Supermarkets Are Awesome.
A personal note from a most dishonest globe emoji neoliberal freak.
Capitalism has had a rough go of it in recent years. From the 2008 financial crisis on, the term “late capitalism” has come to mean the myriad ways that the neoliberal economic model has been yielding… let’s say “suboptimal” outcomes. Louis Menand’s recent longform New Yorker essay on this subject opened with, “‘Neoliberalism’ has been called a political swear word, and it gets blamed for pretty much every socioeconomic ill we have, from bank failures and income inequality to the gig economy and demagogic populism.” Others proclaim that we are now living in a “post-neoliberal” world.
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts will not deny that free-market capitalism is flawed. As the month of July continues to bake the Northern hemisphere, it’s fair to criticize capitalism’s role in aiding and abetting climate change.
All that said, I also think that critics of capitalism and globalization have caricatured it to the point of absurdity. And when they start going after consumer satisfaction, that’s when I get angry.
In the middle of a marathon Twitter thread arguing that capitalism does not increase people’s utility, Cassie Pritchard tweeted the following:
The thread starts to devolve soon after that, with Pritchard first claiming that, “we are not happier for having bananas that our ancestors a mere 150 years ago lacked. We will not be poorer for replacing them with other foods” and then going way off the deep end by asserting, “A lot of Americans—probably a majority—will do unlimited genocide on the global south for the mere *availability* of tropical fruits on demand, which they don’t even take regular advantage of. They will do genocide for waste, for rot, for excess.”
I do not want to engage that entire argument, primarily because it’s: a) mostly nonsense; and b) life is precious and any time I waste on this drivel is time I could spend better doing almost anything else. My tl;dr take on the entire tweetstorm is that she’s extrapolating wildly from the existence of the hedonic treadmill and mostly wrong about the 21st century American appetite for committing genocide.
Rather, let me take just a minute to wax poetic about the opulent pleasures of the North American supermarket. Because they are fucking awesome.
In the mid-1990s I spent a year living in Donetsk, Ukraine, teaching economics to local university students. Needless to say, there were no functioning supermarkets over there at the time. There were some open markets selling pretty shitty produce. Beyond cabbage, potatoes, beets, and onions, there was not a lot of what we in the United States would call “choice” in those market stalls.
Then, for about seven years in the first decade of this century, I lived in the South Side of Chicago. There were supermarkets there, but not many of them and they were pretty crappy. It was while I was living in Hyde Park that I first heard the term “retail desert” and realized how aptly that characterized the South Side of Chicago at the time.
This is all to say that I have lived in places without well-stocked supermarkets, and I am so goddamn happy that I now live close to so many excellent markets to procure food. I love every fresh vegetable, fruit, or herb I can see. I love the variety of sauces available in every aisle. I love being able to go into my local Star Market and buy quality imported Italian pasta, Korean gochujang, and Jenni’s Ice Cream. I love going to Costco to buy lox and whitefish and ribs and frozen wonton noodle soup in bulk. I love going to Trader Joe’s to buy saffron and mushroom ravioli and Indian lentils that I can microwave and east inside of a minute.
I’ll never marvel in ecstasy about a banana, because I hate bananas. I’m pretty sure, however, that I marvel in ecstasy at something I can buy in a supermarket every goddamn trip. I celebrate the opulence of modern capitalism every day I go to a Trader Joe’s or a Costco or any gourmet supermarket thank you very much.
If that makes me a dishonest globe emoji neoliberal freak, then I’m fine with that label. I remember the food available to us when I was a kid, and it was a whole lot worse than what I can buy today. If those are my choices I’ll gratefully shill for neoliberalism every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Dear Prof. Drezner: You live in a Boston suburb, and you didn't mention Market Basket? Tsk, tsk.
Also unless something has changed recently there is no Trader Joe's in Calgary -- the chain famously does not operate in Canada, and goes out of its way to punish people who resell its goods into Canada (c.f. the "Pirate Joe's" saga).
(This is also, in a nutshell, the post-boomer critique of capitalism: That rather than any theoretical connection to free markets, capitalism in practice consists mostly of preventing markets. I'll shill for free markets every day of the week, but "capitalism" is a word so broad and contested as to be, at best, meaningless.)