Desire is viral.
"They look really good on her," Jamie says.
"She wants the 381/2," Ben says conspiratorially, "but I told her they were already taken. That's how it is around here. One person tries it on, and it's modeled for everyone else. Then it's sort of like everyone's got to have it."
Jamie Gavigan, who owns some $20,000 worth of Manolo Blahnik shoes, models her $2,300 satin Gucci dress.
(Photograph by Kyoko Hamada)
|
|
At the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, an Emory University graduate student tossed a small rock into the test chamber, a cage on wheels. Then she held out her hand and waited for the capuchin monkey inside to pick up the rock and hand it back to her in exchange for a food reward. It was an easy task for the monkey. Any of the 35 capuchins that live in groups at the center could perform it, and had repeatedly in recent years.
Capuchins are exceptionally tolerant primates, willing to share food with one another and thus accustomed to handing things back and forth among themselves. They are so social that researcher Sarah Brosnan always positioned her test chamber within earshot of the group so that the monkey being tested could hear and answer the calls of the others and feel secure.
Last winter Brosnan began trying something different, something no one had before done. She placed two capu-chins side by side in the test chamber, separated by a mesh barrier. Then she tossed a rock to each.
The test subjects were content to exchange the rocks for a food reward, such as a piece of cucumber, until they observed the monkey next to them receive a more prized food reward, such as a grape, for the same effort or, worse, no effort at all.
Some of the capuchins who'd been given only a cucumber reward refused to eat it, a rare and uncharacteristic rejection of food they'd find perfectly acceptable in other circumstances. Some went on strike, refusing to return any more rocks for unequal pay. A few capuchins actually hurled their measly cucumber rewards out of the test chamber.
"They got very agitated," says Frans B.M. de Waal, an internationally known expert on primate behavior who co-authored an article on the study for the journal Nature. "We'd never had that kind of a strong reaction before. Of course, on one level, it's very intuitive. As humans, we would have the same reaction. What the monkeys showed is a very egoistic sense of fairness. It's very much like unhappiness at getting less than someone else."
Meredith Small, who teaches anthropology at Cornell University, says she knows just how the monkeys feel every time she sees a fellow professor driving a better car than hers. She thinks competitive consumerism may be an evolutionarily adaptive behavior. Our hunter- gatherer ancestors may have survived because they noted how many berries the enterprising folks in the next cave picked and worked harder not to be bested.
"I have a very dark view of human nature," Small says. "I think the reason the monkey study has gotten so much publicity is that it touches something in all of us . . . There is a contingent that says the reason humans have such big brains is to keep track of social information, and we keep track of it all day long, including who got what."
In recent years, who has gotten what in the United States might leave the capuchins screeching. In the decades following World War II, Americans in almost every income bracket saw their earnings increase at about the same rate. Since the early 1970s, however, the very wealthiest Americans have enjoyed virtually all the income growth, creating what Cornell economist Robert H. Frank calls a winner-take-all society. The lucky few have largely spent what they've earned, he says. In the process they've shaped everyone else's perceptions of what constitutes the good life.
"The people just below the top are influenced by what people at the top spend, and feel pressured to spend more themselves," explains Frank, who has written widely about rivalry and competition in economic and social behavior. "Then people below them start spending more, and you get cascades of spending all the way down. By the time you are in the middle [income range], a $4 cup of coffee doesn't seem strange anymore, and not having leather seats in your new car seems like you bought a stripped-down model."
As spending at the very top relentlessly ratchets up everyone's expectations, today's gratification-seeking consumer is likely to live in a state of continual frustration, according to Juliet B. Schor, author of The Overspent American. She notes that 27 percent of people in households earning more than $100,000 -- among the richest people in the richest nation in the world -- say they can't afford to buy everything they really need. Or think they need. Those pressures are only intensified by what consumers at every income level see on television, in movies and in magazines.
"We have a lot more opportunities to judge each other and feel disgruntled about how we're doing than we used to," Small says. "Isn't it strange that someone in a Third World country can watch 'Baywatch' and say, 'That person has a surfboard. I don't have a surfboard. I don't even have a bathing suit. I want a surfboard and a bathing suit.' "
Ricky Summers doesn't have to watch "Baywatch" in Mogadishu to know how it goes. He sells clothes at Betsy Fisher, a chic Connecticut Avenue boutique, and is acutely attuned to the nuances of competitive consumption.
"One day I was in Dupont Circle and a woman wearing the Burberry trench coat that had the plaid on the outside -- the one Ally McBeal wore on television, and then all of a sudden everyone wanted -- she stood right in front of me so I couldn't move," he recalls. "I thought: 'This is ridiculous. You think you are something because you are wearing this absurd coat. I'm wearing a Donna Karan black label cashmere suit, so give me a break. I've already trumped you and we haven't even talked about my loafers yet. Don't play this game.' "I just looked at her and I said, 'Move!' "
"Today I'm wearing Dolce & Gabbana," Faraz Siraj announces cheerily as he ushers a visitor into his immaculate townhouse on a modest street in Arlington. He heads into the living room, where a $7,500 pair of deep brown leather sofas helps create the faint air of an English gentlemen's club.
"You have to sit on it to appreciate it," he says, patting one sofa. "It's got comfortability."
Friends call Siraj Mr. Consumer, and he embraces that identity with the zeal of a convert. The 29-year-old salesman for a global Internet company not only shops a lot, he buys the best. He likes to make himself comfortable.
Siraj was an infant when his immigrant parents moved to Northern Virginia. His Pakistani father and Indian mother generously opened their home to many immigrating friends and relatives. That meant Siraj often shared a bed or slept on the floor. His brown skin, wavy black hair, dark heavy-lidded eyes and family customs set him apart from other kids in his neighborhood -- and frequently made him uncomfortable. "The heavy Indian food we cooked used to smell up the neighborhood," Siraj says. "I actually got comments on that. I had kids my own age say, 'Eeeewww, your home smells disgusting.' "
He learned how to be an American by going to the mall. He happily joined his parents' hunts for high-quality bargains at Tysons Corner, Fair Oaks and Springfield malls. In high school, he got a job at a mall clothing store and experienced the most exhilarating sense of power he had ever known: purchasing power.
By the time he was studying marketing at Syracuse University, "if a few weeks went by and I hadn't been into a mall, it felt awkward, like when you get in the habit of working out four times a week, then you don't do it," he says. "It was that feeling that something is missing."
Some rich classmates drove Porsches and BMWs; he contented himself with nice clothes. "I was able to carry a good persona with it," he says. "It helped me feel comfortable." He left college with $13,000 in credit card debt and the absolute certainty that he would succeed and pay it off. He did.
Today, Siraj earns six figures selling remote-access technology and other Internet-based solutions to Fortune 100 companies. He pays his credit cards off monthly. He buys only the finest products -- $300 Hugo Boss shoes, $1,300 Frette bedding, a $52,000 silver Mercedes E320 Sport -- "because I want to be all that I can be, and I'm too old to join the military," he says. Standing out back on his deck, Siraj gleefully slips the cover off his $600 Weber Genesis C gas grill. He doesn't really use that extra side burner he wanted so much, but the big grill makes him feel like a real host.
Later, in his garage, he throws his head back and opens his arms wide to illustrate the joy he feels driving his Mercedes, which happens to be paid off. "I love this car," he says. "To some people it's overboard. When I saw it, I had to have it. It is extreme comfortability."
Being Mr. Consumer means living life on his terms. A 55-inch, top-of-the-line Mitsubishi TV dominates one corner of Siraj's living room. It is wired for movie theater sound and hooked up to his favorite invention of all time, the electronic recording device TiVo.
"I love my TiVo," Siraj says as he clicks through a list of television shows TiVo has recorded for him. "One day I came home, when I'd recently had TiVo installed. It had been noticing my viewing habits and it had taped one of my favorite movies ['Dumb and Dumber'] for me. It was waiting in my in-box. I'm not kidding, I almost teared up. I felt like it knew me better than anyone else knows me. My mom has a tough time deciding what to cook for me sometimes when I come over. But this thing knows exactly what I want."
Siraj has five television sets in his townhouse. He likes to keep more than one on so he can continue viewing as he moves from room to room. As he watches, he's frequently more interested in what brand of pots, pans or knives a character has in his fictional apartment kitchen than he is with the plot line. For this faithful student of the culture, the merchandise is the story.
