we were using on Sun workstations was so much better, and that was many years ago. Why do I need all this Microsoft-compatible hardware and software if I can now wirelessly connect to the Internet?

I blog away. I upload pictures. I get on my browser, in this case Safari with its very classy interface with tabs, which took me a couple moments to find, and I write this on my website server, not really caring that I’m running Windows. Clearly this is the future as network bandwidths increase and more and more applications adopt a browser approach that is independent of the computer’s operating system. Sure Adobe doesn’t do it yet with their Creative Suites, but they will. And then I’ll be able to create pages using Adobe applications running on my website server.

Won’t it be grand when we can carry around a paper-thin device with a battery that lasts forever that we can use to get all our computing and networking and communications done without complaining about Microsoft? Sure I may be an old guy. Sure I may be dead when it happens. But I can look forward to the future anyway. Hope springs eternal, don’t you know.

But maybe we’re not there yet. In trying to change my WordPress options using Safari, the browser crashed. Apple made it easy for me to send an error report and Safari is still in Beta, so I’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, checking back from time to time to see how Safari’s doing, I’ll continue to use Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a rebel living on the edge. Bah, humbug Microsoft.

Yesterday we had the pleasure of visiting with our niece, Katrina, her husband Zimran, and their friend Joel. Katrina, who recently finished her residency in Boston, is an emergency room physician who moved out here to work for a hospital near Los Altos, where she and Zimran live. Joel, who is South African but lived for years in Chicago, just finished his first year at Harvard Law and is heading off to Israel for a summer internship. And Zimran, who works for Creative Good, knows a lot about a lot, by which I mean that I can pretty much ask Zim a question about most anything and then sit back and listen with fascination to his response. (To get a sense of what Zimran knows and has done, check out his blog winterspeak.com.)

For example, there’s a large fish tank in their dining room. I pointed at it and asked Zim about the fish — they were small and, I thought, blue — that were swimming about in the large enclosure, with coral and seaweed and an eerie, ethereal light that seemed to be encouraging the seaweed and stuff growing on the bottom and sides of the tank. Zim told me about the fish, green chromis I think, that like to school and can handle significant changes in the tank environment, though Zim talks fast and was quickly on to the topic of tank filtration, opening up the cabinet below the tank to expose the whirring mechanisms that control temperature and salinity and chemical composition and nitrogen cycles and stuff like that, I think, though my head was spinning with details and I wasn’t taking notes.

I’m sure Zim could have talked on this and any number of other topics for as long as we were willing to listen, since he likes to get deeper and deeper into the details, philosophy, psychology and unintended consequences of whatever he’s thinking about, but then Katrina told us that Zim has a quota for such discussions. While I’m not sure how she measures Zim’s eclectic discursions, it seems that the threat of something like a warning bell urges him to move on to the next interesting idea.

Joel, who met Katrina and Zim when they were all undergraduates at Harvard and who was part of a rather large “family” of students with similar interests that brought them together when they were juniors and seniors, is like Zim in his ability to hold forth at length on subjects as diverse as the political history and future developments of Africa — he worked for the opposition party in South Africa before returning to Harvard — and legal issues. After my wife told him about a case pending before the State Supreme Court tomorrow, Joel was able to summarize its main points and highlight its importance with details, it seemed to me, that my wife hadn’t even told him about. Quite amazing.

So we had a great evening, made even better because Zim likes to cook, and he’s a good cook. After Zim’s grilled chicken and garlic bread and Joel’s salad, we had Bonny Doon Vinyard’s NV Bouteille Call dessert wine, which tastes like raspberries and blueberries and I don’t know what else. Into this sweet drink we dunked brownie edges. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, they’re a different kind of biscotti made by Sugardaddy’s Sumptuous Sweeties, famous for round brownies. You’ve got to see this stuff to believe it, and taste it too. The biscotti dipped into the wine was really, really good. Zim told us all about it, Katrina warned us not to leave out the apostrophe when searching for the website or we might be surprised by what we’d find — would I ever do that? — and Joel added color commentary. A great evening of adventure!

One of the joys of writing for a local newspaper like the Benicia Herald is that I get to sit down with people for an hour or more to listen to their stories.

Well, you might say, you’re not living in New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo or London or Paris or even, for that matter, in San Francisco, where there’s a chance that around the next corner you might meet a celebrity or mover and shaker. And you’d be right that the people I meet aren’t the famous and fabulously rich and influential — they’re people who don’t feel comfortable in the spotlight and usually cringe when I pull out my camera — but they’re interesting and always surprising because like all those people you know so much about from watching too much TV or from guiltily reading tabloids while you wait in the grocery story checkout line, these people have spent their lives getting an education, developing skills, creating careers, supporting their families, having interesting experiences and serving others.

Such is the case with Elizabeth Vazquez who, along with her partner Chuck Bowen, owns Galley Cafe, a fantastic, inviting, comfortable little restaurant with a beautiful water view at Glen Cove Marina. Elizabeth was in the Army in the 70s and then recently served in Iraq. She has worked as a social worker advocate for the homeless and recently earned her paralegal degree at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. And she and Chuck, who live in a houseboat in the marina, make wonderful breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks at Galley Cafe in addition to catering special events. But for more about this you’ll need to read my Sunday Column on May 13 in the Benicia Herald.