Wealth and Poverty

Upscale grocery stores are beautiful.

The food is beautiful. The displays are beautiful. The stores are immaculate.

This is a rich country.  Anyone can shop here.

There have always been fancy food stores and up-scale butchers in America, but something new has emerged to service the needs of the "mass affluent." Whole Foods Market is the nationally-known chain. It presents itself as selling "natural" food, organic food, supposedly-minimally-processed foods, responsibly-sourced foods. It is more expensive than general supermarkets like Safeway, but customers in America's vast middle class shop there when they have particular tastes and a bit of discretionary money to indulge them.

There are local versions of the same kind of store. Market of Choice is an example of it in Medford, Oregon, and no doubt similar stores exist nationwide in moderately upscale urban and suburban zip codes. Simple, unprocessed food is cheap in America, a small part of the budget of middle-income customers. The markups are in processed and branded food. Part of the appeal of these stores is gigantic variety in certain categories where there is niche branding, now including beer. In the display shelf below, each beer can has six cans stacked behind it, so that each brand had its own one-can face. I counted 450 different brands in this photo.

There is also a refrigerated section of approximately the same size.

I took photos of the display because it amazed me. I was reminded of that scene in The Great Gatsby, a book commonly assigned to Americans in their high school English class, so part of the national canon. "I have a man in England who buys me clothes," Gatsby said, as he grabbed folded shirts out of his closet and threw them down to Daisy who became covered by them. The wealth. The excess. Look at what Gatsby has, and his freedom to unfold beautiful shirts and toss them. She was led to tears.

I am writing about grocery stores, yet the focus of this blog is politics. Let me explain. 

I observe political messages, some of which are made in the obvious places, including political speeches, and others are made wordlessly, in tone, demeanor, biography, and actions by political actors. This blog calls it body language. Sometimes an object or event is a political message. I see the beer displays as body language, like the language of Jay Gatsby throwing his shirts. 

Surely the merchant intends no political point. It is just a sales display and the denoted unsaid message is simply "Here is beer for sale." But there is a subtext of limitless choice and opportunity to indulge one's finest distinctions of preference. Look at all this! This is a message of vast abundance.

Market of Choice is advertising right now for new employees, to be paid $14-$18 an hour, which enough to allow their employees enough income to shop at this store and others like it. There are people who disapprove of such excess as is show in the beer display. What waste, what flagrant commercialism! Wasn't that one of the messages of The Great Gatsby, the shallowness and pointlessness of wasteful luxury?  After all, it didn't make Gatsby or Daisy happy. 

If beer-drinkers have enough abundance to indulge their particular tastes, why not? I am fussy about my melons, so I don't judge harshly people who are fussy about beer. I like abundance. I want everyone to have access to it. 

Something isn’t working right. I have written about the un-housed people so visible in Portland. Those people on the sidewalks are a wordless political message, too, one as vivid as the beer display that caught my eye. It is a message of the failure of abundance to trickle down. 

Portland Sidewalk

This country's version of global capitalism is an incredible engine for creating material wealth, but it has not been successful in its wide distribution. Some people are left behind, the struggling working class. Some people are left even further behind, and they live in tents on sidewalks. They create a colorful display of their own, their own body language message.

This is a rich country. There is enough. We could eliminate poverty if we chose to.