Small Data Page 7
One of the first things I did was blindfold Lowes management in each one of its stores and take them up and down the aisles. The human sense of smell “resets” every seven minutes, meaning that we rarely notice if something smells odd, or old, or stale. Knowing this, I took them outside into the parking lot, and when they reentered the store, they saw the store in a new light (and smell). In some cases they discovered a fragrance in this or that store zone was unpleasant to shoppers, not necessarily because of spoiled food, but simply because of a broken ventilation system.
Trying to turn around a family-owned supermarket like Lowes would be a huge, expensive risk. But with their future in jeopardy, the company had no other choice. The stores’ demographic trended toward people in their late forties and older, which wasn’t a good sign for future profitability. Lowes also faced very real competition from larger chains like Food Lion and Harris Teeter, as well as from more upscale, hipster-friendly stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. In the end, I told the Lowes management team it wasn’t enough to repaint the parking lot lines, or alter the store logo, or increase the store’s social media presence. We had to transform everything.
As usual, the question lay in Small Mining what was missing in American culture. It lay in figuring out what desires and dreams were going unfulfilled. This wasn’t easy in a country famous for manufacturing desires and longings, whether it’s Apple iPhones or Hollywood films. In an era dominated by the latest smartphone app, it was hard to put a finger on an unmet desire that a comparatively small bricks-and-mortar southern supermarket chain needed to deliver that America wasn’t able to dream up.
But less than a year later, in an industry where an increase of 4 percent is considered impressive, Lowes sales had risen substantially. Tim Lowe, the inspiring, pioneering president of the Lowes Foods, was quoted as saying, “I would say that the results we’ve been able to achieve—and the overall organizational change we’ve seen—are quite heroic and have made a significant impact.” According to CBC, in just a few months the average basket size and average transaction volume at Lowes were up 7 and 23 percent, respectively, and last year, Lowes was awarded the North Carolina Retail Merchant’s Association Retailer of the Year Award, thanks in part to its innovative ways of connecting with customers. Moreover, the chain had launched its own Small Data Department.
Even better, Lowes supermarkets were packed. People were driving in from miles away, bypassing supermarkets closer to where they lived, for the sheer sensory experience of shopping at Lowes. What helped turn around Lowes wasn’t a local or regional solution. It didn’t come out of a Harvard Business School or Wharton case study. It didn’t require teams of consultants. The small data insights that helped transform a local supermarket into a national phenomenon began in the Russian Far East, and drew inspiration from cultures as various as Japan, China, France and Italy.
Like most people who didn’t grow up in the United States, I’ve been exposed to American culture—popular music, television shows, movies and cable news channels—since I was young. Still, spending time in the States is another matter entirely. Like every other country in the world, America has a set of unspoken rules and protocols that have been handed down from one generation to the next, most of them imperceptible to natives but obvious to an outsider’s eyes. For example, in most European countries, when you board a crowded elevator and find your space, it’s considered good manners to gaze straight ahead of you without speaking as the car goes up or down. In Europe, elevator passengers almost never exchange a nod, or a greeting, with other riders. This isn’t considered rude, or unsociable, either. Your silence is simply a sign of respect for other people’s privacy.
American elevator etiquette is very different from unspoken European protocols. During my first few visits to the States, I boarded elevators without greeting the other passengers, and at night, as is my habit, I swam laps in hotel pools without saying a word to the other swimmers. I very quickly learned that Americans find this behavior cold, off-putting and even menacing. These days, whenever I’m in the United States, I make it a point to acknowledge the other elevator passengers, even if it’s only with a smile. If another passenger is holding a bunch of flowers, for example, I’ve learned that it’s considered impolite not to comment on them, just as if you board an elevator to see a woman in a wedding dress, it’s bad manners not to compliment her on her gown, or ask her when her wedding is taking place. In America, you have to say something.
Why, though? It’s tempting to believe that in a country that is home to numerous nationalities and races, the tacit tradition of making small talk with your neighbors springs from the desire to establish commonality, even if you’re talking about something as generic as the weather, or how the local sports team did last night. Small talk also has the secondary effect of defusing conflict or even resentment. A few years ago, I remember flying from New York City to Medellín, Colombia, and, once I landed, climbing inside a taxi to take me to my hotel. At one point, I asked the driver if he knew anything about the upcoming weather forecast. When he didn’t answer, I began chattering about the weather in an effort to engage him, and when he still didn’t respond—he seemed confused—it finally struck me that the global talking point known as The Weather simply didn’t exist in Colombia. I later found out that no one asks or talks about the weather in Medellín, as it never varies, nor are there any television meteorologists. Every day the temperature is in the mid-seventies, with sunlight and an occasional cloud cover. Yet even in Southern California, where the same is true, natives talk about the weather constantly.
As I mentioned earlier, in sharp contrast to Americans’ reputation for friendliness is the absence of physicality. In the United States, no one ever touches anyone else and if they do so by accident, most apologize immediately. Physical contact is seen by many as analogous to trespassing on posted land, possibly even the first step to sexual interest. It’s instructive to compare how dolls in toy stores are sold in America versus how they’re displayed in European toy stores. In Europe, dolls stand side by side on shelves. They’re touching, holding hands with, even embracing each other. In America, a doll is displayed and sold as a single unit, inside a sealed plastic container, as if to communicate that she is alone or, if not, would be smart to keep a distance from her peers. It seems that dolls—and people—are expected to go it alone, and without any physical interference, either.
Why, though, apart from shaking hands and the occasional hug among friends, is the idea of physically touching another person perceived as so threatening? Heterosexual American men who make physical contact with one another first have to enter an unambiguous “permission zone,” usually athletic. The male taboo against physical contact, or making direct eye contact with another man, is a crucial element of a code American boys pick up when they are young, and extends to the protocol most men follow in public bathrooms. Males entering a rest room only to find one or two others males in front of the urinals generally make their way toward a urinal as geographically distant from the others as possible. Once they’re in place, they gaze straight ahead of them, fearing, maybe, that if they look anywhere else other men might misinterpret their gaze as predatory.
From my perspective, there is something amiss in a culture where no one touches. The United States isn’t necessarily a sexually prudish country, but it is physically very vigilant, in part because, more than other cultures, Americans seem more aware of the signals, messages and implications they are sending out to others. In contrast, South America is probably the healthiest continent for physical touch. I’ve sat in business meetings in Peru and Colombia where men of all ages sit around a table with their arms draped casually around one another’s shoulders. They don’t think anything of it.
The presumption of everyday friendliness, combined with the lack of physicality—those were the first two pieces of small data I picked up in the United States. There was a third, too, that could be di
stilled to one word: rounded. In the United States, almost no public rooms or areas are rectangular, or sharply cornered. America is a place where the square and the angular give way to the curvilinear, the circular and the blunted, as if hotel rooms and boardrooms were somehow wrapping occupants in an embrace. It was as if architects and designers were relying on furniture and rooms to provide the illusion of physical touch in a country where it barely exists. As you might imagine, I spend a lot of my time in hotel rooms. Some are rectangular, but the curtains covering the windows, the bowed shower curtain in the bathrooms, and the contours of the furniture convey circularity and security, with an emphasis on the latter.
Security. In every other country across the world, guests staying at a hotel are free to open the windows in their rooms, with the exception of one: the United States. American hotel windows are sealed, or painted shut, or manufactured in such a way that they can’t open or close in the first place. (This even extends to the White House. In a 2015 interview with Ellen DeGeneres, First Lady Michelle Obama said about herself and the president, “We can’t do little things like open windows. I haven’t been in a car with the windows open for about seven years. The windows in our house don’t open.” She added, “We go on the balcony, but that’s really the only door we can open.”2) Once they’re inside their rooms, hotel guests are imprisoned, like royalty in a tower. Why? Does management fear that guests staying on the first floor who open their hotel windows are at risk of killing themselves? People fall or leap to their deaths from hotel windows daily across the world, but is the fear of suicide really the underlying issue?
The circularity I kept encountering in the United States had the effect, deliberate or not, of eliminating the possibility of conflict, or dissent. In a country with the world’s highest incarceration rate, that spends around $640 billion a year on its military,3 which is more than the next seven countries combined, and where 37 percent of all Americans say that they, or someone in their household, owns a gun,4 I couldn’t help but find this paradoxical. America is a military superpower whose prevailing design aesthetic does everything it can to muffle, discourage and eradicate any trace of conflict. Most American malls, motels, hotels, big-box stores and fast-food chains are climate-controlled, mood-controlled, secure, antiseptic and completely the same. Sharpness and angularity have been smoothed out. Whether you’re entering the lobby of a Holiday Inn or sitting down at a table at Chili’s, guests can be assured they are in for no surprises at all.
If the architectural mandate against conflict gave me another clue about what drove American culture, another observation confirmed it: political correctness. Like my experiences in American elevators and swimming pools, it was something I found out about the hard way.
Understand that like most Danes, and Scandinavians in general, I grew up with a nonexistent, and certainly nonauthoritarian, relationship to religion. Fifteen years ago, that suddenly got me in trouble. I was giving a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, about the differences and similarities among some of the world’s best-known brands and the world’s best-known religions. In my industry, a brand is a brand, but I didn’t realize how sensitive and controversial a subject religion is in the United States, and how treating it as anything short of sacrosanct could get me into trouble. The first slide of my PowerPoint presentation featured a photograph of Pope John Paul II, and the second was of Ronald McDonald. To a Midwestern audience made up of marketers and brand builders, I pointed out that both the Pope and the McDonald’s mascot had things in common. Both wore branded, identifiable costumes, and both were leaders of highly successful organizations.
By the end of the third slide, people began walking out of the room. By the end, the conference room was only half full. When my speech was over, I went up to my host. Had something gone wrong? Had I upset one half of the room for some reason? That was when I found out that treating religion dispassionately was, at least in the United States, off-limits.
No country in the world is as “politically correct” as the United States. Few Americans would ever identify themselves as a “racist,” or a “misogynist,” or intolerant of the rights of minorities, whether it’s homosexuals or Latin Americans, and even Americans who exhibit what seems like baldly racist behavior strenuously deny they are “racists.” At social events and parties, the topics of sex, politics and religion are all off-limits. (In fact, a lot of what goes on in America is off-limits—or at least too risky to raise in polite company.) Few Americans are willing to discuss things everyone knows but won’t admit—from how tedious it is to stay home all day with a baby, to their true feelings about hip-hop, to how they feel about sex. Most Americans won’t even talk about how they feel about political correctness itself.
From country to country, I make it a habit to study the national sense of humor. Is it ironic? Sarcastic? Sly? Direct? Indirect? What’s most striking about mainstream American humor is that it focuses on much of the material they won’t talk about over dinner. Visit any comedy club, or watch Bridesmaids, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy or Louis CK’s routines on YouTube, and you’ll realize that Americans pay comedians millions of dollars to talk about things most of them have felt, or thought, but never said in public. In 2014 the biggest-selling American game, and the country’s most popular Christmas gift, was Cards Against Humanity, described on its website as “a party game for horrible people,” and “as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.”5 Its topics include “Auschwitz,” “Lance Armstrong’s Missing Testicle,” “Penis Envy,” “Not Giving a Shit about the Third World” and almost every other topic a lot of Americans take pains never to discuss around the Christmas tree.
Political correctness doesn’t just involve words, it also links back to the rounded American design aesthetic. When gathering together in bars, Americans, like the Chinese, create a large crowd—eight to ten people isn’t an anomaly—which forms in a crescent shape. In southern Europe, for example, groups will number no more than three or four people, and the concept of the large “public group” barely exists in northern Europe. In America, entourages are sizable, and everyone is given the chance to face forward, and to talk, and be heard; while in Brazil, everyone tends to speak at once. In common with the curvilinear design of American furniture, the crescent formation, which forms automatically and unconsciously, seems designed not to hurt or exclude others. The desire not to offend has made its way onto restaurant menus, too. The multitude of options American diners face on restaurant menus isn’t just a smart business decision. It deliberately avoids offending all tastes, palates and dietary restrictions. Even selecting a salad dressing becomes a labor-intensive task, faced, as no other diners in the world are, with half-a-dozen choices from French to Italian to vinaigrette.
The United States comes by its political correctness honestly. Americans are exposed to other cultures and races in ways natives of other countries simply aren’t. Denmark, for example, is as homogenous as a country can be. Ninety-nine percent of Danes are Protestant, and most call themselves agnostic. Without exposure to foreign cultures, or sensitivity to other races’ cultures, habits or tastes, the conversation is blunter. Political correctness ultimately derives from two things: fear and tribe. Who wants to risk expulsion from your gender, your community, your town, your state? More often than anywhere else in the world, Americans come of age hearing that they’re responsible for their own futures. It’s a message both inspiring and pitiless. Children who grow up in the slums of Chicago or Los Angeles can someday become political leaders, successful entertainers, influential businesspeople. But if they don’t, or if they fall on hard times, they’re left on their own to survive. The American safety net is fragile, and under continuous barrage, making the prospect of rejection by our tribes even more terrifying than it would be elsewhere.
I kept coming back to one word: fear. The circularity of American design and architecture. The bolted hotel windows. The political correctn
ess. The sameness of the retail and hospitality landscape. It puzzled me. What were people scared of? Being sued? Being injured? Firearms? Fear, of course, contradicts everything most people want to believe about everyday life in America. The United States, after all, is synonymous with freedom and social and profession mobility. Which is why the padlocked hotel windows, climate-controlled buildings, paranoia about offending others and emphasis on rules and regulations seemed to counter the official version of the American “brand.”
From what I could tell, most Americans were so accustomed to their regulated, rule-bound status they barely noticed the restrictions to their freedom. Whenever I fly into New York, I stay in the same Midtown hotel. One of the amenities provided by the management is a package containing four cotton ear swabs. The instructions on the side seem to be addressed to a not-very-bright three-year-old: Place the cotton squab in your ear. Do not insert completely. These instructions are for your own safety. When I showed the package to an American visitor, he gazed at me without comprehension. “What’s so interesting about this?” he said. As a native, he couldn’t see what I saw as an outsider—that most people who know what a cotton swab is can also be counted on to know how to use one, and what’s more, in no other country in the world would you ever see instructions printed out for its correct use.