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What do Disneyworld, Wal-Mart, and Star Trek type science fiction videos have in common? Not much – except the pervasive role of technology. Understanding how technologies of manufacturing and marketing deployed globally is a fascinating saga of our times.
In fact, this story starts before Disney – in the early part of the 20th century, the “age of the machine”. In this period, people were fascinated by the visible and marvelous powers of science and technology – ranging from Ford Model T to the whimsically spoofed machines in Rube Goldberg cartoons. One of the great embodiments of the spirit of machines was the St. Louis expo of 1904. A website detailing the preamble and attractions of this expo states the following (http://www.bitwise.net/~ken-bill/fair.htm) :
Think for a moment about the world of 1904. The Wright Brothers’ famous flight at Kitty Hawk occurred the previous year. Gasoline-powered automobiles, motion pictures, and the “wonder drug” aspirin were introduced to the public only 10 years before. Electric lighting and telephones were less than 25 years old, and still a novelty only read about by most Americans. Food was stored in ice boxes, and the horse-drawn ice wagon was a familiar site.
But from Opening Day - April 30, 1904 - to the closing ceremonies on December 1st of that same year, the St. Louis World’s Fair played host to nearly 20 million visitors, who witnessed the public debut of air conditioning, were able to ice skate throughout the entire summer, and spoke by wireless telegraph to cities 1500 mile away.
In this era of the machine – let us honor Rube Goldberg, the whimsical cartoonist of the machine, by calling this the era of “goldbergization” – the machine produced results in visible ways.
Most of the visible mechanization was in the factories, but retail spaces saw some sprinkling of mechanization in the form of accessibility by automobiles and the use of cash registers. By the 1950s, cities like New York even had massive vending machines that dispensed all manners of food – the food preparation and stocking being done by invisible humans in the background. But retail culture proved too difficult to mechanize.
The model that succeeded was the opposite of the automated New York food-vending delis. This is the model epitomized by McDonald’s. In the typical McDonald’s retail outlet, the mechanization is largely obscured, behind a partial wall where food preparation is done. Human order takers are key parts of the McDonald’s retail equation. They are trained to smile, accept orders, punch in codes to transmit the order to workers in the back doing the preparation and packing, accept money, and make change by automated methods.
While goldbergization had limited sway in retail spaces, it was Disney who took retail technology to the next step. In disneyfication, the retail technology is invisible and yet palpable. The wondrous animatronics are close to (caricatures of) live humans and animals, but the wiring and the motors are invisible. Disney’s “cast members” – the smiling, friendly human workers with some histrionic skills – assist the animatronics performers and settings.
In goldbergization, the viewer-customer is awed by visible technology producing visible results. In disneyfication, the viewer-customer-guest is awed by invisible technology producing visible results.
While the technologies of disneyfication are invisible, they are palpable at some level: viewers-customers-guests have faint cognitions of the awesome technological prowess that must lie behind the Disneyland backdrops.
Now, “Welcome to Wal-Mart”! The gentle elderly greeter at the door mutters this, and offers to help and guide anyone that asks for assistance. The loose-fitting uniforms, the price-marking gun in one hand, the Normal Rockwell grooming, the “Aw, Shucks!” demeanor of the Wal-Mart “associate” – technology is the farthest thing in your mind as you enter Wal-Mart, unless you came in to buy a computer or a flat-panel TV. Everything is done to promote the schlock milieu of “Always Low Prices.” The tacky newspaper ads that have the aesthetics of 19th century news bills, simply stacked shelves, somewhat unkempt aisles overflowing with seasonal merchandise, the functional fluorescent lighting – this ain’t Abercrombie & Fitch, or even Old Navy.
Yet, behind the schlock-laced façade of Wal-Mart, there is powerful and ruthlessly efficient technology that disciplines every link of the supply chain and keeps employees on their toes, almost literally. So legendary is the back office technology of Wal-Mart that it has elicited paeans of praise in consulting company reports and Harvard Business Review articles. Wal-Mart of course is the biggest company and its owners, members of the Walton family, the richest people on the planet.
So, what is walmartization? In goldbergization, the viewer-customer is awed by visible technology producing visible results. In disneyfication, viewers-customers-guests are wowed by invisible (but palpable) technology producing visible results. In walmartization, totally invisible technology disciplines unseen supply chains to produce seductive low prices for the customer in schlock low-tech settings.
In the 16 March 2004 issue of The Guardian, George Monbiot has this to say about Wal-Mart and similar superstores:
In the US [Wal-Mart’s] sales clerks made an average of $13,861 in 2001, almost $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. It is reported to have told new employees how to apply for food stamps so that they don’t starve to death….By forcing down the prices of the goods they buy, the superstores encourage even more repressive conditions in the companies which supply them. A recent study by Oxfam documents the systematic abuse of workers in the factories and farms they buy from. The Waltons are so rich because others are so poor.
But, capitalism, technology, and globalization grind on…. So, where is the next stop? This brings us, somewhat surprisingly, to Star Trek. In the types of sci-fi fantasies favored in some of the story lines of Star Trek and similar video fare, there are often “worlds” that are serenely pastoral – somewhat like the “Aw, Shucks” Norman Rockwell world of the visible side of Wal-Mart. Yet, in those sci-fi worlds, as the story line unfolds, we usually learn of deeply embedded technologies orchestrating the whole serene-idyllic-pastoral thing.
The logical extension of walmartization is to push super-efficient technologies offshore – to the factories of China and Indonesia, to the software shops of India and Vietnam, to the call centers of Ghana and the Philippines. Then, not only are these technologies invisible, they are unreachable except via long and tiring plane rides, or via super-high-bandwidth telecommunications. Walmartization spawns goldbergization in the super-efficient factories in China, ten times the size of football fields, to support the schlock-style disneyfication of its retail superstores in America.
But wait, there’s more… as those pushy late-night TV commercials tell us! Here is what Forbes magazine (the self-proclaimed “Capitalist Tool”) reported in March 2004:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc, which runs 33 chain stores across the country [China], posted a more modest 5.85 billion yuan [about $0.8 billion] in sales, but bought $15 billion worth of goods in 2003, the [China Securities Journal] newspaper said. Underscoring the emphasis placed on the mainland by foreign retailers, Wal-Mart said last week it had held its first-ever annual board meeting in China…
The next act of the Goldberg-McDonalds-Disney-Wal-Mart saga would likely end not with Mickey’s Midnight Parade in Orlando, Florida but with a spectacular dragon dance in the streets of Shanghai.
Nik Dholakia
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