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| The same price since 1985. It should have a safety warning. |
Richard Mellor
Afscme local 444 retired.
GED HEO
6-28-21
I am not a member of Costco, the giant retailer but was in one yesterday with a friend who is. I find it a very depressing place. One reason is that as I watch people, usually hordes of people, with shopping carts full of things I am not sure they really need and it just reminds me of the excessive consumption that pervades US and capitalist society. Also, there are always thousands of plastic bottles of water being purchased there. I can’t help thinking about the life span of that bottle after use when it will end up in a river or the ocean, in a whales’ stomach perhaps or even a landfill. I know little about the regulation if there is any at bottling factories or whether its regulated at all. Plastic lasts a long time. Beyond that, water purchased in plastic bottles is way is more expensive than gas.
I remember getting our milk delivered in glass bottles and we’d leave the empties when we picked up the new ones. Oh the good old days.
I think that’s it. It’s an ugly reminder that we must want and desire things, more products at all times. We must consume, consume, consume, and it is this consumption that is destroying the planet and our personal health, both mental and physical. This is food production on an industrial scale and it harms us.
As I waited by the checkstand I looked up at what I suppose is an eating establishment. Why would someone eat at Costco or Target, I thought to myself. I never eat at fast food restaurants. I don’t have to, there are so many good local affordable eateries in my area and they are part of the community, not isolated in a big barn where none of us know each other and don’t interact socially. The rare occasions I eat in a fast food joint I regret it an hour or two or three later as it does not leave the system so easily; often I can taste the grease hours after. The picture below caught my eye. The hot dog and 40oz of soda for $1.50 is about one pound 10 pence (British) and 1,26 Euros at the present exchange rate. I was told that the CEO
Apparently, Costco has charged $1.50 for its hot dog and soda combo since 1985 and when CEO, Craig Jelinek suggested the company raise the price, Costco founder Jim Sinegal responded “I’d kill you” if he did so. One can’t buy and prepare fresh food cheaper than that. The only problem is that it is not what we’d call nutritious food at all. A 12 oz can of Coke has close to ten teaspoons of sugar. 7-Eleven’s 64 oz Double Gulp Coca Cola contains one cup of sugar. Along with the unhealthy aspect of fast food, all that sugar is addictive and caffeine is also an ingredient in sodas.
The truth is that the investors that own food production and distribution in a “free market system, are not in the business of nutrition. McDonald’s Ray Croc was fond of remining people that he was “really in show business, not the restaurant business” 1
Kroc and McDonald’s, the early pioneer of mass produced junk food worked closely with Disney to develop marketing strategies aimed at children in particular. Former set designers for Disney worked for McDonald’s developing ads aimed at children and psychologists, focus groups with children as young as two were used to develop the best advertising tools. “Bright colors, a playground, a toy, a clown a drink with a straw, little pieces of food wrapped up like a present.”, this was the secret to Kroc’s appeal to kids. According to research, “….until the age of 6, roughly 80% of children’s dreams are about animals. Kroc, Disney and after them, other social parasites, understood that “….a person’s brand loyalty may begin as early as the age of two. Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they recognize their own name.” 2
Knowing this, investors in the food industry and their paid lobbyists that bribe politicians to pass laws that favor their industry spend billions of dollars convincing parents through their children, to buy their unhealthy junk. “Marketers now use different terms to explain the intended response to their ads---such as ‘leverage’ ‘the nudge factor’ ‘pester power’” “The aim of advertising is straightforward: get kids to nag their parents and nag them well.”
An advantage the investors in the fast food industry have (Buffet, the so called nice cuddly man is one of them) is that their politicians also have a major influence on other aspects of society like hours or work, housing, health care jobs and so forth. For a family or single parent (generally women) that come home after working two jobs or 10 hour days plus another two sitting in traffic, a low degree of pester power is needed to get them to succumb to the fast food craze along with sticking the kids in front of the TV. And the poorest among us are the primary victims of the poisonous effect of fast food. A major issue for the low waged and unemployed has been the lack of decent food outlets in their communities and this adversely effects people of color in the US as poverty rates, are generally much higher in these communities and escaping it much harder.
It is no wonder there is an obesity problem in the US and especially among youth. By 2017-18, “The prevalence of obesity was 19.3% and affected about 14.4 million children and adolescents.” according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. It has tripled since the 1970’s.
Major US Exports: Weapons and Junk Food.
Fast food outlets are an international phenomenon and the vast majority of them are based in the US. This industry destroys working class communities and small local restaurants. In the former colonial world it does the same, displacing local food outlets as well as changing the cultural food habits that have existed for centuries. With pressure from consumers for better quality food, corporations like McDonalds and Burgher King (Warren Buffet Goldman Sachs and other coupon clippers like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital have all had their slimy fingers in this pie), KFC and others have moved abroad. Capital has no borders you see.
Since the Gulf War when the US intervened to undermine its former ally Saddam Hussein by destroying Iraq and defending the family that governs Kuwait, this former British Protectorate has become a US colony. It should be noted that the British prevented a popular uprising in 1939 that wanted to reunify the country with Iraq supporting instead the ruling elite. This time, it was the US that ensured Kuwait remained a proxy of western capitalism in the region.
“There has been a cultural invasion in Kuwait by Western, especially American, culture since the Gulf War.”, Kuwaiti economics professor Dr. Mohsen Bagnied tells Vice News in 2017. “People basically replaced domestic or local foods with Western or fast food, and it's a hamburger culture.” He adds. In 2015 McDonalds was taking in 6 million a day in the Middle East
By all accounts Kuwait has been taken over by junk food joints and these bring the usual problems, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes etc. Bagnied claims that there have been a huge increase in “stomach stapling surgeries” and in 2012, “5000 people were getting surgeries in Kuwait compared with 3,000 in [much more populous] Canada. Lots of my students have done this operation.”, he says.
The same is happening in China where Kentucky Friend Chicken is the largest fast food joint in the country. As they all do, this will wage war on cultural habits and foods. It will change society without one missile being fired by a US warship.
But what does it mean to say it’s a US invasion? The fast food industry is not representative of US culture in general but US bourgeois culture, capitalist culture. It poisons the US population just as readily as any other people no matter where they are. Ray Croc is right about what he does, he’s in the business of making profit not food. GM is in the business of making profit not cars, the industry in which the capital is employed and the final product is incidental.
Marx described exactly the trajectory capitalism would follow 170 years ago:
“The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
The first victims of this ideology so powerful in the US is the US workers and middle class. Kroc, Disney, warren Buffet, they have no love for the American worker. Disney, with Kroc’s support broke strikes and opposed labor legislation that benefitted us. We are important as consumers and as the source of profit. We are crucial when wars fought for control and plunder of the world’s resources between competing capitalist powers break out of the economic and political restrains they impose on each other in to open warfare. Then we are sent to battle on their behalf, workers in other countries in the same position we are in.
And for the Kuwaiti’s and their overweight kids: Welcome to freedom bourgeois style comrades.
1 Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
2 ibid
I should add that I forgot what a very good read Fast Food Nation is, even 22 years later. I recommend it strongly.
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