Excerpt from Affluenza

The All-Consuming Epidemic

Chapter 1: Shopping Fever

Gotta listen to me honey/gotta get all your money/ Gotta know just where I stand/
If you want to be my date/Well you better get it straight/I'm a big time shopping man.. . . . Baby come on, there's a whole lotta shoppin' going on.. . . .
Get that money out of your savings account/There's a whole lotta shoppin' going on. . . .

It's Thanksgiving Day and eight-year-old Jason Jones has just finished stuffing himself with turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie a la mode. He sits at his PC, frantically typing a list of presents he hopes to receive from Santa Claus for Christmas. He plans to deliver the list to Santa the next day, opening day of the Christmas shopping season, and, incidentally, of affluenza season. Jason's list contains ten items, including a trip to Disney World, a mountain bike, a cell phone, a DVD player, and several compact disks.

Jason is no dummy; he doesn't really believe in Santa Claus, but he knows his parents usually give him what he asks Santa for, so he gets up bright and early on Friday to play the game. Jason and his mother, Janet, set out in their Lincoln Navigator and, half an hour later, arrive at the All-Star Bazaar, where thousands of people are already fighting for the remaining parking spots nearest the entrance.

The mall is jam-packed with frantic holiday shoppers, unwitting and at-risk in an affluenza hot zone, armed only with credit cards and checkbooks. In one store, a crowd gathers to watch two parents duke it out over the last remaining Dino-Man, the latest hot kids' toy, a doll with the body of a weightlifter and the head of a Tyrannosaurus (and selling faster than Beanie Babies). In a corner, a mother sobs, knowing she got there too late to get a Dino-Man for her son. "I knew I should have camped out here last night," she wails. Other customers, already exhausted, sit on benches by the bottom of an escalator, beside mountains of merchandise, looking both tense and bored.

It takes Jason nearly an hour to get through the line to Santa's lap and deliver his list. His mom leaves him in the video arcade with a roll of quarters while she makes the rounds of the dozens of shops in the mall. Hours later, on the way home, they stop at Blockbuster's to rent a couple of movies so Jason won't complain of boredom that night. Though the day is sunny and warm, unusually so for late fall, even the park in Jason's upper-middle class subdivision is devoid of kids. There are plenty of children in this neighborhood of young professionals. But if they're not shopping, they're indoors communing with Nintendo Play Stations or The Cartoon Network. It's a tough choice for Jason, but he's tired of the games he has so he turns on the TV.

Jason is, admittedly, an imaginary, composite kid. But his experience at the mall is far from atypical. In 1999, according to the National Retail Foundation, Americans spent nearly $200 billion on holiday gifts, more than $850 per consumer. Affluenza season, the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, generated twenty-five percent of all retail profits

Most Americans tell pollsters they want less emphasis on holiday spending and gift-giving. A third cannot even remember what they gave their significant other the previous year, and many cannot pay off their Christmas debts until the following summer, if then. Yet the urge to splurge continues to surge. It's as if we Americans, despite our intentions, suffer from some kind of Willpower Deficiency Syndrome, a breakdown in affluenza immunity.

MALL MANIA

Since World War II, Americans have been engaged in a spending binge unprecedented in history and fueled to a frenzy by the booming economy of the past several years. We now spend nearly $6 trillion a year, more than $21,000 per person, most of it on consumer goods, which account for two-thirds of the recent growth in the U.S. economy. For example, we spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches ($80 billion) than on higher education ($65 billion). On a five-day shopping trip to Paris, the wife of Florida governor Jeb Bush spent $19,000, though she reported only $500 of it to U.S. Customs. But she's not alone in her passion for shopping.

In 1986, America still had more high schools than shopping centers. Less than fifteen years later, we have more than twice as many shopping centers as high schools. In the Age of Affluenza (as we believe the decades surrounding the Second Millennium will eventually be called), shopping centers have supplanted churches as a symbol of cultural values. In fact, seventy percent of us visit malls each week, more than attend houses of worship.

Our equivalent of Gothic cathedrals are the megamalls, which continually replace smaller shopping centers, drawing customers from ever-greater distances. Typically, they cover areas of fertile farmland that formerly produced bumper crops instead of traffic jams. Indeed, forty-six acres of prime American farmland are lost to "development" every hour. When a new megamall opens, the pomp and ceremony rival anything Notre Dame or Chartres might have witnessed in medieval times.

The Super Mall in Auburn, Washington, opened to a stampede of 100,000 shoppers in October 1995. The crowd gathered under an imitation of Washington's 14,410-foot Mt. Rainier. Rising above the Super Mall's front entrance, the imitation mountain provided one show which the real thing could not: a display of fireworks, set off as soon as the ribbon-cutting ceremony was over.

In a spirit of boosterism that would have impressed Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, speaker after speaker extolled the wonders of the new shopping center, the biggest in the state. "The number of shoppers expected to visit here over the next year exceeds 1.2 million," bubbled Auburn's mayor, adding that "committed shoppers can shop till they drop in 1.2 million square feet of shopping space." Along with a new race track and casino in the area, the mall was expected to become a "destination attraction" for vacationers from the entire western United States and Canada. It would, they said, create 4,000 jobs and "improve the quality of life throughout the region." Thirty percent of the expected business would come from tourists who would each spend about five hours and more than $200 at the mall.

FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY

The thousands of eager shoppers on hand for the opening wore bored and impatient expressions during the speeches, but pushed eagerly through the open doors when the rhetoric stopped. One woman said she was "really excited about the mall because this is something we haven't had in this part of Washington. We were waiting for something like this."

"We said 'if we build it, they will come,' and they did," gushed a happy shopkeeper. Another explained that its hardwood floors "add a little sense of excitement to the mall. They're much easier than walking on tile or granite and make the Super Mall really special." She hoped children would enjoy it, "because shopping has become such a family experience that's really important."

Really. And it's a good thing, too, since we Americans now spend six hours a week shopping and only forty minutes playing with our kids. "Shopping malls have really become the centers of many communities," says Michael Jacobson, founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism in Washington D.C. "Children as well as adults see a shopping center as just the natural destination to fill a bored life."

WHAT ELSE MATTERS?

"If you've seen the mall, you've seen them all," sneer critics like Jacobson, but "committed shoppers" (some psychologists say they should be committed) disagree. They're willing to jet across the country for new shopping experiences. So much so that some airlines now offer package flights to shopping Meccas like Potomac Mills, a giant "discount" mall divided into sections that are euphemistically labeled "neighborhoods." Potomac Mills bills itself as the "number one tourist attraction in Virginia," with more visitors each year than Shenandoah National Park, itself the most visited site in the National Park system.

The host of Affluenza, Scott Simon, visited Potomac Mills while filming the television program. Shoppers were eager to answer his questions about where they came from and what they thought of the mall. None of the people Simon talked to were sweating profusely. But all seemed infected by shopping fever, often the first symptom of affluenza.

Two women from Dallas, Texas, said they'd been at the mall for three days straight, while their husbands golfed nearby. "We're always looking for a bargain. You've got to know the brands and we have experience, we're proud to say," they proclaimed. "I didn't need anything. I just went to shop," said a man with a cart full of merchandise. "Whatever I like I buy." "I bought a lot more than I planned to," another woman admitted. "You just see so much."

Yes, you do, and that's the idea. It's why big malls sell much more per square foot than do their smaller counterparts. Seeing so much leads to impulse buying, the key to mall profitability. Only a quarter of mall shoppers actually come with a specific product in mind. The rest come just to shop. "What else matters?" asked one of the ladies from Dallas, only half in jest.

"I came here with one overriding interest, to spend money," said a proud teenage girl, who was getting rid of the hundred dollars her mother had given her for this particular spree. "I like to shop," she explained. She's not alone. One poll found that ninety-three percent of teenage American girls rate shopping as their favorite activity.

An older couple passed by with a shopping cart piled to the brim. "This is only half of what we've purchased," the man said cheerfully. "We brought a long list of things to buy," his wife added, "and then we bought a lot of stuff that wasn't on the list." Impulse. They were examining the fold-out map Potomac Mills provides to shoppers, saying, "we'd be lost without it."

But Potomac Mills is a mere mini-mall compared to the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. With 4.2 million feet of shopping space, our biggest mall ("Where It's Always 72 Degrees!") spreads over an area the size of seventy-eight football fields. It employs 10,000 people and attracts forty million visits a year. The Mall of America is more than metaphorically a cathedral; some people even get married there. It is also a world-class affluenza hot zone.

In the Age of Affluenza, nothing succeeds like excess. "Good malls are usually the most profitable kind of real estate there is," says one Los Angeles real estate consultant. "Good malls are money machines." "Good," he points out, means bigger. Because of that, the frenzy to attract megamalls pits city against city, each offering sweetheart deals in hopes of capturing tax revenues later on. To win such deals, mall developers compete for the most-profitable stores. According to The Sacramento Bee, the Seattle-based Nordstrom Company received $30 million in direct subsidies and incentives to put a store in Roseville, California's Galleria Mall. Why? "Nordstrom's does the highest sales per square foot in the industry," says mall developer Michael Levin. Most people, says Levin, will only drive about half an hour to a mall, "but with Nordstrom, they will drive much further."

HOME SHOPPING

Of course, these days you don't have to drive at all (or fly either) to shop, though most people still do. But while malls, and vast discount megastores like Wal-Mart and Costco, still boast growing sales (and still drive smaller, locally owned stores out of business), Americans are doing a whole lotta shopping right from their couches. Some forty billion mail-order catalogs flooded our homes last year, about 150 for every one of us, selling everything from soup to nuts (to refrigerators to underwear). "Buy Now, Pay Later," they shout. While some of us resent their arrival, most Americans eagerly await them and order from them with abandon. In some cases, we even pay for the catalogs (such as Sears') so that we can pay for what's in them.

Then there are the home shopping channels. Critics mock them as presenting a continual succession of baubles on bimbos, but for a sizeable percentage of Americans, they're the highlight of our cable TV systems, and highly profitable. And to think someone once called TV "a vast wasteland." That was before the shopping channels, of course.

Mail-order catalogs and shopping channels carry a lot more than products. They are highly effective carriers of affluenza. Next time a catalog comes, check it with a high-powered microscope.

CYBERSHOPPING

In the past several years, of course, a new affluenza carrier has come online. And it threatens to outdraw malls, catalogs, and shopping channels combined. The intense frenzy with which the ubiquitous Internet has been embraced as a shopping center can only be compared to that which followed the discovery of gold in California and Alaska, or the Texas oil boom. Twenty percent of Americans now spend at least five hours a week online and much of that time is spent shopping-a majority of Internet sites are now selling something.

During the 1999 affluenza season, consumers spent $10 billion online, three times what they spent only a year earlier. Now that's growth! For the year, e-sales topped $33 billion. That's still only a tiny fraction of total retail sales, but soon Internet shopping should eclipse catalog sales. Everything imaginable (and some things unimaginable) can now be bought online.

A REAL E-MAN

Proof of that is to be found in the adventures of DotComGuy (formerly Mitch Maddox-he had his name legally changed), a twenty-six-year-old Dallas man who has vowed not to leave his home for a year, while making all his purchases online. Maddox found regular shopping too slow for his tastes, and too much like work. He says he told his "low-tech parents" he could "live off the Internet for a year and never leave my apartment." Now, thousands of "DotComHeads" hang out at his Web site to watch this e-male shop. But he doesn't just buy online, he sells as well: DotComGuy merchandise including T-shirts, mouse pads (of course!), baseball hats, bumper stickers, and cake mix. "This is the Internet. This is a forum for e-commerce," he says, in answer to all those foolish people who thought it was an information highway.

SHOPPING AS THERAPY

When Scott Simon visited Potomac Mills, the mall was running one of the cleverest ad campaigns we've ever seen, featuring an alluring actress named Beckett Royce, whose persona combined bubble-headed ditziness with winking "joke's on you," sophistication. "Shopping is therapy," she intoned, lying on a couch. "Listen to that little voice in your head: SHOP, SHOP, SHOP."

Royce's monologues mocked the shopping channels and catalog shopping, but definitely not shopping at Potomac Mills. She pranced between its aisles, grabbing item after item, then adding up what she'd bought and chirruping, "I spaved a hundred dollars!" "Spaving" means spending and saving at the same time, she explained, suggesting that at Potomac Mills everyone could become a "spaver."

"The more you buy, the more you save," proclaims an ad for the Bon Marche, a Seattle department store. As our next chapter demonstrates, large numbers of Americans apparently believe this mathematical impossibility. Beckett Royce is no fool; she gets paid plenty to persuade the credulous that "spaving" works. Simple mathematics persuades otherwise. But then, math scores have been falling.

And, as we discover in our next chapter, the road to bankruptcy is spaved with good intentions.