You’re Never Wrong if You Prove the Competition Is

“And you listen to the savage way our competitors will moan…They’ll be sunk, all those rag-and-bone men dying of rheumatism in their cellars.” (Zola 40).

In reading Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, I’m immediately struck by how similar commercialism and consumerism in 19^th century Paris is compared to present day America. More specifically, I’m struck by the sheer ruthlessness of someone like Mouret in destroying small family businesses. I think we all tend to subconsciously imagine that families like the Waltons (owners of Wal*Mart) actually love small family businesses and in some twisted way are trying to support them, because they too started as a family business. Chances are that their business strategies lie closer to Mouret’s, driving prices as low as possible with as cheap labor as possible and as cheap a product as possible knowing that all their competition will be driven to destruction as all people see is that smiley face telling you how low the prices are.

As Agent Smith states in The Matrix, humans are the only living things on earth besides viruses that would make their environments adapt to them. Keller Easterling’s article “Enduring Innocence” echoes this by commenting on how today’s society expects everything to be “compatible with our format” (Easterling 5). This reminds me of how in our industrial society, quantity has triumphed over quality. No longer can a cow be weighed in value against bushels of grain, but a precise number has to be placed on absolutely everything to measure their worth, from pocket watches to human life.

There is a company whose products I am fond of but their slogan I am not. Next Limit passive aggressively brags that “We will continue to innovate, and others will continue to copy.” (www.maxwellrender.com) Whatever degree their innovation happens to be, such a slogan would never be needed in a world where everyone gave due credit to everyone for their ideas and products. Because this is not the case, companies come up with all sorts of ways to insult the competition instead of just promoting themselves. Thus, these kinds of smear campaigns of competition—also commonly seen on the political trail—seem to be reflective of the disorganized capitalism that Easterling comments on where the focus seems to be in “the degree of deviance, duplicity, and cheating in the mix” (Easterling 10) This is what interests us. Not ‘what makes your product good’, but ‘what makes your product better than their’s? Again, to quote Easterling, “righteousness is a form of violence that most people cultivate” (Easterling 5) As Easterling would say about Mouret, there is an illusion of superiority in the lower price, but the actual quality of the product is most likely inferior to its hand-crafted competitor. Sadly, all people see are the numbers.

P.S. A quick comment on Easterling's writing style: I can’t help but wish that the author could choose to use slightly less ‘dense’ methods of making a point, as it seems that a lot of time can be spent trying to do nothing more than understand what exactly is being said. What exactly is a “self-reflexive political quarantine” anyway? (Easterling 3)