Who Buys What?

The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What It All Means About Who We Are
by Michael J. Weiss

(Page 3 of 9)

A journey through the clustered world reveals that such mass-appeal businesses do not reach out and touch millions. Not all Americans have equal access to McDonald's and mall outlets; indeed, there are many clusters where consumers have never sampled the tart taste of an Arch Deluxe. And the creeping sameness of malls is one reason that over the last three years, some analysts estimate, as many as 600 of the nation's 2,000 malls have experienced financial trouble. In contemporary America, different products and brands mean different things to different people. The hip city dwellers of Young Literati and Urban Gold Coast may look down on McDonald's as a déclassé purveyor of fat-laden meat and fries, counter to their lifestyle, which celebrates lean, low-cholesterol health food. In Norma Rae-ville, a cluster of mill towns concentrated in the Southeastern states, having a McDonald's in town is a sign that your community is no longer a backwater. In Monroe, Georgia, a cluster community where the closest white-tablecloth restaurants are a twenty-minute-drive away in Athens, residents were tickled when a McDonald's outlet recently arrived. On a Saturday afternoon, it's often the center of community activity, the cars lined up fifteen deep at the drive-in window. Many wish more chains would move in. As one resident observes, "I'd really feel like we made it if a Red Lobster came to town."

Of course, regional loyalties that once thrived in geographic isolation still affect values and consumer patterns. In the kitchens of the Northwest, coffee bean grinders are mandatory. Salsa has outsold ketchup for years in the Southwest. "If it ain't fried, it ain't Southern" is how one resident of the Red, White & Blues town of Hiram, Georgia, describes her regional cuisine, which includes fried peach pie. Sales of grits still mimic the old boundaries of the Confederate States of America. Fashion designers have long known that logos confer different degrees of status depending on where shoppers live. When Rough Hewn clothiers slapped logos on shirts and sweaters, they became hot items in the Southeast; in the Northeast, sales plummeted.

And yet, as major corporations continually foist their uniform products and national brands on consumers across the land, regional differences are having less and less influence. Sharper distinctions of taste occur up and down the cluster ladder. Along the mean streets of Inner Cities neighborhoods in the South Bronx, some young adults will literally kill for a Starter jacket or pair of Timberland shoes, their logos prominently displayed. An hour away in the upscale Second City Elite town of Northport, some shoppers cut out the designer labels of new clothes so they won't be judged by anything so superficial. These consumers look to other products and brands - albeit with more subtle logos - to connect them to their cluster community.

More and more, Americans define their world view through a cluster lens. In Big Fish, Small Pond, an upper-middle-class lifestyle typified by Mount Juliet, Tennessee, a bedroom suburb of Nashville, an important measure of success is which college your child attends. Befitting their interest in education, residents are more likely than the general population to buy the latest books and computers. But in Lynchburg, Tennessee, a downscale rural town classified as Shotguns & Pickups, what matters is how your son or daughter performs on a basketball court or athletic field. Residents speak of the importance of athletics over academics in a community where the major employer is Jack Daniel's distillery. "The most popular kids in high school are the ones who play on the basketball team, not who get the good grades," says librarian Sara Hope, adding that patrons resist reading newsweeklies and out-of-town papers. "People here aren't looking for the latest product seen on a TV commercial," explains Clayton Knight, assistant manager at the Lynchburg Hardware and General Store. "They all know the good old products." Indeed, at the local pharmacy, shoppers can still buy liniment, lye soap, and Watkin's vanilla flavoring, as their grandparents did before them.

In an age of overwhelming consumer choices, cluster residents look to brand names and product myths as distinguishing lifestyle markers. Saturn car owners can now gather for company-sponsored "reunions" - though they've never previously met. The upscale, politically correct urban residents of Money & Brains support the Body Shop and the myth of its founder, Anita Roddick, who supposedly jets around the globe in search of ancient potions that can save the rainforests by making their plants and peoples - at last - economically viable. David Brooks, an editor at the Weekly Standard in Washington, D.C., noticed that many of his neighbors in the Money & Brains neighborhood of Cleveland Park liked things "rough." "Smoothness connotes slickness, glitz, the Reagan '80s," he wrote in the Washington Post. "Roughness connotes authenticity, naturalness, virtue. Whether it's bread, clothing, or furniture, you can never have too much texture. That's why unrefined sugar is now considered the height of refinement." While his neighbors may all agree that coffee bars like Starbucks are essential to their community, they can still realize individual self-actualization by ordering complex concoctions like a half-decaf, no-foam, double-shot skim latte with almond syrup and a dash of cinnamon.

Moving to other clusters causes people to adopt new buying patterns, but most Americans inhabit only a handful throughout the course of their lives. Mobility rates have been steadily declining even while fracturing trends have increased due to economic shifts and increasing divorce rates, among other trends. Twenty years ago, 20.1 percent of all Americans moved every year. Today that figure is 16.7 percent. "Most people move to where they've been before, either where they went to school or vacation," reports Kristin Hansen, a mobility expert at the Census Bureau. Now even laid-off workers are reluctant to move for a new job, though the cluster system may reflect a downshift in lifestyle at the same address. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an international outplacement firm, only 18 percent of laid-off managers and executives were willing to relocate for a new position in 1995 - the lowest figure in a decade. "We are becoming a nation of isolates in which we are apprehensive about venturing outside of the lives in which we have become so comfortable, even after we lose a job," observed John Challenger, executive vice president of the firm. Rather than risk moving to an unfamiliar setting, workers stay put, taking comfort in what real or imagined social and emotional support their communities provide.

This process has left too many Americans alienated from each other, divided by a cultural chasm. Just how wide and deep the differences are hit home when journalist Peter A. Brown examined whether the popular press is as out of touch with mainstream America as some critics claim. Brown cluster-coded the home addresses of 3,400 editors, reporters, and columnists for publications like USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Milwaukee Journal. He found that the vast majority of full-time journalists live in the ten wealthiest urban and suburban neighborhood types - clusters like Urban Gold Coast, Pools & Patios, and Blue Blood Estates. By contrast, they were markedly underrepresented in forty-eight of the clusters, including suburban middle-class lifestyle types that more closely aligned with their papers' readership - clusters such as Greenbelt Families and Middleburg Managers. As Brown observed, "Most journalists are different from real Americans. And their perspective on the world is different from how most Americans live." The American experience, most often seen from the viewpoint of educated and affluent white European descendants, must now be told in different ways.

In clusters like Hispanic Mix, home to downscale, predominantly Hispanic families, you can live most of your life without needing to speak or read English. In Atwater Village, a typical cluster neighborhood in Los Angeles, residents shop at carniceria meat markets, watch soap opera novellas on TV, and sing along in Spanish karaoke bars. It can be a dangerous place, with gang violence erupting over territory and drugs. But the local Chevy Chase Recreation Center serves as a sanctuary for children arriving after school to do homework, take arts classes, or play basketball. When local gang members hang out at the center's parking lot or handball court, director Sophia Pina-Cartez tries to cool hot tempers and maintain peace in the neighborhood. "I tell them, 'Don't tell me what you're up to, just don't make the children your victims,'" she says. "I just want to make this a safe haven."

Across the country in Glen Rock, New Jersey, an affluent suburb west of Manhattan classified as Money & Brains, residents faced a different sort of problem. Several years ago, the unmistakable odor of a nearby landfill wafted down their stately streets lined with solid Tudors and shady trees. People of eminently good taste and environmental sensitivity, these residents devised a solution apropos of their appreciation for the finer things in life. The local government scented the garbage dump with lemon, as if it were a huge cup of espresso. When that plan failed to clear the air, they did the next best thing. They hired a trucking outfit to haul all their garbage to another town. End of problem.

Today, the notion of a star-spangled melting pot seems quaint, of another age. Increasingly, America is a fractured landscape, its people partitioned into dozens of cultural enclaves, its ideals reflected through differing prisms of experience. And this fracturing is likely to continue as the self-concept of America shifts from a majority white-minority black nation to a pluralistic society of many ethnic and racial groups. At the close of what's been called the American Century, during which the nation emerged as the dominant world power in commerce and politics, old myths are dying hard and new ones are just being forged. In this clustered world, the national identity is changing, and most of us don't even know it.

Copyright © 2000 by Michael J. Weiss

About the Author

Michael J. Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and marketing consultant. A contributing editor to the Washingtonian and Ladies' Home Journal, he has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the Newport Times, Redbook, and People. His first book, The Clustering of America, was named one of the best business books of 1988. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C.