The Value Bucket
Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 10:35AM The other day I was driving through one of those highway commercial strips. The Librarian was riding shotgun. More accurately, she was riding Freshly Baked Peach Pie, if what the passenger is holding is the determinant. We passed a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. The sign out front touted “The Value Bucket.” The Librarian noted the sign and observed, “It’s crappy, and you don’t want to think about where it came from, but it’s cheap and there’s a lot of it.”
We agreed that this was an excellent metaphor for much of what Americans consume. To torture another metaphor, fried chicken is just the tip of the iceberg (lettuce).
Consider clothing, although much of it lacks even the virtue of being cheap. The majority of it is made to fall apart, sewn by underpaid, overworked, abused people. Same goes for all those bits of consumer electronics, from ear buds to desktop computers. Also small consumer goods in general, from table lamps to blenders. We’ve all got closets full of this junk, some of it still partially functional. Closets full? Those self-storage places seem to have sprung up everywhere in the past decade. No doubt they are full of sawdust-and-glue furniture, old televisions, area rugs outgassing formaldehyde, and other wretched plastic detritus.
Just as well that those televisions are in the storage bin. Otherwise the two-dimensional screens would be displaying one-dimensional plots and characters interspersed with zero-dimensional corporate propaganda – by which I mean both commercials and “news.” Television offers us a Value Bucket even more greasy, rancid, and overflowing than the dumpster behind KFC.
By contrast, I’ll share the advice my father gave me when I turned eighteen, which was drinking age back then. We went to a local bar, ordered drinks, and he offered the following: “If you only learn one thing from my mistakes, learn this – never drink cheap booze. If you have just a little bit of money, buy a very little bit of the very best you can find. You’ll have just as much fun. Your head will thank you and your stomach will thank you.” The Minor Heretic has followed this advice, with rare exceptions, to this day. It goes beyond alcohol, however. It is decent advice for consumption in general.
I suppose it is futile to advise most Americans to drink a couple of decent quality beers instead of a six-pack of that dilute cat urine they call light beer, or eat fewer calories of better food. Recommending small efficient cars instead of four-wheeled dirigibles or compact, well designed houses instead of 5,000 square foot McMansions is shouting against the hurricane. Our tastes have expanded to fill the available space and won’t contract until nature puts its foot down. By nature I mean not only our overstrained biosphere, but also the declining deposits of minerals and fossil fuels and our own overfed, overstressed bodies. We’ll gorge today and repent in the intensive care unit.
The Librarian and I fled the strip and ended up at the house of some old friends. We ate pizza topped with their own produce and baked in their stone oven and accompanied it with their home made wine. We followed it with the aforementioned peach pie. It wasn’t expensive food, except in the cost of time and care. Those last two factors are the key to understanding the Value Bucket dilemma. We have been robbed of time by a corporate economy bent on extracting more work for lower wages. We have been propagandized into caring more about quantity than quality, and to accept shoddiness as a fact of life.
Still, I count among my friends many holdouts against speed and volume. We’re fighting a delicious battle against the forces of the Value Bucket. Join us.
food in Economics, Human Behavior
Reader Comments (5)
Actually, I put "cheap" on the other side of the "but": It's crappy, and you don't want to think about where it came from, but it's cheap and there's a lot of it. In value-bucket mentality, low price and high quantity are the characteristics valued over every other imaginable thing.
It's only a certain kind of culture that could apply the phrase "value bucket" to food and expect it to impart any sort of appeal. I should've gotten a picture of the sign: with the crooked all-capital letters, and each word on a separate line, the presentation matched the content remarkably well.
It is corrected, thanks. It makes more sense that way.
M.H.
I can just see it now: turning up your nose as you sip your maple-sweetened latte and chortling at the blameless, well-intentioned Value Bucket. How can you be this cold-hearted, this unpatriotic?! Why do you hate America??
Millions of high-calorie Americans daydream about and crave the Value Bucket. Shouldn't you be a little more respectful? Is quality really all it's cracked up to be? Too good for Captain Crunch? Well let me be the first to say...
EXCUU--UUUSE ME!!
This goes along with the Visa ads that played about two years ago.
"I want it all, and I want it now!"
This mentality is a main cause of the economic problems the country is experiencing and the reasons people are not recovering quickly. Their "I want it all" mentality has not changed. Quality not quantity, sustainability not excessive consumerism is the way our economy and our world can attempt to survive.
You get more chicken in a Value Bucket. I think that's the point. Anyway, GREAT POST!!