I find him interesting in his amorphous and fluid form and interpretation of art, connecting what we think of as “Art” with unconvention and with blogging and microblogging (i.e. Twitter and very brief forms of connecting online), combining his artistic impulses with his gift for words, writing pithy and prophetic bits. That’s a kind of artistry I greatly admire, especially in the face of the Chinese State And All Its Men. There is quite a difference–and a kind of bold bravery I cannot imagine–between being an artist in a free and functioning democracy and being an outspoken artist in a state which does not value or embrace free speech, open access to information, or the fullest extent of self-expression–even if it means criticizing the men upstairs.

In his Time interview he was asked “What would you like to see in China?” This was part of his brilliantly explained answer:

We need clear rules to play the game. We need to have respect for the law. If you play a chess game but after two or three moves you change the rules, how can people play with you? Of course you will win, but after 60 years you will still be a bad chess player because you never meet anyone who can challenge you. What kind of game is that? Is it interesting? I’m sure the people who put me in jail, they’re so tired. This game is not right, but who is going to say, ‘Hey, let’s play fairly’?

I’ve been studying China, Chinese politics, language, culture and history, for more than six years now, and my own thoughts on its political system have shifted at times between the two most polar ends of the argument: that either the “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics” official plan has merit, is working, can improve and continue; or that China will inevitably give way democracy because it has already given much up to a free market economic system, and its people still hold memories of the extreme poverty and problems that stemmed from early plans in the early years after the Communist Revolution. People–around the world–have spent much time waxing on the future of China’s political system. No one has explained its crucial fissure in its system so well as Ai Weiwei, himself a son of China, and the actual son of a revolutionary poet.

“Shop ’til you drop” probably isn’t what Mao Zedong had in mind during the years he was in power, as Saporito points out in his piece on the Chinese middle class, a spending class that precariously faces what could wind up saving the global economy–or busting it even further.

What China is planning is a shift away from export-based industry to a consumer-spending based system, but it will not be easy and there are plenty of potential hiccups involved in fundamentally shifting an economy of 1.7 billion people. But the middle class of that country, which they are projecting to be 70 percent of the population by 2020, could be the saviors of the global economic structure; they have immense capacity for spending, a huge group like that.

Western- and Chinese-based companies combine to create the giant metropoles that dot China. This is downtown Zhengzhou, whose population was 8 million in 2007.

Companies have known for years that the developing world was an important place for them to seek new markets for their goods. Couple that with a recession across the West and other developed nations, and you see a kind of exodus now, towards those booming, growing, expansive markets–the new consumers who have their eyes on fancy goods. Gap, the American jeans company, is closing twenty percent of its U.S. stores and tripling the number it has in China.

Saporito’s most memorable bit:

If successful, the shift to consumer spending will take a good chunk of the weight of the global economy off the shoulders of American consumers and make China a gotta-be-there market for everything from video games to surgical tools to potato chips. “This generation, these strivers, they will be the saviors of the global economy,” says Tim Minges, chairman of the greater China region for PepsiCo, which is pouring billions into China in anticipation of that growth. “I really do think the Chinese middle class will be like the U.S. baby boomers.”

I, for one, am putting my faith in this Chinese middle class, as the new version of the U.S.’s baby boomers, to save us all.

Shopping with other study abroad girls at an 8-story mall in Shanghai. (We were excited because they actually took credit/debit cards in Shanghai.)

I decided that if I were to produce a pair of jeans, start to finish, I would charge the prospective buyer $2,000, at least. Obviously, I should not go into the jean-making-or-selling business. But it was a stark reminder that there are plenty of women–and also men and children–whose days are defined by pumping out pair after pair to sell to hungry consumers around the world for amazingly low prices, considering the labor. I cannot tell you how many times, during my years in mall retail sales associateship, I heard parents complain about the cost of jeans. They were especially mad when the jeans  were bleach-washed and “destroyed” (lots of holes and patches, in other words), as they could not believe they were paying more money for something that has been ripped up. As someone who has sat at home and pulled denim threads out of jeans until my fingers bled to get the same look in DIY form, I often held back from pointing out the obvious to them: someone has put many hours of their life into creating this pair of runway-ready jeans for you or your teenager. If you want, buy the regular pair for a whole $20 less, and take them home and try to do it yourself.

There are no new revelations to be had in what I am saying. Sweatshops and the low wages of garment industry workers have been well-publicized over the last twenty years or so, and I do not pretend to have some answer. As long as people need clothes to wear, there will be this problem in the world. But the important thing to remember is that it was not so long ago when the women of the United States were the ones subjected to the long hours, low pay, and back-breaking conditions. It is part of the phenomena of developing nations, that a generation will work very hard in factories to provide better lives for their children, the whole theory being that they can eventually move up a notch in the world. One of the most important lessons about places like Lowell, Massachusetts, which was defined by its industrial factories and garment producers in the nineteenth century, is that those conditions, the ones we thank our grandparents for improving for us–have not disappeared. They have simply relocated. Another group of people carries the burden today, producing clothing for the masses.

Earlier this semester, we read The Lowell Experiment in one of my classes, in which ethnographer Cathy Stanton examines the relationship between historians, a post-industrial city, and the National Park that the city is today. Lowell is still a real, inhabited city, but it is also a historical subject, and a place in the American industrial past that serves as a ground for social scientists to really examine many aspects of the course of American history over the last couple hundred years. What Stanton does the best is remind us that historians do not exist in a vacuum, but are, just by going to a place and trying to learn about it, affecting the results they will find. The relationship a historian has to her subject cannot be entirely removed from the results she will present to her peers and community.

And the other key thing Stanton brings home is that Lowell’s history cannot exist one its own, either. People who visit the city-slash-national-park have to be confronted with the notion that these factories, just because they are no longer booming here, does not mean they are gone, that we have cured the world of the plight of the factory worker. She points out one poignant moment on a tour she was on, when the tour guide strayed from his script for a moment and did what Stanton had concluded had not been happening in this place: he connected past and present. His statement:

I want to say, this machine isn’t just history. When we built this historical park we had to travel around the world to buy looms. Looms like this are operating as we speak somewhere around the world. It’s kind of neat to think about that. And there’s no right or wrong answer, there’s no easy answer to it, but we can go to Wal-Mart or A.J. Wright or any store, really, and buy really cheap clothing. And what’s the alternative? Paying a lot for your clothes? We all work, we all try and and pay the best we can for our cloth. But the reason we can get cheap cloth is because someone around the world is working on these looms, and looms not unlike what we have today. A few years ago, Kathy Lee Gifford was in trouble for using child labor on machines just like this. So it’s just something to think about.

One other thing I like to sort of think about is the word “labor.” It means “to suffer” in Latin. And when you think about the suffering that goes into making cloth, back in history and even to the present day, it’s just something to think about. We wear the clothes, sometimes we don’t think especially how hard the person who built or made the clothes worked to produce that. And all that labor, all the suffering that went into building this city, and the results, both good and bad. Just think about that a little bit. And I’ll be talking about more of the positive consequences on the way back. But on a hot, sticky day, with this loud machine and the lint flying in the air, it’s pretty easy to picture how miserable it would be to work there. (p. 61)

Stanton says it was a stunning moment, where suddenly each person on the tour was confronted with “the phantom figure of the Malaysian or Pakistani mill girl who was laboring–suffering–so that we could buy a t-shirt for a small fraction of what it would have cost to produce in a developed country.”

The tour guide was obviously taking a risk, and chose his words wisely, speaking softly around the issue but offering no illusions about what he was referencing. And, the author reported, the other people on the tour, while a bit shaken, seemed to be able to handle it. “This is precisely the goal of progressive public history,” she says, “to seize such small opportunities and compound them into larger visions of the process we are all a part of.”

My own sewing quarters, where I am allowed the gift of being able to create what I want, as a hobby rather than a laborious job. I am truly grateful.

I was reminded of all of this not because I hemmed a pair of jeans–although that brought the message of labor and frustration home personally–I was reminded, really, by the remembrance, recently, of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, which 100 years ago went up in flames on a Saturday morning in March, killing more than 100 workers, mostly women and children, due to a shoddy fire escape and other unsafe conditions for its workers. Supervisors would lock their workers into the factory’s floors, on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the ten-story building, and so when the fire erupted, many people were left to jump out the windows–usually to their death. In 1911, in an industry of extremes that was subject to the whims of the fashion trends, work of this nature was often relegated to new immigrants seeking to improve their lives. Their average work weeks were 84 hours. These were the victims of the fire, one of the worst workplace disasters in American history. The tragedy of that day, which you can explore in a podcast and recreation of the morning here, reminds us again that such circumstances have not gone away–they have only gone beyond our national borders. It is a kind of labor many of us can only imagine.

It has not entirely left the United States, nor Lowell. Immigrants still hold those jobs, today.

The World’s Jason Margolis did a news story on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and its galvanization of the garment industry. (I heard it on Jeb Sharp’s How We Got Here history podcast.) He reports exactly the thing that the Lowell tour guide was imparting on his listening visitors, but in more specific way, and with direct connection to the conditions that existed in the Shirtwaist Factory in 1911.

“Effectively what we have done is exported our sweatshops and exported our factory fires,” said Robert Ross at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. And it’s as if the 1911 conditions had been lifted up by an evil hand and dropped into Bangladesh.”

According to the Bangladeshi government’s Fire Service and Civil Defense Department, 414 garment workers were killed in at least 213 factory fires between the years 2006 and 2009. Last year, 191 people were killed in Bangladesh in a reported 20 incidents, according to Ross’ research. Last December, a fire killed at least 25 people in a garment factory there.

“And the pattern is disturbingly uniform,” said Ross. “The shops are often in high rise buildings, just like the Triangle. The pattern is that an electrical fire starts, and then without adequate, or any fire escapes, without sprinkler systems, the workers surge to get out. And in factory after factory, the newspapers report locked gates and locked doors. It’s a horrific duplication of what we earlier experienced.”

Even while we may not have answers about these issues, it is important that we be aware, as we put on our clothes each morning, that simply because the factory is farther away does not mean the work has improved any in the last one hundred years. After my frustrating night last night, my hat goes off to all of them, in every factory corner of the world. I hope we can begin to change out outlooks and our consumer mindsets, or at least improve our awareness as a whole, so that we can move towards improvements in the lives of all garment industry workers, not just the ones in the United States.

Historian Alison Isenberg’s 2004 book Downtown America: A history of the place and the people who made it is in fact a testament to the people, more than anything, who are responsible for the good and bad and the complicated personality of U.S. cities today. Oftentimes the city holds a nostalgic identity for people, a loss of something bygone, a sort of deflated self that holds some sort of hard-to-define sadness. Isenberg reminds us however, that in considering our efforts today at defining our downtown economic areas and “Main Streets,” we must recognize that “the democratic, melting-pot downtown has been an evolving ideal, not a past accomplished reality from which Americans have strayed.” Certainly there was never a democratic reality in the segregated shopping districts of the early and mid twentieth century, yet it is oftentimes portrayed or revered in memoriam as having been a free-wheeling, glorious environment. That may have been so, but for a very selective group of individuals; for everyone else, it has a much more complex definition, a much less rosy spot in memory.

A view of Peachtree Street in a much older Atlanta. Things were often removed in these artists' renditions of a city downtown, in order to project an image of the place it could be, an ideal. Isenberg's book is full of amazing images and comparison shots on this and other subjects regarding the American city.

This is not a criticism of either the 1920s-50s, nor of the most recent efforts, either by Isenberg or myself. Rather it is part of her argument that it has been and will continue to be the people who construct the cityscape, both literally in physical development, and ideally in how they invision their city and its image.

It got me thinking of another study on the American city, or one in particular–the public history project that has resulted Lowell, Massachusetts as the subject of an entire National Park, and the recent book on its history. One of the questions at the core of Cathy Stanton’s whole study of the city is whether or not economic development and interest is compatible with public historians’ goals of preserving and interpreting a city’s past and its meaning in American history. Both sides can be argued, I am not here to answer this, but this same thought came back many times while I read about the larger developments of the economy of “downtown America” over the years, and the many vested interests that laid at the heart of each decision within a city’s planning. Most often, it was businessmen, investors, retailers, and real estate appraisers who were making the biggest decisions, but in the wake of urban renewal projects and other controversial methods of “cleaning up the downtown,” historians and preservationists had their say as well, spanning much of the city’s recent past (1980s to the present).

Most compelling to me is the way in which every vested party uses the past to their own ends, and how many of the symbols of the past appear very differently depending on who is looking at them. This was most explicit in Isenberg’s description of the 1997-98 exhibit “Main Street Five-and-Dimes,” which was on display in Washington, D.C. at the National Building Museum. The exhibit’s interpretation says nothing about the enormous effects of integration of the downtown, and how many of the department stores had not been serving African American urban citizens. She uses the comment book to show just how much people really did want to talk about the effects of a separated society on the downtown, even if the curators only wanted to show nostalgic “thingamabobs” and enlist positive images of the way things used to be.

Some of those are truly thought-provoking, so much so that I will post the entire excerpt a little later on. But it reminded me again of how much specific images and symbols from the past are used to many different ends. To investors and retailers, symbols of the past utilize memories, or perceived memories, to add significance to their project. To some white citizens, like this guestbook commentators, it was a vision of a “happier, kinder world,” while to other less-than-subtle commentators, it was a positive memory of “‘whites only’ drinking fountains–the way it should be.” To black visitors, it was that “some change is good,” and that these old department store must be considered in the wider context of the times they were in, including the fact that while they no longer exist, life itself has in fact gotten better for many people who live around the same places the stores were located. One guest book writer agreed that yes, it was a look back on a simpler time. “Simpler perhaps but was it better?” Indeed, a more complex interpretation that gives us more to consider.

Surely I have gone past making a concise point. But my intention was just to unite the discussion in the Lowell Experiment about what history means to certain people while having wholly different definitions to others, and trying to reconcile every group and perspective when your goal is to consider the larger narrative of an entire community, or city, or even a larger metro area. In Lowell as well, part of the complicated story was often the notion of history on an upward ride, that we have surely improved our lives from those of our grandparents, that we no longer suffer in factories. And in the case of Lowell, residents could tout its more recent past as having also given this same improvement to new immigrant groups. One of the corkscrews thrown into its cohesive interpretive plan has been that complicated truth that this reality has really only moved to another part of the world, and that there are people in other countries who would like this to someday be their story too. That is something that Lowell has recently included in their story, making it altogether more complicated and global, but also reflecting much more accurately the world we live in, as one that is connected to the past, rather than separate and removed from it.

This trajectory is indeed a labyrinth of complicated stories, controversies, diverse groups with specific vested interests both in their past and present lives or portrayals, and when it comes down to it, questionable whether it truly is an upward climb of improvement at all points in time. Almost certainly it is not.

But that doesn’t get Isenberg down. “It remains to be seen which constellation of values and participants will chart the course of downtown real estate and urban commerce in the twenty-first century,” she says, bringing it back around to her book’s economic focus. But, during the twentieth century, “Main Street [was] a place to teach, debate, exclude, fantasize, argue,  include, make new dreams, and visit old ones.” Maybe we start there to find the best way to write inclusive, thoughtful histories of our city spaces, and of the communities that live in them. Lowell is certainly one prickly example of this, are there will surely be more.

(The colorful quotation that is the title of this post is by Isenberg, found on page 313 of her book.)

Walt and Mickey Mouse, watching over the Magic Kingdom in Disney World

Mike Wallace’s Mickey Mouse History: And Other Essays on American Memory earns its title from the chapter on Walt Disney’s and, later, Disney Enterprises, Inc.’s interpretation and execution of the historical narrative, in “Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World.” Walt Disney’s approach to the history that appears in the Magic Kingdom echoed the historical interpretations of the consensus-inspired 1950s, but translated into a theme park, took an extreme step further for the sake it tidying up the past for visitors. Says Wallace, his “approach to the past was… not to reproduce it, but to improve it.” The excuse, that it’s only a theme park, not a museum, hides below the fact that many may never know the difference. People who take in the past via a Disney presentation file this away in their brain as part of history and as a bit of knowledge to recall later, promulgating  misinformation, and making it harder for people to accept more accurate histories when they are confronted with them.

Disney's famous audioanimatronics, here inside EPCOT's Spaceship Earth ride, which recounts a version of the "history of communication and technology."

EPCOT has an array of complications all its own in terms of historic interpretation, being–as it has long been–backed by corporate sponsors who at their best explore the challenges and triumphs of a world that is ever marching forward and improving technologically, and at its worst, ignoring the fact that man’s technology has not always had positive impacts on the progression of mankind. (And it would, of course, never be the corporation’s fault; they would instead be the ones seeking to find solutions to problems). Each pavilion stands as a tribute to technology and the future, as a permanent World’s Fair. Then across the waters lies the World Showcase, where countries’ marketable goods are for sale and each destination has been designed to demonstrate the distinct features of its culture.

As Wallace points out, “all historical interpretations [done by Disney Enterprises] are necessarily selective in their facts, but [in EPCOT] the silences are more profoundly distorting. Consider, for example, that in all EPCOT’s depictions of the past as a continuous expansion of man’s possibilities through technology, there is not a word about war. Nothing about the critical impetus it provided through ages to scientific development, nor about the phenomenal destruction such “development” wrought.”

Two other things struck me about the interpretation of the past that we find all around us in a Disney park. First, it presents history as unidirectional, that in fact there was no point that the trajectory could have taken another path. “There were never any forks on the path of Progress,” he writes, “never any sharp political struggles over which way to go.” The other fault in the clean, unoffensive, and vacation-ready historic package is that it makes the past into a “pleasantly nostalgic memory, now so completely transcended by the modern corporate order as to be irrelevant to contemporary life.” We can consume the stories so long as they entertain us, and move on to the next thing. “This diminishes our capacity to make sense of our world through understanding how it came to be,” says Wallace.

When the only versions of history people encounter are commodities–theme parks, but also docudramas, Hollywood movies, and even historic fiction–I fear it becomes the norm for them, deepening the chasm between people and their pasts and their understanding of the world. This seems to be OK for people when they can draw intelligent conclusions and have a grounded base of knowledge, but it can by no means be ignored as an insignificant influence on a people’s vision of their history, in the midst of a thousand museums that don’t draw nearly as many visitors.

For me it is something to ponder on a personal level as well, because, while I can dig through the cleanliness and disregard the stereotypes in the narratives, I highly doubt that is the mental lens that everyone else brings with them to Disney World. And on the other hand, I love the magic of Disney World. Far beyond the history that entrenches it, there is the imagination, the dazzling effects and the ability it has to transport you into another world–not to mention, back a little bit into your childhood. It is a place I will surely take my children someday, although what I do with the historic interpretations and how I explain them might be a little different than the approach others take.

One of my most favorite Disney pairs: Mary Poppins and Burt.

Leaving no opportunity to capitalize on my generation untapped, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios created The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to make the snow-capped shops of Hogsmeade and the flavor of Butterbeer quite real. I waited six months after its opening to make the trip down to Orlando to see Hogwarts castle for myself, giving the crazies enough time to see it first. This had the added benefit of wintertime, which meant the fake snow looked much more believable than I imagine it did to those July visitors, cursing the heat and peering wistfully at the white stuff. When I dipped into the Three Broomsticks for some shepherd’s pie, it was an unusually chilly day in Florida, and I was grateful for the warmth of the fire and the cozy, dark pub atmosphere.

I devoured the first three books in the Harry Potter series in a matter of weeks, checking them out in succession from the Shuman Middle School library (Savannah, Georgia). I was twelve. When Tom Riddle reveals his true identity to Harry inside the Chamber of Secrets, I was absolutely blown away. I have a vivid memory of laying on my bed, flipping the page over and back again, taking in the revelation that Tom Riddle was the younger version, the memory, of the man who would become Lord Voldemort. I had never in my life read such literature, with so many wonderful twists.

Fast forward to 2007, when the seventh and final book was published, and we Harry Potter kids knew much more about the arch-villain of the series. We knew he and Harry shared a strange connection, and we were about to find out just how big. I recall feeling so anxious imagining how J. K. Rowling would end the series, as pundits predicted both Harry’s death and survival. Harry Potter’s death would be the better literary ending, and would certainly solidify his place as hero and martyr. But I honestly didn’t know if she could do that and survive (maybe literally) the angry fan backlash. Yet the option of Harry surviving seemed much too… fairy tale, and depressingly “happy ending,” kids’ story cop-out.

I won’t spoil the ending, but Rowling blew me away. In the midst of some very, very high expectations, as well as many anticipating a let-down, she wrote an ending that went so far beyond anything I could have imagined, I almost couldn’t believe it. At the end of it all, I loved the series even more, more than I thought was possible. Even with some of the predictions spoiling certain aspects, and with all of the speculation surrounding it, she managed to surprise and entertain, and bring plenty of tears. She certainly proved Severus Snape to be one of the most interesting literary characters in the modern era.

Without dragging this too far into a nerdy tangent, I simply felt awed and blessed to be able to walk through a city that had existed only in my imagination since that twelve-year-old girl laid on her bed and was transported. Eating one of Hagrid’s rock cakes and visiting Zonko’s Joke Shop were utterly blissful, and I was an unabashedly happy consumer of the created worlds that thrive on imagination in Orlando.

Strolling through the wizarding Hogsmeade

I tried regular butterbeer, frozen butterbeer, and the Hogsmeade house brew (that one was actually beer).

Hogwarts Castle, where you cannot bring a camera, but where you can visit Dumbledore's office and chat with the famed talking portraits.

The twelve-year-old in me nearly bursting out

Because men aren’t angels, they lie to each other, sell each other faulty or unsafe products to make a buck for themselves, or any number of unwholesome things. Thinking more about what I posted yesterday, and the role of government in improving our lives and standards of living, I have to endorse many of the things it does for us. The government cannot be limited to, at its most bare, a military protection from outside forces, because we need protection from ourselves more often. I recalled something I’d read about a year ago, from the political commentary section of Reddit. It makes a strong point:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to ny house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

Let’s give the powers some credit…

Sean Wilentz, in the Fresh Air interview, comments on that notion, of the government always being seen as a threat to liberty, to a paranoid degree. “What are we left with? We’re left with no government at all. It’s basically, it would end up with, a kind of dog-eat-dog world, mitigated I suppose by religious charity; it’s a view of America that’s just un-American.”

(Since this comment was not the original work of the person who posted it, here is  the link to the commentary on Reddit, posted by nailz1000. This is the source of this quotation. He notes there that this is from the Laissez Faire subforum on Something Awful.)

If the east and west coasts lead the trends, then middle-America picks them up a few seasons later, from the mall or from any department store, in their homogeneous packages, and with the stores using the same marketing techniques in Boise, ID, Topeka, KS, and Charlotte, NC. One group of people decide what should be sold and how it should be marketed, and in an era when people are spending less time buying high-prices clothes while munching on Auntie Anne’s pretzel bites, this is an obviously outdated approach.

The jean wall at the end of the day during back-to-school season

Buy jeans, get a shirt half off!

Spend $50, get $10 off!

All shirts, jewelery, shoes (insert your product here) BUY ONE GET ONE HALF OFF!

In the retail world, that last one is an actual term, BOGO, which might sound nicer if it was actually “buy-one-get-one,” except that it usually means “buy-one-get-one-half-off.”

I was never a fool walking into the mall, but after three years working in that grinding place, you learn all the tricks. You’d think people would realize that they’re still spending more when they do the BOGO thing, and sometimes, if you are looking for two shirts or two necklaces, that can be handy. In most cases, people should more likely keep their wallet shut and bee-line it for the door– especially when managers are training their sales associates to get you to add on items to your purchase, apply for a credit card, and even track you down in the fitting room to suggest additional items you might like to go along with the lot you’ve already hauled in there. It is oft-repeated to associates that the customer is three times more likely to buy something once they’ve tried it on.

And an hour or two later, it's ready for another day of shoppers.

How refreshing, then, that some big-box department stores have finally admitted that maybe there is a better way to reach their nation-wide markets than by offering the same exhausted polo shirts and ripped jeans and bejeweled belts to everyone. From yesterday’s article in the New York Times:

After decades of acquiring, consolidating and centralizing, the department store chain is rediscovering — and financially exploiting — its multiple local roots, advancing a trend that is quickly being adopted by other retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Best Buy.

It is a lesson many companies overlooked in the last 30 years as they rolled smaller stores into huge national brands, and headquarters mandated what the outlets in Biloxi or Boise should sell.

But years of economic turmoil for the retail industry have helped refresh memories. While many national retailers continue to see sales declines in a sour economy, Macy’s says its first full year of “going local” has helped increase sales significantly and “lifted the entire Macy’s performance,” according to its chairman and chief executive, Terry J. Lundgren.

Hallelujah, someone is paying attention to the markets. It does retailers no good anymore to continue to push from above the same tired tactics that were in place before the recession of circa 2008. Instead of desperately reaching with ever-greater numbers of promotions to try to get that same product out the door, perhaps the product must be changed, be more in tune with the market. People want to buy things that are specific to their area–like clothing based on school colors, and climate-appropriate jackets, for example–and money will always be spent on things like that.

In the case of these Macy’s stores, the article points specifically to the Cumberland Mall in Atlanta, and their expansion in the last year of their hat department, whose sales have doubled accordingly, as they sought to give their southern and urban market what it wants.

“We have research information, and we think about household income and population size, but I think it’s much more accurate to have people living in the marketplace tell you, ‘This is who’s shopping in my store,’ ” Mr. Lundgren said.

I always thought it was silly to carry the same coats and sweaters at the Georgia September floorset switch as in the Ohio season switch, when it’s still so hot out; accordingly, people in Cincinnati are not looking for bathing suits in January (nor, really, are Atlantans, but even less so for the mid-westerners). Yet this is taking the whole approach to the American market to a new level of regional consideration, for the better. There are plenty of arguments out there for “going local” for environmental reasons; how about going local for the sake of making a bigger buck on your market? When you have a strong East Asian community, offer more extra smalls; when you have a large Indian clientele, tweak your jewelry spread to include more gold items, less silver.

From the same article:

“In prior years, with the recession, it became all about cost-cutting no matter what,” said Esteban Bowles, a retail consultant with A. T. Kearney. “Now companies are seeing the light and looking for the rebound.”

If my years folding clothes at the mall taught me anything, it was that the whole bottom-line, make-every-last-dollar-we-can mindset is just as prevalent as you hear, and those retailers, they’re all fighting–viciously–to win those economically wounded customers from each other. What hurts the most for sales associates is that they get grief, and pressure, from their managers, who get it from their regional managers, who get it from district- and national-level bosses. Everyone is trying to illustrate that they have what it takes to make money in retail, but maybe they need to start all over with their definitions of “retail.” People will always need to buy things that they need and that appeal to them. Now, start from there.

The communal courtyard shared by several families

This third one sprung up in my mind as I arrived in Beijing with a study abroad group in May 2007, and I even got to see one of these tight-knit and close-quartered communities myself, with part of what I’m sure was a choreographed tour for tourists. This didn’t matter so much to me, as the hutong was the most charming thing I saw in the capital city, and I even made their rapid disappearance the subject of a paper for one of my classes while I was there. (Here’s a post from my first encounter with the hutong.)

Unfortunately, the story has only gotten worse since Johnson’s reporting, and since my visit three years ago. Government and business developers see the single-level, “dangerous” housing as an obstacle in the way of economic growth in the city, as things can be built upwards and sold as commercial space for much higher prices than any residential buildings could garner. What acres do becomes private homes will land in the price range of millionaires, out of reach to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who grew up on that same ground.

A bright and shiny paint job on one of the areas inside the Forbidden City, the old home of the emperor that is now a tourist site

“Historic” in the eyes of the commercial and governmental developers means razing the dilapidated building that has been neglected for half a century and replacing it with an “authentic” facsimile, with upturned eaves painted classic Chinese colors: reds, golds, greens. Qianmen, a fabled shopping district in the center of the city that has been replaced with a swanky doppelganger, is mourned by urban planning professor Yao Yuan in a July 20 article in the New York Times. “The renovation of Qianmen wasn’t about preserving history, but about creating a fake Hollywood version of it,” he said.

Shopping center in Shanghai

I’m not here to pass judgment or even complain, really, because some of those modern amenities made my visit more comfortable, and surely improves the living conditions and salaries of many of China’s urban dwellers. But as many others have asked before me, at what cost are these things forming? Is a newly-built shopping center doing the people of Beijing much more good than its previous shopping center? Is it really a part of the city’s history that could not have been preserved more carefully from the start? Many of these areas, deemed “dangerous” by the government, were named as such in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which means they were slated for demolition or at least known to be in need of renovation and preservation for nearly two decades by now.

Many of these areas did not survive to see the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I hope there are people in charge who will listen more carefully to the preservationists and historians both domestically and internationally who have been offering their advice on the ever-vanishing character of the city, and I hope what little is left of the city’s pre-modern composition can survive. I hope this for the sake of outsiders who visit, but more so for the sake of its own people.

Newly constructed buildings, complete with Starbucks and westerners

Part of the program focused on what Google has become, beyond a search engine, in people’s lives. The guys interviewed pointed out that people, in the privacy of their homes, ask Google things they many times won’t ask their spouses, friends, pastors, doctors, lawyers: domestic abuse, STDs, sexual interests, pregnancy scares, bomb-building… I mean, think about it. It’s the non-judging friend with all the answers.

Except, as the Google reps also pointed out, that creates a new challenge along with all the other uncertainties posed by the digital age: how much of this is private between Google servers and execs and their users, and how much is fair game for investigators, lawyers, families, and other interested parties? Google made a firm stand earlier this year against the Chinese government, no longer acquiescing to censor internet searches made within the country’s “great Chinese firewall” on its search engine; this is a victory for information dissemination and access. But when the government wants information on your online profile, on what you’re searching, it becomes–if possible–even more complex. I find this a fascinating topic. And personally, I don’t know if it’s an entirely bad thing that there is some accountability placed on people for the things they search for on the web.

I really liked the idea of asking the butler... I used Ask.com during its heyday.

Every time I Google something, which most often most recently has been regarding hairstyles and hair colors, I think back on the idea of the search engine and how it has created an imaginary friend for each of us, one that we feel very comfortable asking really random things, and who we expect to give us advice and answers. And pretty often, it does.