Small Data Page 8
To me, this was the core of life in the United States: Rules and restrictions, most of which are reframed so that Americans believe they are, in fact, safeguards. Which begs the question: If most of the time they do and feel and think and watch and eat and drink precisely what everyone else does, are Americans really free?
There was a final piece of small data, one obvious to anyone who took a moment to glance up long enough from his or her smartphone: smartphones. Mind you, of the 7 billion people on earth today, 5.1 billion of them own a cell phone. Over half of all Americans own a smartphone, with 29 percent of them owning either a tablet or an e-reader, up from only 2 percent three years ago. In 2014, CNN Money reported that for the first time ever, Americans used smartphone and tablet apps more than laptops to get onto the Internet. In terms of sheer numbers, this means that 55 percent of all US Internet usage comes from mobile devices, with apps making up 47 percent and mobile browsers making up the rest.6
Their use may be epidemic across the world, and increasing all the time, but nowhere is smartphone use as prevalent as it is in America, with fully fledged adults as preoccupied as younger generations. This makes sense: our phones, and the Internet itself, are often more exciting, more surprising, more new, than our surroundings. They also make natives feel safe. In a country whose workers take the fewest number of vacation days of any people in the world, smartphones would seem to compound the pressure Americans feel to look and seem busy. I was once on vacation at a hotel on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, and among the other guests in the outdoor swimming pool were four men whom I soon determined from their accents were Americans. They were shirtless, and wearing their bathing suits, but not one of them was looking at the stunning seascape directly behind them. All four were fiddling on their phones.
Anyone who has been in an airport recently will tell you that the twenty-first-century airport has transformed itself into a tech-accessory mall. It seems sometimes as if one out of every two airport stores is in the business of selling earphones, earbuds, battery-juicers and power adapters. One concourse in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport has taken this concept to ridiculous lengths. In a place devoted to waiting, where almost no one is not gazing down at his or her phone, the Minnesota airport offers a waiting area populated with white plastic tables, each one with its own iPad. These tablets provide weather reports and flight information. They offer drink and food menus from a nearby restaurant. Since there is literally nowhere else to sit but at an iPad-equipped table, travelers can’t not look at the iPad, leaving them with three options: engage with it, put on headphones, or gaze up at one of the television monitors broadcasting 24-hour cable news. In short, there is no refuge from technology or from the anxiety it engenders.
Life has never been safer in America than it is today. Cited in the Christian Science Monitor in 2012, James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Boston’s Northeastern University, concluded, “We are indeed a safer nation than 20 years ago,” a trend he and other experts credit to factors including increased incarceration and law enforcement technology, and a larger percentage of older Americans. Despite America’s relative safety, Fox says, “Citizens overwhelmingly feel crime is going up even though it is not . . . because of the growth of crime shows and the way that TV spotlights the emotional. One case of a random, horrific shooting shown repeatedly on TV has more visceral effect than all the statistics printed in a newspaper.”7 The Internet magnifies bad news, placing it, literally and physically, in our hands, without providing any perspective. It is analogous to the difference between checking the financial markets in real time in contrast to waiting to see how they did over the course of a week or month. Real-time information can be falsely alarmist.
The Internet isn’t going anywhere, but I have a second objection to smartphone use. From experience I know that a country’s level of “happiness” falls in direct proportion to that country’s level of transparency. Before the Internet, young people compared themselves to their peers in school or in their hometown. Today, they contrast themselves, and how they are doing, to peers in every school across the world. Once, when children graduated high school, odds were good they would lose touch with the friends they had growing up. This wasn’t always a bad thing, especially for kids with reputations or kids who had been sorted into a role, or social position, that didn’t mirror who they felt they really were. With increased transparency comes higher levels of envy and unhappiness, as well as the death of any hiding spaces. How do you reinvent yourself when the original version lives online forever?
From my perspective, smartphones are squeezing creativity out of society, especially among younger generations. The Internet is analogous to junk food. It satisfies your appetite for 30 minutes, but an hour later you are hungry again. Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs once told a New York Times reporter that, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,”8 an opinion seconded by Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine: “We have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”9
Consider Russia, or China, where online media is controlled and monitored. The Russians and Chinese have no concept of a “perfect marriage,” nor can they easily access the films and television shows responsible for creating impossible expectations of happiness. Are these countries better or worse off? A lot of things are better imagined than seen. We may believe we want and deserve infinite amounts of data, but in truth, we can’t handle it, and it merely stirs up our appetites. That said, technology is not the problem: imbalance is.
What, you may wonder, did this jumble of observations and clues about American life have to do with a southern supermarket chain on the ropes, wrestling with local and online competition? A lot, in fact. It bears repeating that America has created a brand around concepts like “freedom” and “individuality.” America is a country, but it’s also a collection of ideas and aspirations. Yet in my experience, the very last thing the United States actually had was freedom, or even individuality. From the moment I entered the country, I saw sign after sign telling me I had to do this, or that, but that it was “for my own safety.” Please remove your shoes, belt and laptop for your own safety. The sidewalk is under construction for your own safety. Bottles of Purell hand-sanitizing lotions are situated every few feet at the airport for your own safety. Americans kept being told that they were free, but were they really? Was there any space in America to be different? With Lowes, I would give it my best shot.
A lot of the work I’ve done in the United States is centered in New York and Los Angeles, places that are hardly mirror images of the rest of America. Did I know, someone asked me later, that I was working not in the faster-paced East Coast, or the trendier, more appearance-oriented West Coast—did I know, in fact, that I was working in the American South? No: I knew only that I liked what I saw of North and South Carolina, and I liked the people, too. Without realizing it, when I came up with a set of new concepts for Lowes, I was responding to the fact that North Carolina resembles neither New York nor Los Angeles. I was responding instead to the gated communities, and the look-alike homes.
From my outsider’s perspective, many of the neighborhoods and gated residences I saw in North Carolina couldn’t help but remind me of Disneyland. The pathways were immaculate. Everything felt manicured. Each tree was planted a certain distance away from the next tree. There were no restaurants or shopping centers nearby. If you wanted to shop, or eat out, you got inside your car, and onto a highway. My Subtext Research revealed that the women I met cared less about the time they spent in their cars than they did about leaving the safety nets they called home. Distance wasn’t an issue; leaving the safe space was. In general, their lives as nonworking wives and mothers revolved around routines and rituals, with their cars becoming almost like small houses on wheels.
One of the first things I noticed as I made my way around the American South was the lack of commun
ity. There were no town squares. The downtowns were empty. What’s more, church attendance was down across the United States, a fact confirmed by numerous recent studies. In 2015, a Pew Survey of 35,000 adults revealed that the number of Americans who identified themselves as “Christian” was at its lowest point in history at 70.6 percent, 7 points lower than its 2007 figure of 78.4 percent, a decline happening all over the United States, including the Bible Belt.10 According to the New York Times, an increasing number of ex-Christians “have joined the rapidly growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated or ‘nones’: a broad category including atheists, agnostics and those who adhere to ‘nothing in particular.’”11 Added the Times, “There are few signs that the decline in Christian America will slow.” The essence of community had dispersed onto highways and into strip malls and shopping centers, or else it had migrated online onto social media. Americans, I knew, would travel miles to get a feeling of belonging and community—the same kinds of community, I might add, that I’d seen in the town squares of Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Yakutsk and Novosibirsk.
What defines a community? The answer I’ve come up with, which draws from my experiences in countries including Lebanon, New Zealand, Germany, Colombia and Italy, is this: communities come together in the face of conflict and disagreement. When North American tourists come home from a vacation in Europe, often the first story out of their mouth has to do with an incident of antagonism they observed. Parisians, for example, understand that unless they demand a certain cut of meat, or a ripe cheese, they will probably not get what they want. Europeans are comfortable with indignation and making a fuss. If, during a European vacation, Americans observe an altercation or an argument in a French marche or an Italian restaurant, they remember it. When other people are arguing, the crowd around them comes together as a community.
Again, Lowes was up against half-a-dozen food retailers, and it couldn’t compete with either the Internet or with Walmart and Target on prices. In what ways, then, could it compete? I’d gathered a notebook of clues about American culture, but when it came time to interview consumers inside their homes, a decisive fragment of small data came from the frogs adorning the home of a 52-year-old housewife and mother.
Frog plant holders. Frog door guards. Frog lawn figurines. Frogs half hidden behind bushes in the garden. Inside her house were frog doll holders, even a frog Scotch tape dispenser. Not only frogs, but other animals, too, stone or stuffed, ranging from koala bears to owls. After visiting nearly a dozen homes, it was clear that many of the women I’d interviewed had never quite outgrown their childhoods. They weren’t at all embarrassed about setting out a stuffed dog on their couch, or a teddy bear on their mantelpiece. One woman even kept Christmas lights and decorations strung and lit all year round.
After my work in Russia, I’d made it a habit to study refrigerator door magnets. Most American fridges had at least a couple. In contrast to Russian fridges, they served double-duty by pinning photos in place. In most, the photograph of my hostess had been taken a decade earlier, often during the first blush of marriage. Perhaps she and her groom were drinking from a single glass, with two straws. Or they were at Disneyland, with Mickey Mouse or Goofy or Cinderella behind them, or at the Grand Canyon, or in Florida or Los Angeles, relaxing by a hotel pool.
America reminded me of Russia in other ways, too—namely, the uncannily similar neighborhoods. The houses and communities in North Carolina were more upmarket, carefully choreographed versions of the ones I had seen across the Russian Far East. How different, after all, is a look-alike house from a look-alike apartment building? The spacing between the trees, the foliage, the homes and the walkways all followed the same emotional rules. Behind the walls of a gated community, conflict was rare, but so, too, was animation or spontaneity. In common with Russia, American children seldom play outdoors. Russia can use the excuse of cold weather, but in the United States, the daily torrent of bad news from televisions and smartphones leads most parents to believe that murder or abduction lies at the end of their driveways. In both countries, men escape. In Russia, men disappear on fishing boats weighed down with cases of vodka. In American, men go golfing.
In an era of pervasive solipsism, where we hear the continuous refrain that technology has unified the world as never before, community in America was vanishing, eroded by big-box stores, a homogenous landscape and the Internet. The American women I met were kind, generous people, but they seemed as isolated as the women I’d met in Russia. They spent most of their time inside their cars. They traveled in lockstep to malls and shopping centers whose density falsely replicated that of cities. Outside their marital and family lives, they never made physical contact with one another. Many were also preoccupied with their children’s food allergies. One mother I met had four children, each one with a different allergy, which meant she had to cook five separate meals every night. Fearing that their children might fall behind socially and academically, the mothers I met devoted so much time driving and coordinating their kids’ schedules that they had no time left for themselves, or for much of anything else, in fact.
How did this pertain to Lowes? On the basis of my Subtexting, I knew that many consumers were ambivalent about shopping there. Lowes was too “corporate,” some said. More than one woman told me that Lowes didn’t feel “local” enough. Many told me that Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods had more of a “family” feel. One man praised Lowes wine and beer selection, before telling me about a supermarket he’d been to once in Milwaukee that allowed customers to sip beer while they were shopping. Still, there seemed to be consensus around a single item. “One of the first things I smell when I go into Lowes is the rotisserie chicken,” one woman told me. “They have just come out of the oven. I buy one almost weekly.” Every customer I spoke to, it seemed, loved Lowes chicken, and not only its taste, either. Lowes time-stamped its broiled chickens so that shoppers could tell how long they had been sitting there.
From what I’d observed about the larger culture, Americans were in need of an escape, or reprieve, from the sameness of their lives. A current of tedium and familiarity runs through every culture, but the uniformity of the American shopping landscape had drained away an element of unexpectedness. As Paulo Coehlo wrote once, “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal.” No wonder Americans were so smitten with their smartphones, which gave them a simulacrum of stimulation that many of their physical environments lacked. Just as I’d done in Russia, in Lowes I needed to create an oasis, a destination for dreaming. If possible I would also restore a feeling of community that most Americans didn’t even realize they were missing.
In Mamagazin I’d created an oasis—a concept I would have never been able to come up with if I hadn’t traveled and worked in Saudi Arabia. That said, what did Russia have that many parts of America didn’t? Community. Despite the coldness, and the hardships of daily life, cities like Krasnoyarsk and Samara still had a strong sense of solidarity. I’d felt it in the courtyard chess matches, in the sights and sounds of Russian children playing outdoors, captivated by an object as simple as a rock. Spending time in Russia was, in some ways, like glimpsing an earlier version of the American small town before the arrival of online “connectivity.”
As the Internet slowly penetrated the more rural areas of Russia, I knew that the community feeling I’d witnessed was probably on its way out. The question was, could I somehow bring it back to the American South, a region where community had been splintered by cars, highways, deserted downtowns and heads bent in seeming prayer over smartphones? Could I help reverse the fortunes of a southeastern supermarket by appropriating a slowly vanishing concept from a communist country where freedom, at least as Americans understood and defined the term, was restricted?
Before I did anything else, I first had to create within Lowes what I call a Permission Zone. This is a term I use to refer to a moment, or an environment, that allows consumers to “enter” an alternate
emotional state. A Permission Zone can be literal, like a zoo, a ferry ride or a movie theater, or even a fast-food restaurant where we eat the foods we generally avoid. (Little wonder that fast-food companies have had no success selling salads or fruit, as the impulse to eat fast food is all about entering a Permission Zone where we permit ourselves to gorge on greasy, un-nutritious food.) Five Guys, for example, is a highly successful hamburger chain with 1,000 locations that showcase bags of potatoes leading from the entrance up to the counter—giving customers “permission” to eat French fries, even though fries are packed with carbohydrates, and the frozen potatoes for sale at the supermarket are about as unhealthy as any food on the market.
A Permission Zone can be linguistic, too. If you’ve ever sat in a meeting, or had a conversation with someone you don’t know well, you probably remember the first time one of you swears. Without even realizing it, you’ve just granted the other people in the room permission to use profanity. You can almost feel the unbuckling of formality in the room, and from that point on, everyone at the table will begin swearing.
The Permission Zone I needed to create in Lowes came as a direct result of the clues I’d picked up about American culture. After all, I kept coming back to that one word, fear. Americans believed they lived in the freest nation on earth, but did they? When was the last time most Americans felt genuinely free? The answer: when they were children.
The Somatic Marker Hypothesis is a term coined by neuroscientist and author Antonio Damasio in his 1994 book Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. In it, Damasio describes in this hypothesis a mechanism wherein our brains modify and bias our emotional responses to decision making. If you’ve ever placed your hand on a hot stove and got burned, your brain remembers that moment. But rather than putting your hand on the same stove every night from that point on, and hoping that the outcome will be somehow different, we become cautious around ovens and burners. Credit this behavior to the somatic marker in our brains that permanently marks our experience, using an equation that goes like this: hot oven = the probability of pain. Some somatic markers are conscious, others unconscious, but most are forged from long-buried past experiences. I tell audiences, for example, that the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, comprise a negative somatic marker. We all remember where we were when it happened and who we were with. But do we remember what we had for dinner on our birthdays last year? That’s the difference between a somatic marker and a typical memory.