CHCH News - Marketing in the Land of Plenty

Dingy.

That's what I remember most about it. I don't know if the word was in my vocabulary at the time...but it describes the place.

It was the Fisher Bros. Grocers (Incorporated) store in a strip mall called the Great Northern Shopping Center on Cleveland's West Side. The place was small by today's standards - a little smaller than the quaint A&Ps that came a few years later, with the sloped roofs and cupolas. The front was glass, inevitably obscured by sale items of bagged dog food, or charcoal briquettes, or peat moss or some such. The floor was a poured-resin yellow, of a kind I later saw a lot on Navy galleys. It looked dirty, always - even when it wasn't.

We'd go in, my mother, my baby brother and I...My little brother would be in the baby seat. My mother would mostly be oblivious, to us as she poured over her shopping list, working the prices into her mechanical adding tool or adding them up on the shopping list. I'd look around...a curious fellow I was, always.

Far overhead there were the rows of fluorescent tubes, not enough, it seemed, even then. The light was white, but too faint - that was a common feature of big stores of the time. The ceiling tiles were white, also - but dingy with unreachable dust, which also hung on the fluorescents. The whole effect was that of a pall - even in a room full of food, it seemed a depressing place.

I remember the open-top coolers of the time; I even remember the manufacturer's name - Hillman, it was. I found it so fascinating that frozen and refrigerated food could be in those open deep-trays, with no covering, when my parents were always yelling to close the refrigerator door, NOW! There were the monotonous, unimaginative displays in the poor light - pyramids of Green Giant canned peas, or interlocked walls of Charmin.

And then the shopping was completed. We'd get in the long lines at the checkout stands, with the women (always, women) working the cash registers frantically, the boys (always boys or old men) bagging the items as they were passed back. The sun would be coming through the front windows, which in direct light always seemed a bit dirty - and the manager, in his white apron and hat, would be overseeing the process and checking his watch - the store closed at 5:00 sharp every day.

And then we would be out in the evening sun, to load the groceries into the old Rambler and make it home before Dad did.

I hated that store. The place depressed me.

Fast forward forty years. Once again in the neighborhood I grew up in, I needed to make a trip to the grocery this evening. The Fisher Bros. chain is now part of the Giant Eagle foodglomerate. They've moved, too - about a mile from the old location, which is now a CompUSA outlet. The "new" store, seven years old, is about five times the size - and worlds away in environment.

The first thing you see is the floor tile. It's synthetic stone, grouted - easy to roll a cart on but an attractive tan coloring. Then you notice the light. The ceiling is actually unfinished; you can see the corrugated steel and the trusses; but it's painted a flat maroon-brown and it's unobtrusive. Mercury vapor lights spaced intelligently cast an even, fresh light.

Then there's the layout. It's satisfying visually. Instead of monotonous rows upon rows, the areas are broken up with displays and stands and offers - and even a cafe area to sit and eat items off the in-store deli. Things are marked, things are clean - and they look fresh, vibrant, imaginative. It's a pleasure to shop in a place like that - as compared to, say, a typical Super K.

Need I mention that the store is stocked, with just about every dang food or drug or personal-care item you could conceivably need? Along with more non-food stuff than ever found its way into a Ben Franklin, in years past.

And it's there for my convenience. The best time for me to shop, I've found, is 3 a.m., unless I need some fresh meat or a deli item. No lines, no waiting, one self-serve checkout stand - and about forty employees stocking, ready and willing to help locating items.

This is progress. This is a society in affluence. No one can tell me, after I come out of such a delightful store, that we're in hard times or on the wrong track.

Alas, as I pass the newspaper vending rack - seven major-city papers available, right next to the cafe-deli - the news is not good. The news is of a fearful shortage of influenza vaccine, now that a British pharmaceutical company's stock was condemned. How did we arrive at this, here in the Land of Plenty - dependent on foreign firms to produce lifesaving vaccines?

Yes - how indeed. How could a society so rich as to provide, not one, but two of these marvelous stores in a single nondescript neighborhood, not be able to provide something so basic?

And that's the key. Society tried to provide it. Not a physician with a patient at risk...society. Meaning, of course, government.

Government, in the form of two grifters from Arkansas, decided that vaccine manufacturers were overcharging for their product. Charging it, went the reasoning, of the government. The government was paying for it because of well-meaning programs in place, to make these vaccines available without cost to people who couldn't afford it...or who would have difficulty affording it...or to whom fell into certain income categories. This was done in the interest of the public health; and to excite voters over the beauty of social programs.

Now, a husband-wife tag team of political hacks from Arkansas, together with their lackeys, decided that the price asked for the product was too much. And since the government was the single largest purchaser of vaccine, it was, by itself, the market.

Remember free-market rules: The price floats to a level where both buyer and seller are agreeable. If the price rises too high, competitors enter the market to take advantage and the supply drives prices down. If the price falls too low, suppliers decide that producing the product isn't worth their while.

That's not callousness. That's necessary. If a widget costs $6.00 to make, and the buyer only will pay $4.00 for the item, then there won't be any subsequent shipments.

The glitch in the process here is that, the government wasn't buying the vaccine for its use. It was buying the vaccine for use by program recipients - who perhaps would have put a higher value on the vaccine than those grifters from the Apple Blossom State.

But they weren't given the choice. They, and their physicians, were told to leave it to the benign hands of Big Brother, who was working in our interests to hold costs down and improve health. So, because of cost containment and government distribution of vital pharmaceuticals, suppliers ceased supplying, one by one - until there was only two foreign corporations, Aventis Pasteur and Chiron, interested in meeting the government's purchase instructions.

And the results were predictable. Along with lower wages go lower quality control; Chiron's supply was condemned as unsuitable.

This, as we're in an explosive Presidential race where the themes are class envy, "outsourcing" of jobs, increasing cost of energy and healthcare. And where a large voter bloc seems to expect the government to, not only provide full employment - we're just about there now - but full, high-wage employment.

So, as Kerry Reveals His Plan, let's take a trip down to my neighborhood Giant Eagle.

Curtailment of "outsourcing" - that is, double taxation on goods made by foreign subsidies - will price a whole class of goods out of the market. Let's face it, a lot of this stuff is just modern-day trinketry - throwaway CD players, kitchen utensils, retractable dog leashes. Gone...they cannot be made profitably using $18.00 per hour unionized Americans.

And this cuts into the profit margin of the store.

Then, there's the raising of the Minimum Wage. Even though unionized, grocery workers don't make a whole lot today. Frankly, the job doesn't justify it. Stock the shelves, stack the boxes, wave the product over the scanner. Hell, the machine even figures the change; spits it out, even.

Higher labor costs translates to fewer bodies. Whoops!...guess we can't afford to be open all night anymore.

Higher corporate taxes - a need for higher returns on each operation. Will this store close? Don't know...but it's dead-solid sure there'll be fewer opening in the future. Less choice, less selection.

And as government gets into pricing of other basic needs, like energy, it can only have the effect it's had on vaccines, on the railroad industry, on education. Either prices will be held artificially low, with no suppliers willing to comply; or prices will be raised high enough, and possibly too high - without the checks and controls of the market, of Adam Smith's "invisible hand."

And in either case or any case, suppliers will understand who the REAL master is, and where the power lies.

And as we go marketing for our basic needs, for needs our betters in Big Government have decided we cannot do without, we will find the shelves are no longer stocked so well - or the marketplace so attractive.

16 October 2004

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JustPassinThru is a locomotive engineman and former political-science student in the Great Lakes region, where he drives trains, worships cars, curses government - and occasionally writes about all three.

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