Attention Shoppers

Great news recently from your favorite financial news network: Several U.S. manufacturers have recently announced their intentions to decrease the number of discount coupons they circulate to consumers. Some promised to lower prices as well. Cheaper goods and no more time with scissors. A good deal, right?

In her essay "Revaluing Economics," Gloria Steinem reminds us that it was John Kenneth Galbraith who coined the term "consumption manager" and pointed out that a generation of middle-class women were being trained for the explicit purpose of keeping the capitalist economy going. They were being trained as professional buyers. Also, "the family of higher income...sets the consumption patterns to which others aspire. That such families be supplied with intelligent, well-educated women of exceptional managerial competence is thus of further importance...."

Indeed, it takes time to spend money and set consumption standards. And if Dad is going to be in the factories and offices of America earning the bacon, someone will have to take charge of redistributing said bacon back into the economy. It is no accident that supermarkets and department stores are consciously, and openly, designed to be appealing to women.

At the same time, studies show that the average American family spends 8 hours a week shopping, an increase of 400 percent since the 1950s, due in large part to the increasing size and complexity of supermarkets, department stores, and malls.

My husband Joe and I are late thirty-something and early forty-something. One thing that attracted each of us to the other is our shared tendency toward social rebellion. Among other leftist labels we could apply, I am a feminist; he is as anti-sexist as possible.

Joe was a bachelor for decades, and has even cared for older relatives. Perhaps because of his vast domestic experience, he and I have never had to discuss a fairly equitable distribution of household chores. From the beginning, we shared housecleaning and laundry equally; I do a bit more cooking these days only because he has a heavier outside-the-house workload; he takes the trash out more often and haggles willingly with mechanics about car repairs.

Fairly equal. So why am I doing all of the shopping? For some reason, feminism has not yet gone to the market.

Eight hours a week shopping. When I read about the increase, I thought about my own busy schedule. As a dedicated coupon-clipper, sale-flyer-reader, and bulk-buyer, I pride myself on what I thought was a fairly clever subversion of Madison-Avenue-run capitalist supermarket structures. I have done the work of differentiating between what I need and what I’m being teased—by my upper-middle-class neighbors and by advertising—into wanting. I have eliminated completely the use of shopping as a recreational activity. I was certain that my average would be well under eight hours.

I started clipping coupons when our "circumstances" were "reduced," as they used to say. And I could not get him to stop buying brands, which are the only things you can get coupons for anyway.

My freelance schedule is fairly flexible, and I prefer to shop during a weekday because the aisles are clearer and I can linger over prices, calculating in my head the best deal available on a can of Light Red Kidney Beans. Often I encounter a truly professional Market Maven, as Mavens prefer weekdays too. Her cart is loaded carefully and she balances a big notebook of coupons, a battery-operated adding machine, and lists she is marking with a red pen. Ask yourself if you’ve ever encountered a man doing this in a supermarket.

But when you get that can of Select Baby Peas for a nickel—regularly priced at an absolutely ridiculous 97 cents—it’s like flipping the middle-class bird to every big boy CEO at once. Yeah, we sure showed them.

But wait: something else is going on here. Despite our wonderful domestic equality, if we need a hotel reservation, Joe would prefer that I make it. After all, I do have a stack of guide books for every discount hotel chain in the 48 states. If we need to send a mail order gift to someone—in my family or his—guess who looks through the equally tall stack of catalogues and makes the call? Guess who calls 800-FLY-4-LESS to reserve the airline tickets? Guess who decides it’s time to switch our long-distance carrier? Guess who’s in charge of transferring credit card debt to a cheaper interest rate?

It’s as if this intelligent, independent, capable man has, in the space of the last year, developed a severe allergy to 800 numbers. When I consider asking him to take more responsibility here, all I can think of is that his lack of patience will cause him to spend more money than we need to spend. Can’t have that.

Turns out that when you factor in everything I do during the week to spend money or plan to spend money, including paying the bills, I am spending about 11 hours on consumption management tasks. Joe, who loves cooking, food, and going to grocery stores, comes along shopping sometimes—but I estimate that he spends an average of maybe two hours per week shopping, usually with me, usually from a list I have made.

Which is a pretty incredible inequity in what is otherwise a fairly equitable division of labor. How can this be? It seems clear to me that both he and I have been suckered.

So now they’re going to cut back on the amount of coupons they distribute. I smelled this coming last year. Post Cereals conducted an extensive advertising campaign to announce that they were lowering their prices and would be offering fewer coupons. They cited the expense of coupon distribution as the reason, and that only 2 percent of coupons are redeemed anyway.

Funny. If it’s true that only 2 percent of coupons are used, and if it’s true that producers distribute coupons to attract consumers, then why didn’t they stop using them long ago?

Does anyone else find it odd that manufacturers apparently got together on this announcement? Or that this amazingly minor bit of news was covered by most of the cable business shows? How many coupon clippers watch these shows? It’s not us girls <D>they were talking to.

I have enjoyed this little game I have played against Corporate America. Joe rolls his eyes when I stack coupons, but I continue despite the ridicule, confident in the idea that I am costing Capitalist America 92 cents.

Score one for us, right? Wrong. For one thing, I don’t really rob the Big Boys of all that much money. During the month I kept track of the time I was spending, I also calculated how much money I saved. On food, I saved about $15 with coupons and another $20 by stocking up on often-used items which happened to be on sale. Deduct $5 for the cost of the Sunday paper. Hell, $30—that’s just the cable bill. Basic cable, at that.

By offering me that discount, the grocery stores and producers I frequented found in me some business they otherwise would not have had, right? Wrong. Sale flyers and coupons don’t really attract new business. I would have gone to that store anyway. There are only so many food stores in any one neighborhood, after all. If Tropicana Premium is on sale at one store, it’s on sale at the others too, or soon to be. Then what the hell are these things for?

Sale flyers, coupons, and contemporary designs of supermarkets are used to entice women to continue their work as consumption managers.

On some level, I knew this all along. I knew that when I was using a coupon, the Big Boys wanted me to use it. While I was rewarded with the feeling of having gotten one over on them, they too were clearly getting something for their 92 cents.

It was a win-win relationship, I thought. Wrong again. What they’re getting for their money is the creation of a marketplace complexity that forces every household to designate an expert. By forcing households to appoint a consumption manager, the Big Boys assure that consumption will continue. It’s clear that, despite the fact that we live in what some now refer to as the "post-feminist" age, the Big Boys still expect women to be that expert. Coupon lay-outs are always addressed directly <D>to women. "His snoring is your problem," asserts a coupon ad for an anti-snoring pill.

Of course Joe is going to tune this out. It’s not even addressed to him. In fact, it insults him.

I see the results of the decrease in coupon distribution already. My Sunday coupon flyers are stuffed more and more with mail-order ads for cheap Wonderbra rip-offs, and featherweight vacuum cleaners so expensive they don’t even put the price in the ad. "I lost 87 pounds fast. Without dieting."

For some reason, the Big Boys are leaving the game. They’re pulling the financing on the competition. They save the money, we save the time. Another win-win, right? Can’t be. Let’s review.

Contemporary supermarket design has forced U.S. women to spend half again as much time shopping as they used to. Galbraith asserts that economic growth requires a steady increase in the workload of the consumption manager.

Sixty-five percent of married women work outside the home these days. Tighter and tighter schedules explain why fewer and fewer middle-class women have the patience for coupon clipping. Despite women’s tightening schedules, the middle class has seen its standard of living stagnate since 1960. Many middle-class households now work two and more jobs for the standard of living once provided by one.

Clearly, a designated consumption expert is even more necessary, since people have little time to shop these days. But since the economy, the new supermarkets, and contemporary social circumstance have all worked to make shopping more challenging anyway, coupons are no longer necessary to complicate, artificially, the marketplace. The Big Boys have finished their brainwashing. We have now internalized our gender-specific roles of consumption manager, and its corollary, the consumption incompetent. Corporate America correctly perceives that it is no longer necessary to finance the enforcement of these roles through coupons.

The first step toward the subversion of this gender-specific capitalist manipulation is an awareness of how both men and women are being exploited. With obvious hardware-store exceptions, the current supermarket drives men away by making them feel inexpert, leaving the field free for women. Women have less social power overall and are thus more easily maneuvered by a false reward for an expert knowledge which is inaccurate, and obscures actual marketplace mechanisms. Thus, men defer these tasks, and women volunteer for them, even claim to prefer doing them.

With this awareness comes choice. In Joe’s and my circumstances, I may still clip coupons. But I may choose to subvert a consumer system that is forcing a predetermined behavior upon me, and opt out of the game completely.

Makes you think: Imagine what would happen if all the consumption managers went on strike for a week. Anyone game?

H. Kassia Fleisher is a freelance writer from Chicago.