Restoration Joe's
A new kind of chain store
has emerged to cater to affluent baby boomers who think of themselves as
practical, but who are easily gulled into buying things for which they have no
obvious practical need. It is a store that knows yuppie materialism is a kind
of materialism that thinks of itself as anti-materialistic, because yuppies
tend to confuse their restless pursuit of Authenticity when purchasing retail
goods with an indifference to material things. It is a store that takes
everyday items and buffs them up just enough that they seem like luxury items
and yet (usually) keeps prices relatively low. It is a store that, if you
happen to be an affluent baby boomer, understands more about you and the things
that give you pleasure than you understand yourself.
The typical posture of such an enterprise is that
it is, to quote promotional material for REI, a popular chain of camping gear
stores, "more than a store." It is a community. You may wander into Borders
bookstore without a thought in the world of buying anything, except perhaps a
cup of coffee. Should you happen, amid your browsing, to find something you
want to purchase, the store will labor to treat it as an unexpected windfall.
At the more aggressive (and youthful) end of the spectrum, Urban Outfitters
turns its stores into theatrical sets suitable for staging the works of Eugène
Ionesco. J. Peterman, a catalog retailer with a few stores here and there, goes
so far as to make its products seem incidental to the spirit they're meant to
evoke. The company "describes" a $345 cream colored silk jacket thusly in its
catalog:
The photograph on the dust jacket of
her book shows her in jeans and blazer, standing at the edge of a deep canyon
(inherited from her father). The book itself is "serious, perceptive, skirting
the edges of hilarity and terror." You'd never guess she's a lethal player of
poker. But the book doesn't go into any of that--the congenial barge trips on
rivers in France, the "innocent" trips down the Nile, the lucrative
transatlantic crossings, making grown men cry.
As this passage suggests, a common theme in these stores is
camp nostalgia. Another is the soullessness of retail as practiced by the
nonelect. "I think that giant American corporations should start asking
themselves if the things they make are really, I mean really, better than the
ordinary," the eponymous Mr. Peterman avers on his catalog's first page, under
the heading "Philosophy."
Two chains in particular
excel at this new style of retailing: Trader Joe's and Restoration
Hardware. Although they position themselves as "practicality" stores, you'd
never visit them to buy more Jell-O for the kids or a molly bolt to hang a new
warehouse lamp. Rather, they invite you to question the underlying assumptions
behind your everyday needs and to reorder those needs.
Both stores are somewhat difficult to classify. Trader
Joe's sells food, but it isn't really a grocery store. "The traditional grocery
store handles between 25,000 and 40,000 items," says Trader Joe's spokeswoman
Michele Gorski. "We handle between 1,500 and 2,000." But don't think of it as a
gourmet shop, because it's bigger and less pricey than most gourmet shops.
(When the prices are high, the store is quick to make a joke of it, as it does
with its private-label "Really Expensive Authentic Handcrafted" frozen chicken
burrito, which sells for $2.19.)
Similarly, Restoration
Hardware calls itself a hardware store and stocks a few items that might
legitimately be termed hardware--multiple-head carbine screwdrivers, fold-up
pliers, flashlights with old metallic ribbing, etc. But these items, along with
a sprinkling of kitchen ware, gardening supplies, and whimsical doodads such as
an old-fashioned hand warmer, are essentially the amuse-bouches served
up before the main course, which is a sleigh bed, a leather and cherry bentwood
recliner, or some other hunk of massive retro furniture. Restoration Hardware
is a home furnishings store for people who think of themselves as too austere
for such fripperies (but really aren't).
Both chains present themselves as bucking the aesthetic and
moral poverty of corporate America. Joe Coulombe started Trader Joe's in 1958
as the Pronto chain of convenience stores in Los Angeles. A decade later,
Coulombe reoriented the stores toward gourmet foods offered at cut-rate prices.
Eventually, the store ceased to carry "lines" of goods at all, instead selling
mostly private-label versions of a few staples (corn flakes, olive oil) and
more exotic goods such as British-style crumpets and carbonated water blended
with elderflowers. The chain guarantees that if any item can be found cheaper
elsewhere, it will stop carrying it. "We like to suggest that some of our best
customers are unemployed Ph.D.s," says Gorski. "These are knowledgeable people
that have traveled and read, but they're still looking for a bargain." Gorski
has no secretary; neither, she says, do the company's CEO and two
presidents.
Such austere commitment
to Quality and Value would be easier to commend wholeheartedly if it didn't
reek quite so much of snob appeal. One has to remind oneself that this is an
enterprise whose ultimate goal is monetary profit. Who owns Trader Joe's,
anyway? Coulombe sold out in 1979 and retired in 1988. Although the chain
preserved his hokey South Pacific décor and still touts the chain's goods in
its eccentric "fearless flyers"--illustrated with 19 th century pen
and ink clip art, no less--it treats the identities of its new owners as some
sort of state secret. When pressed, Gorski says they are European and that
she's met them. Clippings from the Los Angeles Times and U.S. News
& World Report identify the owners as the Albrechts, a German family
that owns about 10 percent of Albertson's, a U.S. supermarket chain. What?
Trader Joe's is owned by supermarket people? Say it ain't so!
R estoration Hardware's origins smack more distinctly of
counterculture rebellion. The company, which is now traded publicly, was
started in 1980 by a psychologist named Stephen Gordon, who was restoring a
Queen Anne-style house in Eureka, Calif., and found it maddeningly difficult to
locate the period-style fixtures he needed. Finally he started selling the
stuff himself. The company's Web page depicts him as a Cincinnatus of
retailing, one who "did not set out to found a retail group, but did so as a
result of one of his passions, the discovery of fine craftsmanship and
design."
Like Trader Joe's,
Restoration Hardware does not carry "lines" but rather selects individual items
that seem to capture the store's "spirit," many of which are made exclusively
for the chain. The presentation of these items is hushed and museumlike, with
just dash of whimsy. The little identifying cards psychologist Gordon sets
beside each item display an impressive mastery of the manipulative arts. "FOUR
GENERATIONS OF MAINE FISHERMEN COULD BE WRONG ... BUT WE DOUBT IT," reads a
card beside four sizes of woven metal baskets in Restoration Hardware's
Georgetown store. To refrain from purchasing one would insult the working class
and dishonor the labor of our fathers' fathers! "Hey ... we, like you, secretly
covet recliners," purrs the card beside a 1952-style Metro Finer Recliner,
priced at $990. But there are only "a few of us who possess a stout enough
psychological profile to allow ourselves or even imagine ourselves purchasing a
big cushy wonder boy or girl reclining chair." Let's pause for a moment to map
the nuances of that pitch. 1) Snob appeal: We all know recliners are tacky. 2)
Sympathy: And yet you secretly desire one so you can capture some magical
moments from your childhood. 3) Challenge: Dare you rise to the occasion, like
Raskolnikov, and reject the petty rules that govern lesser men? 4) Smugness:
You may be buying your dad's chair, but you are not going to play that gender
dominance game that he played. It's your wife's chair too! Wonder boy
indeed!
The editors of the Baffler , a little magazine of
cultural criticism, have coined an extremely handy term to describe the spirit
of stores like Restoration Hardware and Trader Joe's: "Commodify your dissent."
In a book of essays with that title, the process of turning counterculture
rebellion into profit-making opportunity that does absolutely nothing to
challenge the status quo is described in various settings, such as Nike (which
used William S. Burroughs to sell sneakers) and the films of Quentin Tarantino
("always hip but scrupulously content-free"). In the case of Restoration
Hardware and Trader Joe's, the dissent (hence the commodification) is a bit
more subtle and has more to do with the harnessing of postgrad hauteur mingled
with a longing for simpler times. But in both stores, one is similarly invited
to live out vain fantasies about who one is, or should be. The spell is broken
only when you leave the store, realize that you've just bought $200 worth of
merchandise, and understand you're just another schmuck consumer.
