As IF Times

link: https://fortune.com/2023/10/11/bernard-arnault-lvmh-louis-vuitton-second-richest-man-luxury-spending/

In a famous quote by P.T. Barnum, it was stated that, ““Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.”  His reference was of course to ‘popular’ acts he featured in his eponymously named circus with partner James Bailey. The baser the acts, the more popular they seemed.  In the day, bearded women, tattooed strong men and morbidly obese people of ambiguous sexuality were unusual curiosities.  Today of course, not so much.

A very similar sentiment was expressed by H.L. Mencken, an American journalist who invoked, “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Anyone paying attention to current events would have to concur with the sentiments expressed by these insightful men, so many decades ago since they are confirmed again and again in our own lifetime. Today, the appetite for base amusement continues unabated and it seems that there is no spectacle too crass or raw for public consumption.

The success of so many enterprises and individuals over the decades have relied exclusively on this principle.   While invoked in reference to the American public, people of all nations are no less susceptible.  Vast empires have been built on selling consumers not just the idea, but the need, to get or experience, the next big thing. In our time,  some of the best exponents of this are such companies as NIKE, Apple and Louis Vuitton, the inspiration for this post.

Without this urge to consume fed by savvy enterprises willing to satisfy a virtual bottomless pit of demand, we wouldn’t have the grotesque consumer economy we see worldwide today. The dark side of this enormous consumer economy is the associated debt that has been taken on by naïve consumers.  At the center of this consumer vortex are the so called ‘luxury brands’ that cater to those especially insecure types who need to express their superiority over others by association with a prestigious marque. Quite a combination: the need for amusement as well as the need to assuage insecurities.

And thus it was bizarre to observe that during the insanity of the past few years of lockdowns and sequestering, companies such as LVMH, the French based vendor of premier ‘luxury’ brands actually had record sales!  How odd that during a period when people weren’t allowed to venture outside their own homes, that they would feel the need to buy a $6000 purse or $3000 alligator shoes.  The expensive cognac, I get; why drink swill if you’re in jail.  To be sure, many high priced marques do provide higher quality products, that’s not the issue. The issue is the need for average consumers to ostentatiously display these goods as a means of separating themselves from the hoi polloi. It always seemed odd to me that someone sporting a garment with CHANEL imprinted on it in bold letters was essentially broadcasting their deep insecurities.  No wealthy person would display their lack of taste in such crass fashion.

This mindset of association with brands is much worse among those who are clearly unable to live in this world.  It’s truly bizarre to see young ghetto kids wearing sneakers costing many hundreds of dollars when they couldn’t find 3 bucks for a McDonald’s burger. But it’s no less different than the suburban couple up to their hairline in mortgage debt needing to own a Mercedes and a Range Rover.

Marketers have done their jobs brilliantly in creating the insatiable demand for things that are entirely discretionary.  They’re even able to do this with food.  Next time you go to Whole Foods, have a look at the range of prices for eggs.  You will pay much more if you want to be associated with the woke crowd. Marketers have successfully capitalized on people’s need to be associated with success and wealth. Imagine the 20 something mall gal sporting a Louis Vuitton labeled bag.  As if anyone is going to associate her with Paris Hilton.

Nothing wrong with aspiring to better things of course.  That’s the natural order of things.  However, what the little people manage to do is to make people like the Bernard Arnaults of the world even wealthier…which separates them even more from their aspirant customers. Ironically that’s exactly what the little people want to do when they flash their Rolexes to the peons. And isn’t that the entire point of the Instagram generation?  To show others exactly how vanilla others’ lives are compared to theirs?  They are only emulating what works for the big guys.

Recently, I had the misfortune of dunking my mobile phone into a lake.  Not on purpose of course; the phone was in the pocket of my swim trunks and I’d forgotten that it was there when I waded into the water.  I’m sure I’m not alone in having these kinds of mishaps with their cell-phones.  The aggravating part is not so much the moisture permeating the phone and causing it to not work.  It was the reality that without access to the information and features on the phone, I was somewhat handicapped from doing everyday things that I’d taken for granted.

Who amongst us can easily recall the actual telephone numbers or co-ordinates of our regular contacts….much less casual friends or especially of business contacts? We’ve all programmed the phones to access them via voice or key strokes.  What about access to doors whereby we wave our phones over a Bluetooth sensor?   Don’t forget the most important function of all phones these days and which is responsible for their high cost….the camera.  Once that’s out of commission, our everyday shortcut for recording events is no longer available.  Of course, without camera phones, how does one eat food or take vacations? Girls would be helpless. It’s like the old chestnut about preventing an Italian from driving by breaking his middle finger.

Our dependence on such devices has been such that people are more anxious without their phones than they are about almost anything else.  That’s rather frightening to think that our lives are tethered to a 3 by 5 piece of plastic and silicon. This transition has been gradual, so gradual that we’ve failed to notice our increasing dependency on our phones.  Like all consumer items, the hook is convenience.  Who doesn’t want more convenience?  The issue with convenience is that our minds naturally ignore the processes involved in finding a solution and we become dependent on ‘things’ or others for decisions.  Once routine things are taken care of, we presumably turn our mental efforts to more worthwhile things.

Except that this doesn’t happen. If anything, we are likely to become lazier.  Why go through the trouble of researching anything in depth when by merely clicking a few keys, a ‘source’ will provide the information for us.  The onset of Artificial Intelligence will only make this worse.  We have as a society, offloaded lots of our critical thinking to sources that make our minds up for us.  The advent of the phenomenon of social media has created an entirely malleable generation of people whose opinions are shaped by prolific posters.  The veracity of this claim is proven by the amount of money that corporations are willing to throw at ‘influencers’, in order to shape views and opinions and of course, hawk goods.

To be sure, corporate television and media still exert their influence, but distrust of them has grown so much that few take any media utterances seriously any more.  They have collectively become America’s version of Pravda or Xinhua. For those that have outsourced their critical thinking of major issues to media, their ability to grasp simple realities withers and suddenly their ability to logically assess situations disappears.  They may have positions which they parrot on any given issue, but not the ability to defend them critically.

The real wake-up call for people is that people whom have been relied upon to provide rational responses and opinions have been outed as being utterly incompetent or incapable of rendering any views at all.  They are like a virus; their stupidity has the ability to infect untold naïve minds.  For example, recently, a politician offered an idea to fight rampant crime in her famously violent city of Chicago.  Her brainstorm: ask gangs to only shoot people at night.

In a previous post, I postulated that a school child will tell you that 2 plus 2 equals 4; not so much because they can prove it, but mostly because the teacher told them it was so.  It’s a rather frightening thing to agree to a set of beliefs just because it’s convenient to agree with everyone else.