KrispyKremocracy
by Roland Barphe, editor of Excressences and
head of media studies at the Polyvalente de Saint-Tite
The current difficulties of the Krispy Kreme corporation [Editor's note: This article was first published in 2004] may simply be the result of bad business strategy, or they may be the sign that we are about to save ourselves from our misery.
For what company better serves as a symbol of the modern industrial state? The product on which Krispy Kreme has realized its enormous fortunes is the perfect symbol for the life of the citizen of the modern "democratic" industrial state – a bland, homogeneous, boring base rendered sickeningly sweet by a massive layer of sugar, the result being toxic.
The product is neither crispy nor creamy – but then it never promised to be either! It's not crispy, it's Krispy! It's not creamy, its Kremy! What are Krispness and Kreminess? Why, they're what Krispy Kreme gives us!
Finally, Krispy Kreme has perfected the Skinner box model of business described in a perceptive article by my colleague Wentworth Sutton. Like other practitioners of this business strategy, Krispy Kreme rewards customers for spending time in the store (time they chiefly spend lining up). In addition, Krispy Kreme has added a phenomenon known as stimulus control – Krispy Kreme commands its customers to appear by switching on a neon sign in the window when it is ready to serve customers! Similarly, rats and pigeons are often trained to press or peck the keys in their Skinner boxes only when a light is on.
And in the lives of us modern citizens, the equivalent of the imperious light is the ubiquitous imperious clock. The typical modern citizen is a well trained performer who performs specific tricks at specific times – getting up, showing up at work, going to lunch, going home, turning on television shows, going to bed, getting up again, and so on.
This life is as interesting as the bland unvarying dough which forms the basis of the Krispy Kreme donut. Like the donut it is made tolerable by the layering on of sugar in the form of sentimentality and flattery. Our "information media" flood our consciousnesses with tales of heartwarming courage and generosity, of thrilling love, and of a need to recognize our great personal worth and admirability. Our lives are to be thought of as noble histories, full of dash, magnanimity, and love, when in fact they are largely humdrum tales of making the mortgage payment and getting enough fibre.
Our lives resemble real lives in the same way that Krispy Kremes resemble real pastry.
Our leaders embellish this mythical life we lead by encouraging us to believe that we are powerful creatures who control our own destinies! An election is an occasion for debate of weighty issues of crucial import to the survival of society, conveniently conducted in words of one syllable. Between elections we are fed various romantic tales – about health care, for example, or social relations. And in the end we do what we are told.
But now Krispy Kreme is in danger! One explanation of its current travails is that carbohydrate-conscious consumers are turning their backs on the dollops of sugarcoated fluff that Krispy Kreme feeds us. Consumers have decided that they want to be sold food that is not bad for them.
While, like my fellow commentators here, I am worried about the strong religious element in food faddishness (for example, consider Essence de Vere's earlier article), our furiously competitive diet peddlers seem finally to have, in desperation, turned for a marketing advantage to…reality! And we, the public, seem for once to be…taking reality seriously! We are thinking about the consequences of our actions rather than fantasizing about them!
Whoa! Hold on there! Have we thought this through? Now that we've started thinking about our eating, we may end up wondering why we are trying eat more healthily. We may start asking ourselves why we want to lead longer lives which consist of even more boredom, futility, servility, and self-delusion than our current shorter ones. We may start trying to get our leaders and employers to remove the boredom, futility, and servility from our lives, just the way we have forced fast food chains to put salads on their menus.
And then we could attack the final enemies, the authors of our self-delusions – namely us. Once we have conquered our own delusions and shortcomings, our lives will blossom into joyous series of rewarding and beneficial experiences and accomplishments!
Of course we have to balance the probability of that accomplishment against its desirability. Perhaps the likelihood of achieving that goal in any useful length of time is too small for attempting the goal to be worthwhile. And besides, someone has to take the kids to hockey practice and the dog to the vet and my ass to work because they won't be suspending mortgage payments for the duration of the struggle for self-realization.
Gimme one of them donuts.
Posted December 1, 2004
KrispyKremocracy © John FitzGerald, 2004
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