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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Consider the numbers. Old Navy now has 580 stores nationwide and is still expanding. The Gap, Old Navy's parent company, remains convinced that people want more, and it seems to be right. In 1998, when Old Navy opened its first store in downtown Chicago, more than 10,000 people lined up hours before the doors opened. When the San Francisco flagship store opened in 1999, the rush was equally astounding. There were giveaways, rock bands and rabid, clothes-carrying crowds fighting their way to the registers. Never mind that Old Navy carries far fewer pieces of apparel than other comparably sized stores. And never mind that half the clothes are just knockoffs of items available at the Gap. After all, deals are to be had -- and shopping at Old Navy is just so cool!
Ikea is an even bigger phenomenon. More than 320 million people worldwide walked through one of the Swedish company's stores last year. That's more than seven times the number of people who visited all four of Disney's theme parks.
Shoppers can claim that they're just being good consumers -- that buying a $179 Poang chair at Ikea is actually ecofriendly. Old Navy shoppers might say they're just frugal. Not so, according to critics like Christine Rosen, a professor in the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley. According to Rosen, people who fill their closets, homes and lives with Old Navy and Ikea -- or Pottery Barn or a host of other slick stores -- are simply new examples of the trend toward conformity that started when the first "brands" appeared in the 1910s and '20s, says "We're Pavlovianly trained to respond to this," she says.
And we're also just too damn lazy. That's the theory floated by Packard Jennings, an anti-consumerism activist who says that stores like Old Navy are designed to numb the brain and remove all semblance of creativity from the purchasing process. "Ikea pre-arranges sets of furniture in its stores, thereby lessening individual thought," he says. Once people are in the store, they can't resist. "Entire households are purchased at Ikea," he says.
Indeed, Janice Simonsen, an Ikea spokeswoman, confirmed that a large part of the chain's demographic consists of "people who come in and say, 'I need everything.'" Meanwhile, those who don't want everything usually end up with more than they need, says Fordham's Reichart. "The way they design their stores" -- with an up escalator to the showroom and no exit until the checkout -- "you end up going through the entire store," he says.
Old Navy plays by the same sneaky rules. When Frank and I entered the San Francisco store, clerks offered us giant mesh bags. Ostensibly, this is just good service, but since the bags are capable of holding at least half a dozen pairs of jeans and a few shirts, it's obvious that they're also meant to encourage overconsumption.
Frank called the bags "gross" but not out of line with other state-of-the-art retailing practices. But according to Klein, the sacks, in conjunction with Old Navy's penchant for displaying T-shirts in mock-1950s supermarket coolers, prove that the company is aiming to do something more. The idea behind this "theater for the brand" architecture is to commodify the products, to make them "as easy to buy as a gallon of milk," Klein says.
"The idea is to create a Mecca where people make pilgrimages to their brand," Klein says. "You experience the identity of the brand and not the product."
Disney, which opened its first store in 1987, was the first to employ this strategy. And since then others have appeared. Niketown, the Body Shop, the Discovery Store -- they all aim to sell products by selling a destination.
Old Navy and Ikea, however, are far more popular than those predecessors -- and, if you believe the more pessimistic of their critics, more dangerous. Not only are the two chains remaking many closets and homes into one designer showcase, says Klein, but they are also lulling consumers to sleep and encouraging them to overlook some important issues.
Such as quality. People think they're getting "authenticity on the cheap," says David Lewis, author of "The Soul of the New Consumer." But the truth may be that they're simply purchasing the perception of quality and authenticity. "Because [Ikea and Old Navy] create these self-enclosed lifestyles," Klein explains, "you overlook the fact that the products are pretty crappy and fall apart." Adds Jennings, "Things may be cheaper, but you keep going back to replace the faulty merchandise."
Then there is the trap of materialism. Survey after survey suggests that people who place a high value on material goods are less happy than those who do not, says Eric Rindfleisch, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona. The focus on bargains, incremental purchases and commodification plays to a uniquely American blind spot.
"We operate with a duality," explains Rindfleisch, who has conducted studies linking materialism with depression. "Americans know that money doesn't buy happiness, but most people somehow believe that increments in pay or goods will improve our lives. It's a human weakness -- particularly in America."
The most insidious danger may be more abstract. The anti-consumerism critics argue that by elevating shopping to cultural status, we are losing our grip on real culture. We live in a time where college kids think nothing of decorating their rooms with Absolut vodka ads and fail to realize that they're essentially turning their rooms into billboards. Meanwhile, museum stores keep getting larger, Starbucks sells branded CDs to go with your coffee and because Ikea and other stores now look like movie theaters or theme parks, we don't just shop, "we make a day of it," as Klein puts it.
This only helps steer us away from other endeavors. When people spend so much time buying, thinking and talking about products, they don't have time for anything else, for real conversations about politics or culture or for real interaction with people.
Ultimately, the popularity of Old Navy, Ikea and their ilk proves that we're stuck in what Harvard professor Juliet Schor calls "the cycle of work and spend." Breaking that cycle may not be easy, but if one believes critics like Frank, it's essential if we are to control our own culture, instead of allowing it to be defined by corporations.
The cycle may not be possible to break. Frank, for one, is extremely pessimistic about our chances for turning back the tide of conformity and co-opted cool. Maybe that's one reason why he wanted to get out of Old Navy as fast as he could.
But I'm not so sure. When "Ikea boy," Edward Norton's character in "Fight Club," watched his apartment and his Swedish furniture explode in a blaze of glory, I wasn't the only one in the theater who cheered.
