The Buying Game

Inconspicuous Consumption:
An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for
Granted from the Everyday to the Obscure
By Paul Lukas (Crown Trade Paperbacks)

In the November 1924 Atlantic Monthly, journalist and ex-New York Globe publisher Samuel Strauss could be found whacking away at what by then was a familiar target for him: “Consumptionism.” This was Strauss's term for what he saw as a whole new system of American values predicated almost solely on the creation and acquisition of more and more (and nicer and nicer) stuff; he railed on about it for years. “Consumptionism,” he complained in this particular Atlantic essay, “is bringing it about that the American citizen's first importance to his country is no longer that of a citizen but that of consumer.” The quixotic Strauss pops up briefly in Land of Desire, William R. Leach's 1993 social history of the department store, which I happened to be flipping through during the recent Christmas countdown-in fact, on the very same day that The New York Post ran a story in which a reporter described purchasing a black-market “Tickle Me Elmo” doll for $350, cash.

So it's fair to say that Strauss was right. And it's just as fair to add that his jeremiads had precisely no effect on the great march of new and improved products into the American consciousness. In fact, the manipulative corporations that so exercised Strauss have long since shifted their focus to the selling of cheeseburgers in Minsk and the like; back home, surely, we are all consumers now.

This being the state of things nearly three quarters of a century after Strauss's lament, it's interesting to find someone like Paul Lukas picking his way across the cluttered consumer landscape, musing over and critiquing products and services like some sort of supermarket archaeologist. Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, from the Everyday to the Obscure, composed of about 100 of Lukas's product “reviews,” is a slim volume with a broad agenda — a different way of approaching consumerism itself. Lukas, a writer who came of age well after the product-spewing juggernaut of late-20th-century American capitalism had gotten up to speed, makes no attempt to block its course. Instead, he has climbed aboard for the ride.

That ride began in earnest in 1993, when Lukas published his first issue of Beer Frame, a zine with a clever conceit: Plenty of critics review music and movies and books, so why not review off-the-shelf consumer products, as well? He didn't want to use the dry, nuts-and-bolts fashion of Consumer Reports, testing nine varieties of eggbeater in a climate-controlled lab somewhere. And, as the book's title implies, he wasn't really interested in the most conspicuous manifestations of consumer culture — you won't, for example, find him weighing in on “Tickle Me Elmo.” Instead, Lukas, who isn't so much an overly enthusiastic consumer as a highly discriminating and observant one, has more or less forged a kind of consumption aesthetic, against which he measures the range of unusual products that catch his eye. “Inconspicuous consumption,” as he puts it, “is about paying attention to the details of consumer culture. It's about noticing certain aspects of products and services that we might otherwise overlook, things that are either so obscure that we never see them or so ubiquitous that we've essentially stopped seeing them.”

Specifically, this means that Lukas has written glowingly about admirable products like The Brannock Device, (that black-and-silver whatsis that shoe-sellers use to measure your feet), skeptically about the reworking of bubble-gum character Bazooka Joe and His Gang into the MTV-ified Bazooka Joe & Company (“How limp”), and with an air of amused exasperation about the redesign of Scott Bathroom Tissue packaging (the new design includes a small reproduction of the old design, captioned “Still the Original!”). And frequently, to answer some nagging question or satisfy some peculiar curiosity, Lukas ends up calling up the product-makers and asking a few things, and encounters varying levels of resistance. PR types for various kraut juice producers freely admit that the stuff is disgusting. The folks at Coors are a little disingenuous about why they've chosen to spell “Artic Ice” beer that way, and barbed-wire manufacturers Michael Industries Inc. would prefer not to be written about at all (no dice).

The quirky subject matter and breezy writing style quickly won Beer Frame a following: It soon became the basis for a column in the NY Press and then New York (where a new editor, it turns out, has just killed it), and Lukas now pops up on CNNfn as well; these days, each issue of the 3,000-circulation 'zine is essentially a compilation of his recent reviews. Inconspicuous Consumption, in turn, divides the best of these mini-essays into seven broad categories: industrial gadgets like the Brannock Device or the Dial-A-Pick Toothpick Dispenser (model S-11); ubiquitous products whose laudable characteristics are seldom noticed, let alone celebrated or rigorously examined, like the Victor Mouse Trap or the red tear string whose use in Band-Aid Adhesive Bandages has been quietly discontinued; flat-out bizarre offerings like Creamy Head, “a foaming agent designed to add a layer of suds to mixed drinks”; food, which I'll get to in a moment; a handful of consumer artifacts such as a Toast-O-Lator Electric toaster remarkable for its one-slice-at-a-time, conveyor belt loading style; services including the Kentucky pork researchers Pig Improvement Company, Inc.; and printed matter, including Lukas's evaluation of the physical and material properties of books and publications like The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (whose paper stock contributes to “an illusion of tomehood ”).

The category that Lukas labels simply “Foodstuffs” strikes me as the most interesting. “Nowhere is the engine of consumer productivity busier than in the realm of food,” he writes, “where the corporate desire to cater to (or, better still, shape) our tastes has resulted in a marketplace full of very interesting products for our eating enjoyment.” Thus it's in the grocery store — especially in its sprawling suburban variations — that we're really confronted with the wages of consumerism: endless rows of bright, multicolored goods, from bottled water for cats to the latest variation on Cheerios. Lukas is at his wariest, funniest, and most observant here, whether speculating on the fate of a product called Mister Salty in a health conscious world, or mounting a spirited defense of Hydrox, a “creme” sandwich cookie similar to (but actually pre-dating) the Oreo.

Would Samuel Strauss be amused? Probably not. Lukas tells us early on that he's “not here to bury consumerism or to praise it,” but he never gets around to articulating what exactly he is here to do. There is a certain built-in mockery of the whole consumption apparatus that belches out things like lawn paint or Reese's Cups-flavored cereal, but it's pretty tame compared to, say, “AdBusters” or Leslie Savan. The underlying assumption of Inconspicuous Consumption seems to be that flat-out opposition to the consumer process is roughly analogous to flat-out opposition to rain: Fine, but meanwhile you'd be well advised to get yourself an umbrella. What Lukas provides, then, is a handy tool for coping with the whole idea of the modern buying game on one's own terms. And that's not a bad thing for the citizen-consumer to have.

A very similar version of this review appeared in the March 3, 1997, issue of The Nation. For the record, I did not meet Paul until later.