Americans Shoplifted Almost $2 Billion Of Stuff This Christmas
Santa has sticky fingers. Via the Atlantic Wire:
Hope you have a Merry Christmas, America, because you’ve been extremely naughty at the mall this year. After surveying retailers in the U.S., the Global Retail Theft Barometer says that shoppers pinched $1.8 billion worth of merchandise during the four weeks leading up to Christmas, reports the AP. $1.8 billion! For context, $1.8 billion is a 6 percent increase from 2010.
Naming Products Like Babies, And Babies Like Products
Slate on how branding names and baby names converged. Are our consumer products becoming our babies, and our babies becoming branded items?
We’ve started naming our kids like products—and our products like kids. Parents approach baby naming a lot like product branding. Whereas in the past, names were typically chosen with an eye toward personal significance (a baby was named after a grandparent, say), today’s parents increasingly focus on the public image projected by the name.
Now, as companies introduce technologies that function like people—Siri being the most extreme example to date—they suddenly find themselves with the same kinds of naming challenges as today’s parents-to-be. They have to consider the complex web of cultural meanings that each name carries. They have to ask, as parents do, “What kind of person are we creating, and what name represents that?”
It’s no coincidence, then, that brand names and baby names have begun to converge, as in…
D17: Protests Mark The Third Anniversary of OccupyWallStreet Movement Puts On A “Why I Occupy” Show in Times Square
Saturday marked the third month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. It was also Bradley Manning’s Birthday. It was one of those days that confirmed the validity of the chant: “All Day, All Week, Occupy Wall Street”.
Ok, maybe, it wasn’t a whole week but Saturday felt like a week in one day. The plan for the day, as announced, was to gather at Duarte Park at 6th Avenue and Canal Street to attempt a RE-Occupation of vacant land owned by Trinity Church, more of a real estate company than a house of worship.
For a few weeks, the Occupy Movement had been demanding that the church allow the movement to take “sanctuary” on that land. There were earlier protests and even a hunger strike that made page one of the New York Times. Police in riot gear had ousted the occupiers the last time they tried to take over the space a…
Giant Godzilla-Shaped Christmas Tree in Shopping Mall
John Farrier writes on Neatorama:
Allegedly, this is a picture of a Godzilla-shaped Christmas tree that appeared in the Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall.
Within minutes, it destroyed the mall.
So, in retrospect, it was a really bad idea …
Your Civil Liberties for Lower Prices (Video)
Luke Rudkowski reports on Black Friday in Brooklyn, New York outside a Best Buy & Toys ‘R’ Us:
Pro And Anti-Christmas Retailers List
Keepers of morality the American Family Association have released their annual list of companies that are “Christmas friendly” or “anti-Christmas” (the latter using the term “Christmas” sparingly and instead referring to “the holidays”). Lesson learned: Jesus loves Wal-Mart, and when you shop at Staples, you’re shopping with Satan.
Malls Track Shoppers’ Cell Phones on Black Friday
Annayln Censky reports for CNN:
Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.
Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year’s Day, two U.S. malls — Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. — will track guests’ movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.
While the data that’s collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers’ paths from store to store.
The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria’s Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren’t being visited?
While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they’ve used cell phones.
Woman Pepper Sprays Shoppers To Get Xbox
NBC Los Angeles reports on some Black Friday action. Over the past two months, in our society, pepper spraying anyone, anytime to get what you want has become completely normalized:
A customer shot pepper spray at other customers at a busy Northridge Wal-Mart store late Thursday night, causing minor injuries to at least 10 people who had been waiting hours for Black Friday savings, according to Los Angeles firefighters and a police lieutenant. The Associated Press later reported 20 injuries.
A witness told NBC4 that the incident started as people waited in line for the new Xbox 360. The witness said a woman with two children in tow became upset with the way people were pushing in line. The witness said she pulled out pepper spray and sprayed the other people in line.
It appeared only one person would need to be transported to a hospital for treatment.
Occupy-Themed Best Buy Marketing Campaign
Have you been curious how the Occupy movement would be co-opted? Occupy Best Buy combines the red-hot protest movement with Black Power fist iconography in an effort to get people pumped up about buying plasma screen TVs or whatever it is they sell at Best Buy. Definitely the worst of the occupations to spring up so far. Best Buy claims that no affiliation with the web site, though one would suspect that it’s a viral marketing effort:
The Deeper Meaning Of Shopping
Shopping and the consumerist impulse are lambasted as empty and selfish. But the New Left Project has an entirely different, novel view of consumerism:
Shopping is usually a collective act. Most of the time it is done in groups, in families or with friends. Much of our consumption is for other people; or we have other people in mind when we’re doing it. In the supermarket, we buy for our families. In the high street, teenagers buy the same clothes and music as their peer group. Consumption by children and adults is driven by a sense of what we need to keep our collective lives together; and by the way in which owning the same things as others gives us status amongst our peers.
In their effort to reformulate progressive politics, many on the left have called for the creation of a `post-consumer society’ in which more noble values than shopping lie at…
Exposure to BPA Before Birth Linked to Behavioral, Emotional Difficulties in Girls
Via ScienceDaily:
Exposure in the womb to bisphenol A (BPA) — a chemical used to make plastic containers and other consumer goods — is associated with behavior and emotional problems in young girls, according to a study led by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.
BPA is found in many consumer products, including canned food linings, polycarbonate plastics, dental sealants, and some receipts made from thermal paper. Most people living in industrialized nations are exposed to BPA. BPA has been shown to interfere with normal development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in people. In a 2009 study, HSPH researchers showed that drinking from polycarbonate bottles increased the level of urinary BPA.
In this study, published Oct. 24, 2011, in an advance online edition of Pediatrics, lead author Joe Braun, research fellow…
A Capitalist Against Corporate Greed
Critics of the Occupy Wall Street movement often point to activists’ use of iPhones and laptops in their fight against corporate greed and control of America. As Natalie W of Capricious Yet Constant points out, we sometimes must use the tools of the system to dismantle it. We recognize the irony of biting the hand that feeds, but the lifestyle choices anyone makes do not diminish their involvement in the movement, or the movement itself:
I own an Apple iPhone.
I have a MacBook that I take everywhere with me.
I drink Starbucks when my body needs a caffeine fix.
I eat McDonald’s but prefer Corner Bakery when I’m hungry and away from home.
I smoke Camel cigarettes.
I am a proud member of Occupy Chicago. I am protesting in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and the 1000-plus occupied cities in the US for economic equality for all people, for an elimination of corporate influence over…
IKEA: The Architecture Of Consumer Confusion
Normally architects organize space to make the experience as efficient as possible. At IKEA though, however, the (almost ‘urban’) designers deliberately set out to confuse people. See this phenomenon analyzed [with] various (heat)maps, 3D reconstructions and other illustrations, in a talk (the IKEA case in starts at the 24:30 mark), by Alan Penn (University College London).
The presentation focuses on how architects use space to sell things, by demonstrating how space creates patterns of movement, bringing people into contact with goods. It starts off with how spatial quality influences spatial behavior, which is then applied on urban environments, retail and shopping spaces in general.
Dawn Of The Dead Malls
The landscape of our post-recession country is littered with the carcasses of abandoned malls — fallen, ghostly temples of twentieth-century consumerism and suburbia. In an interesting two-year-old piece, Design Observer wonders what to do with them. Utopian schemes from wild-eyed planners abound:
Dead malls, according to Deadmalls.com, are malls whose vacancy rate has reached the tipping point; whose consumer traffic is alarmingly low; are “dated or deteriorating”; or all of the above. A May 2009 article in The Wall Street Journal, “Recession Turns Malls into Ghost Towns,” predicts that the dead-mall bodycount “will swell to more than 100 by the end of this year.” Dead malls are a sign of the times, victims of the economic plague years.
The multitiered, fully enclosed mall (as opposed to the strip mall) has been the Vatican of shiny, happy consumerism since it staked its claim on the crabgrass frontier — and the public mind — in…
The New Religion of Shaolin
Photo: Robin Chen (CC)
Chinese capitalism has something uniquely in common with historical Maoism: atheism. Vast economic growth met with a huge demand for traditional culture has meant Chinese cultural institutions are increasingly trading in their social values for growth-based business plans. Via the Independent:
Young men spring through the air, performing elegant punches and kicks; others bound across the dirt, swords flashing through the misty air. An ancient tree has dozens of small dents, made by “finger punches” of warrior monks over the centuries.
This is the Shaolin temple complex, in the mountains of central China, where kung fu was born 1,500 years ago. Now a place of pilgrimage for martial arts enthusiasts and Zen Buddhists, thousands of young people come to study kung fu, or wushu as it is known in China, in schools around the temple.
The commercial success of the temple is obvious, even if some of the sights are…
Advertising And Our World
Advertising has became our dominant creative industry – what Stuart Ewen calls ‘the prevailing vernacular of public address’. It sucks up our talent for art, design, creativity and storytelling.
Via Our Kingdom, a look at the cumulative effects of advertising on our society and why it must be controlled:
Advertising is everywhere. Media that were once largely commercial free – from movies to the internet – now come replete with commercial messages. Not so long ago, most musicians were reluctant to see their work used to endorse shampoo or sneakers. Today, the music and advertising industries are locked in a lucrative embrace.
We now have commercials in our schools and on our clothes. They clog up – with increasing speed – nearly every form of communication we devise. Our dominant TV genre – in terms of sheer volume – is not comedy, drama or sport, but advertising. The average British viewer is now…
China’s Economic Boom Fueling Poaching In Africa
Greg Neale and James Burton writes in the Guardian:
Elephant poaching in Africa and Asia is being fuelled by China’s economic boom, according to a study of the ivory trade.
Authors of the new report found that the number of ivory items on sale in key centres in southern China has more than doubled since 2004, with most traded illegally. The survey comes amid reports of a dramatic rise in rhino poaching across Africa, and a spate of thefts of rhino horns from European museums and auction houses.
Based on the results of their survey, the ivory researchers are calling for China to tighten its enforcement of ivory trading regulations, saying that such a move is vital to reduce the number of elephants that are killed illegally. The report is published on the eve of a meeting in Geneva of the Cites organisation, which is responsible for controlling trade in endangered wildlife species.
Esmond…
How Shopping Malls Make You Buy
Hungry Beast offers a three-minute primer on how architecture and design elements in shopping malls have been tested and tweaked to create “scripted disorientation” and manipulate and channel our behavior. Most of us have heard of some of the consumption-encouraging tricks used within individual stores, but not necessarily those occurring on a larger level in the surrounding structures and environs. Someday businesses will perfect a method for getting us to shop for just as long as they wish us to:
How Would You Define “Poor” In America?
Greg Hengler writes on TownHall:
The federal government says that 14% of Americans live in poverty. So here’s a list of luxuries that these households retain:
99.6% own a refrigerator; 81.4% own a microwave; 78.3% own an air conditioner; 73% own a car or a truck; 63.7% own cable or satellite television; 54.5% own a cell phone; 53.9% own an Xbox or PlayStation; 48.6% own a coffee maker; 38.2% own a computer; 32.3% own two or more televisions; 31% own two or more cars; and 25% own a dishwasher.
Do any of you remember John Edwards saying that there are 37 million Americans living in poverty and that their kids are going to bed hungry every night—43.6 million Americans living in poverty according to the NAACP President, Ben Jealous? Well, Robert Rector debunks that political talking point of the Left. Rector says that that only 2% experience hunger and it is only temporary. The…
