Odds and Ends (5)

stores as art, jungle primaries and official truth

I get an idea for a post, start it, put it aside to see if more ideas accumulate around it. If they don’t then eventually, when I have enough too short posts, I put them together and post them.

Stores as Art

It was a little before nine in the morning, the cab for the airport was at 10:30 and my daughter needed a new pair of headphones, the old ones having died. I called a local electronics chain; the recorded message said they opened at ten. I called Fry’s. The voice at the other end of the phone informed me that they had opened at eight that morning. She sounded mildly surprised that I would ask.

While trying to decide which of ninety-seven different models of headphone to buy, I was also contemplating the nature of Fry’s. My conclusion was that Fry’s was best understood as a work of art. It combined an elaborate variety of features, from the hours it keeps to the flashing lights that notify you that a checkout clerk is free to the junk food in the checkout aisle, from the selection of goods to the décor — my local Fry’s flaunted an ancient Egyptian theme — all designed to convey a single consistent feel, appeal to a particular sort of customer.

In the case of Fry’s, an electronics supermarket, the target was geeks. The whole ensemble was designed to make geeks, technophiles, feel at home, feel that this is their place. To fully explain how they do it I would probably have to be an artist capable of creating a similar work myself and I’m not. But I was enough of a geek to recognize what they are doing and admire their skill in doing it.

Fry’s, alas, was a casualty of the pandemic,¹ but it is not the only example. If this piece were being written by my friend Steve Landsberg he would probably cite Wegman’s, a supermarket chain in northern New York state.² Steve can go on at some length about the MegaWegman stores that are the stars of the chain; he has been known to argue that their existence is a sufficient reason to live in that part of the country.

The Berkeley Bowl is nearer to hand. If I want quinces for a medieval Arabic recipe I have to grow them myself. If I lived fifty miles further north I could walk over to the Berkeley Bowl and have my choice among several different qualities and varieties of quinces, half of a dozen of persimmons, eight varieties of sugar, ten of mangoes. I doubt there is any customer who takes advantage of more than a small fraction of the exotic ingredients but their range makes it a mecca for cooks.

They have the best selection of everything grocer related that I have ever seen out of any store anywhere. (Store review on Yelp)

Then there is Costco. We go every two or three weeks to stock up on a handful of specific things but, at least for me, half the point is to browse the free samples and look at a variety of things I have no intention of buying.

There are many other examples — Apple stores surely qualify. In each case someone with artistic abilities much superior to mine has created an ensemble, a combination of aesthetics, products, marketing, that sends a consistent message. Properly viewed it is a new art form, one of considerable depth and subtlety.

The Jungle Primary

Most states have separate primary elections for the different parties. The winner of the Republican primary is the Republican candidate, the winner of the Democratic primary the Democratic candidate, and the two run against each other in the election.

California, for state offices, uses a different system, a jungle primary. All candidates for an office compete against each other; the two who get the most votes will be on the ballot for the general election. Since California is a heavily Democratic state, the result can be, often is, two Democrats running against each other.

At first glance this feels unfair to Republican voters who do not have a Republican candidate to vote for. Looked at more carefully, it gives Republican voters in California more of a say in the final outcome than if they had their own primary and their own candidate. The voters split about 60/40, judged by the latest presidential election, so if there was a Republican candidate in a statewide election he would almost always lose. The winning candidate would get nominated by winning the support of a majority of the Democratic primary voters and the Democratic nomination would almost guarantee his election so he would have no need to appeal to Republican voters.

With a jungle primary, in contrast, the votes of Republicans matter. They matter in the primary if they are willing to vote for the Democrat they dislike less, and they matter in the election. If there are two Democrats running, the one who better appeals to Republicans can combine all of their votes plus a minority of Democratic votes to win the election. That makes it in the interest of one or both candidates to tailor their position to attract Republican votes. In the rare case when the Democratic incumbent is sufficiently unpopular or the Republican sufficiently popular to give the Republican a chance of winning a statewide race,³ the Republican will come in first or second in the primary and so get on the ballot.

The only effect in the other direction that occurs to me is that the Republicans don’t have an opportunity to use the election to get attention to their candidate’s views.

Salt, Official Truth, and the New York Times

Some years ago the New York Times published an op-ed on the subject of salt.⁴ Its thesis was, first, that we are being told by authoritative sources that we ought to consume less salt, second, that there is not and never has been adequate scientific support for that claim, and third that there is now evidence suggesting that the official advice is not merely mistaken but dangerous, that reducing salt consumption to the recommended level might well be bad for one’s health.

What struck me about the piece was not its contents — I had seen reports in the past on evidence that reducing salt consumption was bad for one’s health — but where I was seeing it. My impression of the Times was that it was sympathetic to official truth, the sort of arguments that start with some version of “all scientists agree” and treat anyone who disagrees as either misinformed or in the pay of some interest group that wants the truth suppressed. The perils of global warming is one obvious example, the natural origin of Covid another.

A close parallel to the case of salt is the case of saturated fat. A few decades back the official wisdom, promoted by the same sorts of authorities that tell us to eat less salt, was that saturated fat was bad for the heart and one should therefor switch from butter to margarine. The margarine we were being told to switch to, made from hydrogenated vegetable oil, replaced saturated fats with trans-fats; further research eventually led to the conclusion that, while saturated fat might be bad for the heart, trans-fats were much worse. In that case, as best I can tell, the official advice was not merely wrong but lethally wrong, a fact which led to less skepticism about official truth than it should have. Any readers better informed about the subject — nutrition is not an area where I can claim any expertise — are welcome to correct my account but I think it is accurate.

I was, perhaps, less inclined than most to take official truth at face value due to early experiences in what was to become my field. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early sixties I had a conversation with a fellow undergraduate who, with no idea who I was, informed me that he could not take an economics course at Chicago because he would burst out laughing. It struck me at the time that the fact that a student who had probably taken one introductory course in the field thought himself competent to judge with confidence which school of thought was correct was a good reason to be skeptical of the claims of his teachers. Within a decade or two, the Harvard economists had mostly conceded that on at least some of the debated points they had been wrong.⁵

In the case of global warming, I am inclined to accept the official version of the climate science since I do not know enough about the subject to be competent to question it. But the official version of the associated economics, the claim that the rate of warming implied by the climate science will have large negative effects, strikes me as unconvincing and probably wrong, for reasons I have discussed here in the past.

Other examples of official truth discussed in past posts include Body Mass Index, the origin of Covid, Hoover’s response to the stock market crash, ice cream and diabetes.

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1. Or possibly of embezzlement by a company VP.

2. Now, I discover, in nine states, none, unfortunately, on my side of the country.

3. All of this is in the context of statewide races; there are local races where Republicans are a majority.

4. A longer (and not paywalled) account of the argument by the same author.

5. One such issue was whether the Phillips Curve described a long-term tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Many years later a Harvard economist told me that, while of course we all knew that inflation produced only a temporary reduction in unemployment, it was logically possible that the gain from the temporary reduction was greater than the loss from a permanently higher level of inflation. That was, so far as I know, true, but it was not the position that the Harvard economists had been defending when I was a student there.