The Unbearable Weight of Post-Modern Symbolism: The Case of Background Music

on the symbols that hold me hostage

Posted Jul 21, 03:12 pm in culture, experiences, marketing, postmodernism


Sometimes the post-modern world is a weird place to be. The things we do are so pregnant with symbolism that it’s hard to do anything that doesn’t appear to say more about you than you’d mean for it to. My girlfriend Huan-Hua’s birthday was a couple months ago and we held a very enjoyable party at our house, where about 20 people showed up. What typically happens in situations like this is that I’m expected to be in charge of the music. I can’t stand being in charge of the music.

There’s too much scrutiny and expectation associated with that job, too much anxiety associated with failing to match the playlist with the crowd’s prevailing sense of aesthetics, or matching the music to the crowd’s mood. Some people love doing this because they can showcase their impeccable tastes and impress people with their musical knowledge. I envy these people for the unabashed way in which they are able to share their tastes without a neurotic fear of judgment. However, I am unfortunately not in this camp.

Ideally, what I’d like is to just put something on and walk away without having to worry about it. In a world of musical diversity and genre-fication, I feel that the act of putting on a track by [artist X] will have a symbolic social value that is necessarily greater than the value that I personally ascribe to the act of putting on [artist X]. For example, if I am playing DJ at a party, and I happen to put on something by, say, New Order (not a bad selection for a party, in my opinion) I see this act as primarily fulfilling a functional purpose— filling the air with something that is tonally aligned with a festive event. It will serve as suitable background music, and won’t get attract too much attention to itself. But in this post-modern era, a New Order song is not just music. It is part of a genre. That genre is attached to many symbolic meanings. Those symbolic meanings are then attached to the DJ. The DJ then is responsible for the “statement” that these meanings make.

On more than one occasion, I put on an album by John Zorn, who is one of my favorite jazz musicians. His band Masada makes music that is alternately pleasant Middle-Eastern/Klezmer-inflected jazz music and less frequently, crazy, off-the-wall free jazz that perhaps encapsulates the most ridiculous negative stereotypes of what jazz music is (e.g. “It’s just a bunch of people playing random noises without a beat! I could do that!”). When it’s the former, it’s very good, energetic, organic, and sophisticated party music. When it’s the latter, it’s chaotic, unnerving, and immensely distracting. I try to delete songs with avante-garde instrumental wailing from my playlists. Of course, one night I failed, and I felt rather sheepish amidst a crowd of befuddled 20- and 30-somethings being sonically battered by cacophonous screeches of atonal, arrhythmic saxophone. This, for having made a bizarre public statement that I had actually studiously avoided making.

My friend Tim suggests that the best way to avoid this problem is to divest control: put on a radio station. But even then the selection of the station itself is an editorial process that could reflect back on you. Short of dumping the DJ job on someone else, it seems there are few escapes— though I can think of at least two ways out of it; 1) at the start of the party, choose a radio station through a transparently randomized process, or 2) profess total ignorance about anything related to music.

The first of these options, you have to admit, is pretty ridiculous. The statement that would result from you making a spectacle of randomly selecting a radio station is very likely more damaging to your image than you putting on a station representing any particular genre (though putting on a smooth jazz station— aka “quiet storm”— would be one genre that could potentially be even worse).

Professing total ignorance is a route that I’ve seen a lot of people do in the past. It’s a good escape hatch to use when necessary. The typical sophisticate has a strange tendency to want to be knowledgeable about everything. Or at least appear like they are, even if they’re not. It seems important to maintain one’s currency in certain matters (popular television programming, movies, music, politics, alcohol, current events, etc.); It keeps you in the conversation and demonstrates that your tastes mirror those of others— very important for maintaining social standing. However, sometimes the trump card is admitting ignorance.

Admitting ignorance basically does one of two things: either it suggests that the ignorant person is above the fray, or it suggests that they are an outsider who can be schooled. The first of these two leaves someone open for assault on their tastes since it implies that categorical dismissal of a topic (e.g. music) is the result of a selection of something else that’s superior (e.g. film). However, the second leaves one unassailable on grounds of taste. After all, how can you criticize someone’s consumption habits if they come clean upfront that they really don’t know what they’re talking about? Not even the most callous of record store employees would criticize on those grounds.

Playing ignorant is a great strategy to use if it’s true. But on the other hand, pleading ignorance can also be a dishonest way of preemptively truncating any line of questioning that might legitimately address issues of taste. That is, someone who actually knows something about music might, when questioned, demur on grounds that actually, er, they don’t know anything, huh huh. It’s almost a sort of nuclear war of cultural capital where you talk a good game until you see the stockpile of weapons the other guy has, and then you back down and pretend that you weren’t really planning to fight for real. It’s actually this strategy that I’ve seen a lot of. No matter how hollow it might ring to me, somehow I always find it kind of a charming tack.

One way that marketers have cracked the puzzle is not by defying the tenets of post-modernism through a refusal to play the game, but by actively embracing it. Take diversity to an extreme level. Jack radio has done pretty much this. Stations with this format don’t commit to a genre at all. They just play, in their words, “what we want,” which apparently means that they don’t pay particular attention to genre, they don’t pay attention to era. Everything is just thrown together into a blender and spat out over the radio. Jack radio has been gaining popularity since it started a few years back, and for good reason: kids of this generation are not as committed to genre as they once were. A couple decades ago, metal kids listened to metal, punk kids listened to punk, and rap kids listened to rap. I can remember a few years ago when the definitive “indie” music review site Pitchfork reviewed an Eminem album; it was the first non-indie album the site ever reviewed. The backlash was fierce. Its readers were incredibly upset that this site, which was ostensibly a champion of indie music was now reviewing a mainstream rap album. Accusations of selling-out were bandied around and emailed to the site with alarming frequency. It’s hard to imagine this happening now; indie rock kids now brag about listening to both indie music and top 40 radio. Many simply don’t make a hard distinction about the two. Music is music.

A Jack station might be a convenient ‘out’ for the situation I was describing. It both offloads the DJ’ing onto someone else (the station), and it’s hard to criticize on genre grounds. It would have been a good solution. But here’s the one I went with: I didn’t play music.

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Is Recognition of Human Empathy the Solution to our Environmental Problems?

according to Jeremy Rifkin, we’re on the verge of a massive revolution

Posted Feb 19, 11:36 am in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, environment, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, sustainability


There’s a fascinating interview with writer Jeremy Rifkin over at the New Scientist website. In it, he lays out why he thinks there is going to a be a massive shift in human consciousness as a result of new forms of information accessibility combining with the human ability for expressing empathy. This revolution, in his estimation, will solve the energy and environmental problems our world is facing. Borrowing from evolutionary biology, philosophy, marketing, and many other fields, Rifkin sees hope in the current turmoil where others don’t.

Incidentally, Rifkin’s vision of changing human behavior runs completely contrary to that of Steven Levitt (of Superfreakanomics fame), who as I stated in a previous entry is stuck in neutral with his “solve problems created by technology with more technology” rut.

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Personal Control and the Existential Salve

an autonomic perspective on the implications of purpose through purchase

Posted Jan 21, 01:55 pm in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, religion, unanswered questions


We have moved far from the sort of ‘subsistence’ mental existence that our prehistoric ancestors may have experienced. To make a simple example, as a society, we’re tending to spend less time and energy thinking about where our next meal is coming from and more time worrying about whether we’re ‘accomplishing’ things and whether we are ‘optimizing’ our life experiences. I realize that this may seem like an odd point on my part; wouldn’t anyone rather worry about something relatively frivolous like their status than the fear of starvation? After all, the benefits and penalties are at extreme odds with each other. If you’re worrying about your status and your goal is to make more money than the guy next door, the worst that will happen if you fail is that you feel bad about yourself. If you’re worrying about whether you’re going to be able to eat and you fail at your goal, the worst that could happen is that you actually die of starvation. In this context, most rationalists would probably say that if you had the choice, it’s clearly better to have your fundamentals neatly secured and spend your energy focused on the non-fundamentals— the stuff that’s higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.1

However, there may be other dimensions of this choice whose repercussions perhaps aren’t so obvious, and perhaps touch on the very central tenets of life fulfillment, happiness, and transcendence. If you spend all your daily energies and time on searching for food, water, and shelter, these tasks will form the basis for meaning and fulfillment in your life; for example, note that ancient mythologies revolve around things like weather and harvests, while modern mythologies revolve around things like entertainers and populist worlds attained through consumer goods (for example, the keys to the Wild West lay in a pack of Marlboro cigarettes). If your daily energies and time are spent on building your company’s profits so you can have a nicer car or go on vacation or enjoy recreational activities, then these external fruits will form the basis of your goals and your meanings in life. The question is, which of these will ultimately prove more psychologically rewarding and meaningful in the long run?

Further, if your life is defined by the search for food and your reward is the food you find in your search, there is a relatively small chain between your actions and the consequences of your actions. The act (i.e. the search) leads directly to the outcome variable (i.e. food). This inherently implies a simplicity and control in daily life activities, and a greater attachment of meaning to fewer things. As the chain between your acts and the outcome variables becomes more convoluted and unclear, there becomes increased complexity in daily existence, and a more uncertain relationship between effort and results. What does this mean? At the very least, it almost certainly introduces a longer lag time between action and outcome, which means you have to spend more time and effort thinking about and preparing for the future. It also means that you are more likely to be reliant on others (as producers and consumers) to relay desired outcomes to you, since your actions do not directly lead to the outcomes (working in an office for 40 hours a week does not magically produce money that appears on your desk; your work goes into some action that leads to some other action and another, which eventually leads to your company getting paid by someone, and then a portion of that money is given to you). The chain is much longer, more uncertain, there are more things that could go wrong, and less of a direct causal relationship between action and outcome.

This has a lot of implications. If you are searching for food, the amount of time you spend searching will most likely be directly proportional to the amount of food you find. If you are working in an office, the amount of work you do may or may not be directly proportional to your pay; some secretaries do as much or more work than the head executive, but get paid way less. You might work 100 hours weeks to find that you are going to be promoted to a higher paying job— or, as many people are currently finding out, you may do the same only to find that your company is doing very poorly and you’re going to get laid off. You have little direct control over how your actions will manifest in an outcome; the ultimate goals of modern work situations are not typically the direct result of actions, but rather the result of multiple concurrent and mutually dependent processes.

The nature of the uncertainty is different because of the different number of linkages in the chain. The search for food has one link: the search for food leads to food. A job, on the other hand, has many links, and each link has many horizontal and vertical links associated with it, which amounts to a mess of related events of varying causation (e.g. single causation, multiple causation, conjunctural causation, mediated causation, and probabilistic causation). In other words, the relationship between the input and the output is much more complex, and depends on a lot more factors (each of which depends on a lot of other factors). This chain of events is inherently less predictable, and the actions you take have little direct relation to the goals you reach towards.

You might counter at this point that surely there’s a generally positive correlation between how hard you work and how well you are rewarded. Maybe, but note that this is not an unmediated chain of events. There are many linkages that depend on the successful occurrence of other events for the desired outcome of wealth to come to you after a lifetime of hard work. Wealthy people have a habit of saying that their hard work got them where they are, and it is perhaps true that if you looked at data regarding this, you would find some correlation between levels of effort and wealth among an already selectively chosen group (an example of the problematic survivorship bias). But looking over the entire population, it would also not be hard to find people who worked hard their whole lives and got nowhere due to, for example, always working for horrible companies, personal problems, and just bad luck. How would this exact same situation differ amongst individuals searching for food? Logically, it would be very hard to argue that with individuals starting in similar circumstances, the guy who spent less time searching for food over a longer period would end up in better circumstances. I would suggest that this is because the greater the number of linkages in the chain between action and ultimate goal, the less predictable or certain the outcome of the action; therefore, in a situation in which the action leads directly to the goal, the individual who works harder at that action is in greater control of the outcome.

Another point to consider: there are a lot of people involved in these longer chains, which means you (as an actor within the chain) have to spend much more energy considering what others think about you, because you have to engender their trust and respect to enhance the probability of your goals being met; this means you have to be more cognizant of social and power structures for your survival. Such concerns create a fertile soil for existential angst borne from the constant need for validation from others. I would also argue that it creates a disincentive to focus on securing only your fundamentals in favor of procuring such things as status and comfort since there is a greater importance placed on your position in a social structure— in network theory terms, one’s centrality. The stronger and more connections one has, the more central an individual is. The more connections you have with others who are central, the more power you have over the whole network and people in it. Network centrality means that you control resources and people; people look to you for instruction and they listen to you if you are central. Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet, for example, have high centrality. They can get things done because they know other powerful and central people in networks. They also have a lot of money, which also means power (money and centrality correlate heavily), even among people outside of their networks. I, on the other hand, have very low network centrality. I know no powerful people and have little control over any resources.

For better or for worse, people who are looking only for their next meal don’t have time (or need) to worry about such things as their network centrality. They just don’t want to die of starvation. And though they need to think about that, they don’t have an immediate need to think about how others in the network might think of them (though in the long run, they may want to consider that they may be able to leverage network connections for future security). Of course, people with near unlimited financial resources also don’t need to consider what others think of them either— unless a mass exodus of network connections could lead to that financial reservoir being unceremoniously drained. Then they do. But for the average person, we have to think about this a lot, because what others think about us dictates our network centrality. The more central we are, the easier it is for us to achieve the goals we seek, and the higher the likelihood that actions we take will actually achieve the goals we want them to— because, again, the long chain between action and outcome involves a lot of people, and if the people in this chain know that you’re trying to get something done and you’re a central figure, they’ll work harder to make it happen (because they themselves are trying to raise their network centrality, and repeatedly following the orders of someone who is more central than them is a good way of doing that). Therefore network centrality grants an individual control, because doing something and knowing it will have a certain effect is the very definition of control, and being able to command the obeisance of others is tantamount to being able to shorten the chain of events.

The entire world is built on our ability to get to this point of predictability and “no surprises” as often and as reliably as we possibly can. It is this foundation-level quality that we work constantly for and which we sell to others. Without this unyielding human desire to gain control, the world as we know it would cease turning. We earn money to gain control of our environment because we believe that having the money will buy us security. People hire us for jobs because they believe our skills can confer control onto their businesses. Pharmacies sell us medications to give us control over our health. Construction workers build roads to give us control over our transport. Television gives us control over our boredom. We pay deeply (at times in financial terms, at other times in other ways) to gain that control, and there is little that surrounds us, either physical, institutional, or conceptual, that did not arise in some way to present us in some way with the promise of control.

In my view, materialism is a by-product of the angst produced by a lack of control. Things can provide us a sense of stability. Things, we think, don’t go away or betray us. They ground us. When we feel insecure, we can cling to them and they will not abandon us. We feel secure in our homes, with our things. When we have jobs, we aren’t filled with fear about losing things we’re accustomed to, like our lifestyles. But it is not just this “negative” quality of materialism that is fueled by this apparent dark side of humanity. Altruism, too, is a response to the lack of control in the world, and an effort to counter it (see related: Just-world hypothesis).

Marketers know well that we are on a constant hunt to quell our existential anxieties. And yes, they do wish very much to exploit this of you, but it is not with malice that they do this, for they, as humans, are subject to it as well. They know that the search for transcendence is a universal human experience. And they know well, implicitly, that our society is on a search for transcendence— not through inward searching or contemplation as perhaps the people of the distant past have (and by virtue of the non-industrial nature of their societies, were forced to), but through material goods.

Without putting a judgment on it, it is hard to deny that our world increasingly looks to consumables to act as existential salves, if not vehicles to transcendence and meaning. It is a matter of conditioning; our economic and cultural systems increasingly push us in this direction (for example, the common definition of success has little to do with personal fulfillment and everything to do with financial and/or social capital, a definition that nearly everyone has blindly embossed on their roadmap to personal success). Our cultural values tell us that the houses we buy give us our sense of security and well-being. Our cars and vacations transport us to places we think will offer us moments of joy and escape. Our televisions and media will confer us with the sorts of meaning and realities that we cannot find alone. For better or for worse, our modern search for transcendence is one littered with consumer purchase and consumer desire; part of this is because of the increased availability of consumer goods. The other side of it is that there has been a mainstream psychological shift towards it as a by-product of industrialization and economic growth. More than being a deliberate shift of societal priorities, it is the result of a rapid change in technology, expansion in marketing communications, and an across-the-board raising of the bar of what constitutes the bare necessities of existence in the modern world.

I think most people walk towards this consumer salvation without the slightest conscious awareness of their fundamental underlying purposes; for many, this constant search for new things is simply a lifestyle that they were born into and have integrated into their psyches as the result of a process of reproduction of societal values— a concept referred to by Bourdieu as habitus. For these people, the search for the latest-and-the-greatest and for personal comfort is all there is, because in a climate where this ideology is the norm, they have never been challenged to think otherwise.

As with anything, there are good aspects and bad aspects of this. On the plus side, this mentality opens us to a breadth of experiences, and a wider mindset that can facilitate a deeper array of thoughts and understandings about our world. Because of the advent of advanced economic systems, complex experiences can be bought and sold, and there’s a wide range of experiences available to modern societies that we might not otherwise have been privy to. You wouldn’t expect, for example, tribal peoples of Papua New Guinea to pack their bags, board a plane, and vacation in the Virgin Islands, nor would you expect Australian Aborigines to go out on a Sunday evening to sip on a Tom Yum Gai soup at a Thai restaurant).

Certainly such experiences can be and often are valuable both in the developmental sense and in the sense that it opens our eyes to new opportunities and ways of thinking. As members of advanced societies, we are privy to such benefits, and we tend to think of them as normal experiences that are not all that remarkable or out-of-reach. In fact, we expect, within reason, to be able to purchase pretty much any experience we want provided we have the money for it, and usually there’s someone willing to make the exchange with us to make it happen. Knowing this, our brains develop the not unrealistic notion that we can externally procure any experience we may want to have; thus, we may be simultaneously, and unwittingly, developing an increasing reliance on salable external phenomena to confer meaning and substance onto our lives.

The question remains, however: can there be fulfillment in this? Is fulfillment in purchase any different than fulfillment in being a hunter-gatherer? This is a question that deserves serious inquiry.

1 A model that I find flawed in certain respects, but one that is instructive for the purposes of this discussion

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On Nuance and Intellectual Honesty

the importance of thinking in complex terms about subjects that are often denied it

Posted Nov 10, 02:35 pm in consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, research, unanswered questions


It’s so hard to be nuanced these days. Every time you make an assertion that—wait— maybe Wal-Mart isn’t working hand in hand with Satan, or that materialism might not cause the downfall of civilization, you get dirty looks from people. It’s not that I believe that Wal-Mart is the greatest company ever or that I believe we should all be more materialistic. It’s that these are nuanced points of view that attempt to not be reductivist. By this I don’t mean to imply some wishy-washy sense of moral relativism that sidesteps taking hardlined stances on topics of public interest. It’s about being complete in an assessment before passing judgment. But in the modern world, we not only expect reductivist views that are partially based on political ideology, but we view non-reductivist views suspiciously, as if they are coming from someone with an ulterior and opposing motive.

Case in point: last night, I was engaged in conversation with some fellow graduate students, faculty, and area intellectuals. We were talking about Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, in preparation for his visit to this campus. The topic of conversation weaved a path around a number of subjects, but I found myself interjecting numerous times to offer a little bit of push-back towards unquestioned, ideologically driven assertions. I realize that doing this often makes me appear argumentative and contrarian, particularly in settings where I don’t know the people I’m talking to, but my goal is to elicit some level of thought in people who have strong, but largely unsupported, points of view.

Being nuanced means that people will interpret a political argument even where there isn’t one. Some topics are simply so ideologically loaded that you can’t talk about them in a complex and thoughtful way without people instinctively taking the side that most conforms to the talking points of their political ideology, and getting defensive when a statement impinges on it. Viewpoints that I often come in conflict with, and for which my rebuttals ruffle feathers, almost certainly cause people to form negative judgments about me (“obviously, this is a marketer talking” or “he’s clearly a member of such-and-such political party”); these impromptu acts of belief-formation on their parts are able to account for what otherwise may seem like— but aren’t!— needless and attention-seeking subversions of expectations on my part. The problem is that on hot-button issues, people assume that their conversation partners have political agendas that they want to push.

But in order to have a real dialogue, we have to abandon that way of thinking. We can no longer afford to have conversations that consist entirely of liberal/conservative/capitalist/socialist/pro-business/anti-corporation talking points. These talking points mean nothing because they are contextually bereft, and are selective ways of interpreting large amounts of complex information. But the real world is complicated. In my view, extreme points of view are common from people who haven’t done research on opposing views, and have not considered the aggregated knowledge in a meaningful way.

Perhaps you are wondering about the types of complex thoughts I’m talking about. Here are some points that I brought up last night, and which probably didn’t go over too well:

So, to the few of you who actually read this blog, I have one desperate plea: Question your own belief system rigorously, and be willing to think in complex terms, even if that means you arrive at conclusions that are unpopular among those in your peer set and social networks. It’s the only way to have honest dialogues these days.

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Corporate Social Responsibility Can't Happen By Itself

emphasis on short-term profitability stunts CSR’s ability to thrive in the market

Posted Oct 1, 10:40 pm in business, business models, culture, economics, ethics, finance, improvements, marketing, sustainability, unfinished thoughts


Regulation is a pretty hot topic. And when I say “hot,” I mean that it has an uncanny ability to divide a crowd. Progressives seem to generally favor regulations as a means of limiting the damage caused by corporate recklessness, and they have been quite vocal in pushing for greater government oversight in what companies can do, and how much they can do it before incurring serious penalties. Meanwhile, proponents of the free market maintain that the only fair and effective way to handle regulation is to allow the market to do the work; they believe in an efficient economic system that automatically controls problems that really matter (i.e. the problems most people care about). I personally can sympathize to some degree with both sides of this debate, but am not convinced that either can be implemented as solutions to the problems we currently face. What follows is my logic.

Before we can go on though, we have to face facts: it’s been obvious to those paying attention that market forces have not been effective in curbing devastating environmental damage caused by companies who have ignored the social costs of their operations. It’s not limited to environmental damages, either. The recent financial meltdown almost certainly would have been prevented with more oversight.

The traditional progressive (read: “liberal”) line about all this is that these corporations are just greedy and soulless, and don’t care about anything but profit. But this views corporate activity within a vacuum, and denies the economic realities underlying their behavior. In the absence of proper incentives, no company will behave in a manner consistent with diffuse, idealized social goals. Companies by their very nature act in ways that are most beneficial to themselves in the marketplace; even companies that try to do social good still have financial and publicity incentives underlying their behavior. Why? Because if they don’t, they effectively get punished by Wall Street and the market; remember that when we’re talking about the stock market, the bottom line is that public companies (i.e. the biggest organizations on the planet, who control the most money) pretty much need to post higher-than-expected profits consistently— or else. On Wall Street, nobody gives a hoot about how socially responsible you are— unless you’re making money from it. And tragically, our system is structured in such a way that companies really cannot afford to piss off Wall Street, for a number of reasons that go beyond the scope of this commentary.

Nevertheless, that is an economic reality; to condemn a company for being socially irresponsible overlooks the conditions that encourage the sort of reckless behavior that we hear so much about. In my opinion, it’s more of an indictment of our social and financial structure than it is of a company to say that they act irresponsibly. Like I’ve said before, we should think of corporations like organisms. They do what it takes to survive now. They typically can’t afford to think too far in the future, because Wall Street does not reward thinking far into the future; Wall Street rewards thinking about next quarter. Whose fault is that? I’d argue that it’s all of our faults. In an environment of high competition and high risk of market punishment, it’s unfair to blame companies for playing the game by the rules we ourselves constructed. Of course, it doesn’t make what they do ethically right, but like in any evolutionary context, the concept of justice doesn’t play a large role in behavioral decision-making; surviving does.

So yes, public companies do operate by almost strictly by financial motives, just like many progressives indignantly charge. But I would argue that this financial motivation should not at all detract from the actions of, say, Wal-Mart, who has done more than almost any other company in the world to enact serious green initiatives. True, they’ve done it for themselves, their own bottom line, and Wall Street— but still, they’ve done it. And if that’s the motivation they need to do it, then perhaps we should encourage that. Besides, if they were supposed to adopt a sudden conscience about their activities and rectify them, whose social goals are they supposed to strive for, anyway? Lots of different social factions have lots of different goals, and many of them have incompatible or actively contradictory goals.

For this reason, it seems fair to place the decision-making process in the hands of the public, through market forces. That allows a sort of collective decision-making process that is free from being regulated by “some guys on a board,” and allows for us to ostensibly have a shared voice in determining the direction that we take as a planet. Unfortunately, however, there are some problems that such market forces don’t resolve. For example, the economically well-endowed have a disproportionately large voice and thus the ability to unilaterally have a strong negative impact with their choices. And there’s still no guarantee that the aforementioned group will pay attention to social well-being if they’re still being held hostage by Wall Street demands. Free market economics as a means of regulation is dependent on not only market efficiency, but ethical, rational, and well-informed decision-making on the part of consumers— many of which are corporate entities.

But as consumers we are neither rational nor omniscient. We are sometimes ethical. But we can’t know everything about all the downstream effects of all our purchases at the time of purchase. This makes it pretty hard to argue the point that the market will be able to curb environmentally damaging business practices through selective consumption.

That may seem like a slam dunk for regulation, and many on the political left would love to see this happen. But it’s not that easy. The problem of regulation is complex, and it is difficult to enact regulation in a way that appears fair to everyone. Here’s the main problem: if there are regulations, who gets to call the shots?

Some might argue that we should use science to guide our regulatory policy, at least with regards to environmental concerns. But what science? Even science can have an agenda. The more you look into scientific research, the more you see how there is a chain of funding. Funding is a political process. People conducting research are subject to biases. No matter what the science says, or the preponderance of evidence suggesting one thing or another, when it comes down to drafting law, there will almost always be some arbitrary component about implementation (e.g. exactly how many tons of CO2 a company can release per year; exactly what chemicals a company can and can’t produce). And those people whose economic interests are being impinged will no more welcome the validity of the science or the arbitrary lines being drawn than a liberal would welcome Sarah Palin’s views if she was placed in charge of preserving endangered wildlife. Ultimately, any laws will be seen as political tools with embedded agendas.

Though it is debatable how much this might change corporate attitudes towards CSR, I think part of the fix is to change the nature of Wall Street. It does not serve companies or society to have such a heavy focus on short-term profitability. This structure denies companies the opportunity to act in ways that favor their own long-term efficiency, the public’s best interest, and the well-being of the planet. If companies didn’t have to keep impressing Wall Street, they could better take actions that could, over the long term, make their operations more efficient, streamlined, and less wasteful. That would be good for their bottom line and for environmental concerns. But that takes time, and it might require a few consecutive quarters of what may appear to be subpar financial performance. Right now, this is a highly risky strategy that most companies wouldn’t consider because they will not be rewarded for it.

Weirdly, even amidst all the talk about reform in the financial industry, I have not heard any talk about this. Admittedly, I’m not sure if anyone has worked out the details about how a “new and improved” stock market system would work, or if anyone has suggested a better set of economic incentives for waste reduction, but perhaps it’s time we started a national dialogue about it. It seems rather important.

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The Trader Joe's Paradox Revisited

how the most progressive grocery store came in last for sustainability

Posted Sep 22, 09:18 pm in consumerism, environment, experiences, marketing, sustainability


Trader Joe’s, the much celebrated “progressive” grocery store is a favorite of those consumers who favor such adjectives as “green” and “eco-friendly.” Unfortunately, as I described in a previous article, the reality is that Trader Joe’s is nothing of the sort. Amazingly, they manage to maintain that undeserved image without promoting it or even living up to the standards that these values would suggest. Case in point: this article in the New York Times places Trader Joe’s dead last in a national survey of grocery store seafood sustainability. It really takes some doing to lose out to guys like Safeway and Kroger. But then, Trader Joe’s never claimed to be eco-friendly and green in the first place, so maybe it’s not that surprising.

As I mentioned in my previous article about TJ’s (see the update at bottom), I talked to a Trader Joe’s manager about this very issue about their fish last November when I noticed that almost all the fish they sell there were on the “AVOID” column of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish). The manager told me that Trader Joe’s is a “democracy” and they stock things that people buy, and well, the people like unsustainable fish. I suppose he seemed somewhat apologetic about it, but at the same time he was able to take umbrage under this lofty ideology of populism.

Of course, by the same token we can view this democracy as a means by which we are able to use our buying power to promote our ideals through selective purchasing; that is, if we don’t believe a company is representing our values, we can avoid buying there. Being concerned about the state of our collapsing oceans, I did exactly that and stopped buying fish there. I also tried to share this information with friends, colleagues, and anyone who would listen. What I discovered about this is that it’s quite hard to gain credence with others regarding something when your statements directly contradict what others think they know; nearly everyone I told this to seemed to doubt my claims because of Trader Joe’s pervasive “progressive” reputation.

Earlier this year, I decided to write to Trader Joe’s headquarters about it. In my letter, I expressed that while I appreciated their apparent democratic ideals, Trader Joe’s could implement a “high road” approach on this, given the scientifically-validated reality that overfishing is destroying the world’s oceans. I attached a copy of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish. Much to my surprise, soon after I sent it, they updated their website to add something about how they are now sourcing their fish based on the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide. I’m not sure if it was my letter that elicited this, but the timing was pretty remarkable, and I was pleased that maybe one customer’s opinion did matter!

Well, it’s been several months or so since that update on their website. Since then, I’ve gone back numerous times and have not seen any change in their inventory of fish. I’m disappointed, especially since so many people are convinced that they are a company with “principles” and “ideals” relating to environmentalism, and thus do all their shopping there with the implicit understanding that their shopping list has already been filtered for eco-friendliness. Of course, to be fair, TJ’s never claimed that they serve this function.

But boy, they’ve shown that they can really cash in on this misconception.

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The Symbolic Value of a Beer

how much meaning is embedded in a single beverage?

Posted Jul 31, 11:03 am in branding, culture, marketing, politics, postmodernism


The so-called “Beer Summit” occurred today. The premise of this meeting between Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and James Crowley— a Cambridge police officer— was the culmination of a lot of recent speculation about latent racist attitudes, profiling, and the state of race relations in America. The event hinged on an incident in which Gates was trying to get back into his house after apparently being locked out, and being challenged by a white police officer for appearing to be breaking-and-entering. Allegations about police making assumptions about black men committing crimes were made and it soon turned into the subject of a national debate.

But Obama, ever the diplomat, invited the parties over to the White House garden for some beers (one each) and a bit of mano-a-mano discussion. A lot could be said about the political nature of this event, but what I’m interested in is what apparently the media made a big fuss about: the beer that each individual was going to choose to drink at this event.

It’s fascinating that a single beer could be so embedded with symbolic meaning. This is the nature of the post-modern world, in which many brands are reservoirs of symbolism and fit so prominently into the public’s schemas about social groups. As I mentioned in a previous post, David Foster Wallace once commented that he’d read books in which a character’s personality could be succinctly conveyed simply by naming the brand of T-shirt the character wore. That’s how much meaning we associate with certain brands. Thus, it was a matter of apparent great symbolic import what beer these gentlemen were having on this momentous occasion.

Gates, a Harvard professor, chose a Samuel Adams Light, while Crowley chose a Blue Moon (with an orange slice). Obama, ever the epicurean (what with his much-ridiculed taste for arugula), chose Bud Light. This invites the question of why, if you were the ostensible leader of the free world, you would ever choose a Bud Light. Maybe I’m more of a beer snob than I realize, but of all the world’s beers I could choose, Bud Light would be somewhat at the bottom of my list. Perhaps I am being a bit presumptuous here, but it seems highly unlikely that a man of Obama’s stature and taste would voluntarily choose a Bud Light if given unrestricted choice.

But of course, we have to think about the symbolic value of his choice. Bud Light is the best-selling beer in America, and has been since 2001; apparently it accounts for a massive 22% of case sales in the United States! It carries with it so many symbolic, populist overtones. It’s what any blue collar American would drink. Not like that elitist, hoity-toity microbrew stuff, and especially not one of those foreign beers that wasn’t brewed on our shores.

According to a Republican strategist quoted in an article from Bloomberg, Obama is “trying to send a message that he’s an average American… [He could] complicate that by making an exotic choice, or an import, or too expensive.” Indeed, imagine what the news sources would say if he drank, say, a Heineken, a Sapporo, or a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He was already skewered by Fox News’ Sean Hannity for asking for Grey Poupon at a diner several months ago.

There is a rather unexpected complication to Obama’s choice, however. Budweiser was sold to the Belgian company InBev back in July 2008, making Bud Light not quite an American beer. Sure it’s brewed here and it’s a traditionally American brand, but it’s no longer owned by an American company, so perhaps it can’t be viewed as wholly American as say, Coors.* Nevertheless, I think most Americans probably still view Budweiser as a culturally American beer and don’t really know much or care much about the location of the headquarters of the huge international beverage conglomerate that owns it.

Bud Light, viewed strictly on symbolic terms and with the intent of being an uncontroversial choice for a nation who, during the 2004 presidential election was inexplicably obsessed with choosing the candidate who one would most like to have a beer with, was a good selection. It’s a best-seller, has no particular subculture attached to it, and is sold pretty much everywhere. It’s hard to beat that. As Al Ries, an Atlanta-based marketer told Bloomberg, “Leading brands tend to be a very safe choice for a politician because, in a sense, they’re saying to the public, ‘You picked it, not me. I’m just reflecting your choice.’”

Interestingly, little commentary has been made on Crowley’s choice. The police officer was easily the most blue-collar fellow at the table, and chose what is probably the most “elitist” beer (if such a concept can be meaningfully applied) in terms of popular conception. Most people likely have not even heard of Blue Moon as it is the type of beer that is typically served in “uppity” and yuppy-type hangouts, not roadside dive bars. In reality, however, Blue Moon is rather surreptitiously brewed by Coors, though they do not advertise this and do not have the Coors name listed anywhere on any Blue Moon products. The company (rightly) assumes that the Coors name will reduce the brand equity of this macrobrew masquerading as a microbrew.

Gates’ choice was a sensible one; he lives in Cambridge, just outside of Boston, and he chose a beer that is brewed in Boston, perhaps a symbolic nod to his affection for the area despite his recent conflicts.

All in all, somewhat interesting choices made by all three gentlemen. I would, however, have loved to hear what kind of public commentary would have been made had Obama chosen the ultimate in a confounding beer with multiplex meanings: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Is he kowtowing to rednecks? Bikers? Hipsters? Cheapskates? In a perfect world, he would have chosen it, and it would have been a wonderful and puzzling mystery to unravel.

* You could tell that around the time of the sale of Anheuser-Busch to InBev that the company got kind of nervous about how its customers might perceive this traitorous act of selling out a quintessentially American brand to Europeans; they responded by creating and heavily advertising something called Budweiser American Ale, repeating the world “American” many times in the ads to reinforce the idea that this was a American drink.

Further reading:
1. The Bloomberg Article
2. “How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding” by Douglas Holt

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Marketing Privacy

amidst consumer fears and self-consciousness, retailers should offer something that’s hard to get

Posted Jun 15, 01:06 pm in business, consumerism, culture, human nature, improvements, marketing


It’s not infrequent that you hear people lamenting about the loss of privacy in modern society. Grocery stores want us to get loyalty cards so they can monitor what we’re buying and change their marketing mixes to capitalize on it. Facebook wants to sell our user information so marketers can post up banner ads about things they think we might buy. Data mining software on our computers watch what we’re doing and send that information to various companies that sign us up for junk mail and email spam lists.

Some of us actively combat this trend by being secretive when companies try to get information from us, while many of us are just resigned to it; but it remains true that privacy is a highly-valued commodity in our society. Some people value privacy because they don’t want to deal with the irritation and annoyance of people constantly trying to sell them things. But there are also real concerns about things like identity theft and corporations mining information for purposes that many people don’t feel comfortable about. Then there’s the fear of humiliation; sometimes people simply don’t want others— friends, acquaintances, and even strangers— to know certain things about them. There are, for example, fears of looking pathetic or comical in the eyes of others, or fears that potentially embarrassing information might circulate.

This morning, I happened to be in the pharmacy buying some calamine lotion for a poison ivy problem, but I noticed that in the same aisle there were numerous products for problems of a more embarrassing nature, like the slew of products for jock itch. Some people would rather live with the jock itch (or buy a $5 product online and have it shipped out for $7) rather than take that to the counter and face the cashier, knowing that they’re probably snickering under their stoic fascade and laughing about it with co-workers later.

Two aisles away were the condoms, prophylactics, and lubricants. I bet that only a quarter of people looking to buy “male enhancement drugs” in a pharmacy actually have the nerve to take the product to the counter.

In bookstores, I wonder how much potential revenue from the sales of self-help books, health and medical literature, and erotica (or pornography) is lost due to the inability of consumers to work up the gall to look another human in the eye while the price scanner brings up the book title on the computerized cash register.

I mention all these things not because they are humorous and we may see the universal human emotions involved in them, but because there’s a real marketing problem involved here. Consumers want to purchase things but are thwarted by their inhibitions, insecurities, and retailers’ apparent inability to acknowledge these feelings. Retailers are damaged not only because of the lost revenue from salable products that people are actually willing to fork over money for (but won’t), but because these products are taking up shelf and warehouse space and aren’t getting the turnaround that they could. There are high inventory costs to products that don’t shift units.

Some grocery stores, to save on labor costs, have implemented self-checkout lines in which customers ring up their own sales and pay for them through a machine. A system such as this would be incredibly valuable at stores like a bookstore or pharmacy. It offers customers an outlet to pay for an item and retain their privacy. They don’t need to talk to anyone, they don’t need to feel embarrassed, and they don’t need to feel like they are being judged. Retailers benefit because it keeps customers focused on getting the things they need, rather than feeling uneasy about making the transactions. These machines are a little clumsy in the grocery stores, but they would work much better in these venues than they do in grocery stores because you’d typically have a lot fewer items, and all the items have UPC codes (unlike vegetables in the grocery store, which are a pain to ring up).

There’s no doubt that persons in positions of power at retail organizations have recognized this issue. Yet, short of grocery stores (which have ostensibly implemented them for different reasons), I have yet to see one brick-and-mortar store do anything to remedy this misalignment. There may be a number of reasons for this, including concerns about theft, space, bucking convention, and good ol’ status quo; but in my view, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by a significant margin— and for consumers, it would be a welcome change from feeling like their every move is being watched. For bookstores, it has the added bonus of keeping them as anonymous as Amazon.com, who they’ve been claiming has a competitive advantage over them.

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The Last Days of "Stuff" and the New Age of Digital Pack-Ratism

if you never have to throw anything away, would you do it?

Posted Jun 11, 12:17 pm in consumerism, culture, economics, experiences, human nature, marketing


There was a time near the end of my undergraduate days— probably around a time that I was moving— where I realized that I hated stuff. And by stuff I mean all the trinkets, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, mementos, curios, and souvenirs that filled my house and my closets, and littered my floor and acned my walls. What is notable about this revelation was also the realization that even though I hated stuff, I had a weird, irrational attachment to stuff as well.

These were things that served no function, yet were impossible for me to get rid of, for a variety of reasons. Some of them had too much personal significance for me to just throw out, like the hilarious and baffling—but non-fitting— “God Loves Ukraine” t-shirt my friend had given me in high school. Other things seemed too substantial and useful to someone else to just throw into a garbage can just because I no longer wanted it in my presence, like books I no longer needed but which no one would buy. Yet others I felt like I had paid too much money for to just discard; these things needed to be sold— even though nobody would ever bother to come all the way to my house just to buy them.

Around this time, I took a very long trip to India that kept me away from my stuff for nearly half a year. I remember thinking as I gazed into the deep blue Indian Ocean that if my house burned down while I was away, I wouldn’t really miss any of my stuff except for a couple of things here and there, items that would easily have fit into a small box. In a perverse way, I wished that my house would burn down so I wouldn’t have to deal with the unpleasant and conflicting emotions that I had to confront when discarding stuff myself. Also while I was away in India, a new-agey book suggested to me that if you can’t bear to part with something, you no longer own it— it owns you. This I found rather unsettling. I decided that when I got back, I would just get rid of all my stuff somehow.

Much of it I was able to get rid of by packing into boxes and offering on Craigslist. Some I put in boxes and laid on the street, stating that they were free. Some stuff I was able to sell. It was a difficult process. Even the stuff I knew I would never miss, I still had a very hard time discarding. I would think 4-5 times before putting something in “the box,” for all the reasons I stated previously.

Yet, despite all this, getting rid of stuff actually had a surprisingly strong psychological effect on me. I felt lighter, like I had lost 20 pounds, and somehow a kind of psychic burden was lifted as well. It was weird; it was almost as if these things took up space not only in my house but on my person as well, and shedding them had the simultaneous effect of emptying my house and also decluttering my person.

But there was an interesting aspect to this decluttering process that I’m still trying to come to grips with. Since I was quite young, I had been obsessed with music. I collected many, many cassettes, compact discs, and records, and listened to them constantly. I enjoyed them, but they also took up a lot of space. While I was getting rid of all this stuff, I realized that I had some 150+ CDs that I was rather nervous about parting with. Some were rarities, some would be expensive to replace, and some just felt like an affront to good taste to even consider selling. But I was committed to this winnowing, and wanted to make every effort to get rid of anything I absolutely didn’t need to have (within reason). But instead of going to my favorite haunt Amoeba Records to sell them off without looking back, I did something else first, and it’s something that I’m trying to contemplate whether violates the very premise of my efforts in divestment. At this stage, the early 2000s, I was living well into the age of digital music, and I could simply copy all that music to my hard drive without much effort. Which I did. And I bought a new hard drive to house it all too. At the end of it, I had some 40 gigabytes of music on my hard drive, and made (well, more like recovered) $300 selling my records back to Amoeba.

My question is, are digital files also stuff or do they not count because they don’t literally take up any space? If I collect files on my hard drive, is it any different than collecting junk in my closet? As someone who wants to absolve myself of the sin of stuff, do I have to clear out my hard drives and delete music that I don’t listen to?

At first glance, clearly. Whether stuff is physical or digital media makes no difference. The concept of pack-ratism is about irrational attachment to possessions. It’s about an unwillingness to give up that which does not really serve you. It is about carrying stuff around for no other reason than because you are terrified to throw it out because you might need it.

So far so good.

But where it starts getting very convoluted is the idea of how much this stuff interferes with your life. We consider pack-ratism problematic because we believe that there are serious consequences to the neuroticism of never throwing anything out. People become unhealthily obsessed with their things; they develope debilitating fears of losing their possessions; their living conditions become defined by squalor and filth. The Collyer Brothers, who epitomize compulsive hoarding, were found dead amidst the 103 tons of garbage that literally flooded their entire Manhattan home (at least one of them ‘drowned’ when a pile of garbage fell on him). That’s a pretty strong cautionary tale. But chances are pretty slim that you’d experience anything similar with a few extra gigs of junk on your hard drive. In fact, if you are able to keep your files well organized, you’re unlikely to experience any problems related to clutter; and actually, with advances in search technology, you’re don’t even need to organize all that much. In other words, you can be a total, complete pack rat and never feel any particular consequences.

I believe that we’re all moving in the direction of digital pack-ratism. Short of wiping embarrassing pictures away, we don’t have much reason to delete things off our hard drives— except, of course, clearing up some free space. But this problem likely won’t be so prevalent in the future. Hard drive sizes are getting exponentially larger while prices are dropping dramatically; meanwhile, the sizes of MP3s, photos, and documents will likely not be exploding on the same scale as hard drive sizes. Therefore, hard drives will be getting much bigger while file sizes will stay relatively stationary; on average, each file will make up a smaller and smaller percentage of the total hard drive space. Concern over space and efforts towards space-saving will become increasingly irrelevant for the average computer user.

Also, as people move from computer to computer, they will likely just copy their entire old hard drive over to their new ones every time they switch; this is to avoid the risk of losing potentially important information by selectively copying certain files. There is not a large penalty for doing this, as hard drive sizes will be continuously growing. Thus, computers will serve as warehouses for peoples’ lives (which increasingly will revolve around their computers): their record collections, their writings, their emails and letters, their photos— everything. And they’ll have no urgent need to delete anything.

Does this mean we will all be digital pack rats? It could be, depending on how much industry pushes this idea, and how much they can manage to reframe the concept (e.g. “It’s not an obsessive and neurotic behavior; it’s just common sense that can protect you and the things that matter to you!”). Hardware manufacturers have the ability and motivation to promote this idea that people will never have to get rid of any of their files; and amazingly, they can even truthfully claim that there will be little to no consequence for engaging in this type of behavior, short of occasionally having to make a cheap upgrade to a bigger drive, which probably won’t be necessary very often for most people.

Of course, there will probably always be people who are neurotically fearful of running out of space, and will never become digital pack rats. For some of these people, this is a consequence of living in through a technological age where drives often did fill up, and at inopportune times. For others, it’s just a fundamental lack of understanding about what hard drive space means. My dad informed me yesterday that he deleted an important 20k Word document off his computer because he was afraid of filling up his 120Gb hard disk. His drive is not even 10% filled.

For the rest of us, there might be no stop to our obsessive data collecting, except for the dreaded hard drive failure, which may indeed serve as the new devastating house fire.

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Pay What You Want (and Maybe Still Feel Like You Got Cheated!)

the complexities involved in allowing customers to call the shots

Posted Apr 27, 08:56 pm in business models, economics, human nature, marketing


The PWYW Paradigm
There’s been a lot of talk within the past few years about Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing. Much of the public discussion about it has stemmed from and has revolved around Radiohead’s decision to release their album In Rainbows online, and to allow users to pay whatever they want for it— much to the annoyance of certain other artists, like Robert Smith of the Cure, for example, who doesn’t want music (especially his) “devalued” in this manner. Various restaurants, coffee shops, and other businesses have been cautiously implementing this scheme as well, many of them before Radiohead adopted it.

Honestly, I’m not exactly sure why all these people are doing this. Is it a philosophical meditation on the complex relationship between money and humanity? Is it in the lofty hopes that reliance on altruism will actually generate more profit than would otherwise be generated through standard market norms? Is it the idea that rich people will be thoughtful and generous, and knowingly offset the losses incurred by the poorer people who couldn’t afford normal prices and thus don’t pay as much? Is it a sort of neo-socialist experiment that means to question the values and by-products of our firmly entrenched capitalist system? Regardless of its intent, I’m curious about it even though my first reaction to it is to view it more as a novelty than a straight-faced business model— which of course, does not necessarily discount it as a valid business model nor invalidate it as a legitimate political statement (if it happens to be one).

A Weird Experience with PWYW
When I think about PWYW, my first thought is of a somewhat unpleasant incident shortly after my undergraduate days at Berkeley. On weekends, in the parking lot of the Ashby BART station there was a rather idiosyncratic flea market where you could find items as unusual and varied as Aboriginal didgeridoos, homeopathic medicine for every disease under the sun, and ultra-cheap tax preparation from a filthy man sitting in the back of an even filthier truck. And on occasion there was a massage school student who hung around and advertised free (but pay-if-you-want-and-what-you-want) back massages. Being that they were free and I could just tip him whatever I felt like, I one day thought I would just get one of these free massages, drop a couple bucks in his tip jar, and be on my way.

My recollection is that it was a pretty good massage, and one that I really needed. However, I found that immediately after I had emerged from my deeply relaxing 10 minute massage session, I was standing, somewhat sheepishly, before this man and his tip jar. I say ‘sheepishly’ because beforehand I had (somewhat naively) viewed the experience as a sort of free lunch. But now I instinctively wanted to reciprocate for the massage in a “fair” manner— not least because he was standing expectantly in front of me, clearly able to see how much money I was going to put in the empty jar. The shame of being seen paying only $2 in tips negated the possibility of me doing that. He didn’t know my name exactly, but yet I felt weirdly afraid of looking like, or possibly being, a bad person who paid $2 for a 10 minute massage.

So here I was, saddled with guilt for taking this guy’s services and thinking about not paying him a market price for it. Rather begrudgingly, I ended up giving him $10 for a massage that if it were advertised as being $10, I wouldn’t have gotten at all. And even then, this $10 I knew was below fair market price, but I rationalized that I was a poor student so I couldn’t possibly give him more than that. So even though I paid, I still walked away from the transaction with a sensation of guilt which follows me around to this day!

In a normal transaction, both parties presumably make a mutually satisfactory exchange and go about their days. Here, there were odd social norms that came into play unexpectedly, feelings of guilt, and lingering dissatisfaction (I walked away from the transaction feeling insecure and with unpleasant memories of what should have been a pleasant experience). I think this is a big risk for a business to take, even though the PWYW model is arguably kind of a neat and somewhat playful concept. The fact that there’s a very good chance that a customer might leave feeling like they either underpaid or overpaid is not really a good sensation to create if you want repeat business. It may be possible, however, to alleviate such problems. To understand how, we have to think about how the ambiguity of the situation might affect the thinking of someone in that position. So let’s start with and why someone might pay more than they really felt like something was worth. Here, I will use the example of a PWYW restaurant, of which there are apparently a handful scattered across the globe.

Things for a Business to Think about Before Implementing PWYW
Consumer’s fear of others’ judgments (“I don’t want my date/wife/waiters/owner to think I’m cheap so I’m going to pay more than I think this meal was worth”) will create a negative evaluation of the business because they will feel like they were guilt-tripped into paying more than they wanted to.

A restaurant could reduce the amount of personal interaction at the time of payment between restaurant staff and the customer, or better yet, reduce this contact over the course of the whole dining experience. The risk here is that even though you will be making the patron more comfortable (if with less customer service), you are running the serious risk of collecting insufficient funds to continue operations. The guilt and shame factor that comes with human interaction is one of the main principles propping up the idea of someone being generous in their payments. Without eyes being on them, so to speak, customers are more apt to shirk based on their own post-hoc rationalizations about why they shouldn’t pay what they actually thought the meal was worth.

Consumer self-perception and self-image involves how people view themselves (“I know I am not a cheapskate, therefore I should pay an amount that reaffirms to me the idea that I’m a generous person— especially when an opportunity comes up to take advantage of the situation, and justifiably be a cheapskate”). You’d like them to want to view themselves positively (by feeling self-congratulatory about their doing the right thing), and you’d like them to maintain attitudinal and behavioral consistency (that is, they do what they morally think is the right thing). You want them to hold up their end of the moral bargain, but not necessarily because of guilt. And you want them to not resent you for it. And you want them to keep doing it as a repeat customer.

Guilt aversion (“I don’t want to walk away from here feeling like I underpaid; that would eat away at my conscience”) is something you do not want to invoke. You don’t want people to leave feeling like they overpaid or underpaid; you want them to walk away satisfied, and absolved of any moral or economic ambiguity. This is difficult to do in a business model that seems not only to openly encourage it, but which invites these weirdly complex and open-ended transactions.

Overpayment as insurance (“I don’t know how much all this was worth, so I’d better give an amount that definitely covers it to avoid underpaying or looking like a jerk”) is also not good. You might like it because you are getting paid more, but it’s probably not going to make someone want to come back. If people leave feeling like they overpaid, there’s a very good chance that they will take their business somewhere else where they can get a full understanding of the nature of the transaction before they are forced to carry out the terms of the contract in a manner that is either unpleasant or unexpected.

Novelty (“this restaurant should be rewarded for being unique” or “this is such a strange and wonderful experience that I think giving more money is justified”) is probably not a good thing either. Yeah, you might get some wide-eyed golly-gee-shucks folks in who love having their expectations subverted, but I would be wary about relying on an endless stream of them popping in just because of your payment scheme. I would hope that your restaurant or business is actually remarkable in whatever it is supposed to be doing, rather than in how it collects on the bill.

Potentially Revenue-Changing Input Variables
I am curious how end-of-year revenue would differ in PWYW businesses if you could toggle certain variables. Here are the variables I would be interested in switching in order to gauge the change in the outcome:

Payment in person vs. payment in private – If there was no way to trace back payment to customer, what would change? That is, if the customer could pay without anyone but himself knowing how much he paid, and the restaurant could only calculate total sales at the end of a night instead of seeing what each customer paid, how would the revenues differ? My guess is that it would be a hell of a lot lower.

Numeric anchors – If there were numbers shown around the restaurant, perhaps referring to the standard menu pricing or perhaps even arbitrary numbers, how would this affect what people paid?

Visual and sensory anchors – If there are no numbers in a PWYW restaurant, what anchors are customer payments tied to? Decor? Level of formality of the business/restaurant? Lighting? Quality of food/products? How would changing these factors affect consumer behavior?

Geography / Politics of Clientele – How would the success of a business/restaurant be affected by the different political compositions of different geographies? I get the feeling that a PWYW business would generally play out better in progressive (‘liberal’) strongholds, where— as Jonathan Haidt’s “The Happiness Hypothesis” contends— there is a stronger focus on individuality, autonomy, and acceptance of ambiguity (“this restaurant is unique”; “these guys think ‘outside of the box’”; and “this restaurant pleasantly subverts standard market norms”) vs. in more traditional (‘conservative’) areas, where there is a higher emphasis on order, structure, and adherence to norms (“I want to know how much I’m paying beforehand— so why doesn’t this restaurant do it?”; “this restaurant tries too hard to be different”; “their payment system, while novel, just introduces confusion and unease”; and “unlike most business transactions, this one does not give me proper closure on the deal because afterwards I still retain a sensation that I either overpaid or underpaid”).

Final Thoughts
The PWYW system is an intriguing one, and for reasons I can’t really articulate, it seems like the next evolutionary step in business and cultural exchange— but in my estimation, there are some serious barriers that need to be examined and broken before it can work successfully as a widespread business model. It would be interesting to see if and how these barriers will (or won’t ) be negotiated.

Have you had an experience with a Pay-What-You-Want system? Tell me about it in the comments!

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