Adam Menter’s Blog

Julie and I finally took our first trip to Tahoe on January 27th. Since we don’t have a car, we took the SnowBomb bus up there. Despite having to board the bus at 4:00 am on the other side of the city, it was a wonderful experience. Once on the bus, we were able to sleep most of the way up there. We woke up when we were about 25 minutes from the slope and the trip leaders were handing out breakfast (a bagel, yogurt, and juice…more than I’d expected). We got to Heavenly before the slopes even opened and were some of the first folks up the hill. We got a full day of skiing in. The weather was beautiful and the snow stayed pretty good all day. It was good to get back on skis after over 2 years. After skiing, we met back at the bus for an Aprés Ski party with wine, hot drinks, and snacks. We pulled out of the parking lot at 4:15 pm and watched movies on the way back. We were allowed to drink on the bus - and we thoroughly enjoyed watching Talladega Nights while getting mildly hammered on Labbat Blue. We were back in the city by 9 after a very full and enjoyable day. The price tag for the trip was only $99 - a fantastic deal when you consider that lift tickets normally cost $79, we didn’t have to drive, we got to watch movies, and we even got food and some wine out of the deal. I’m looking forward to our next SnowBomb trip.

This afternoon my girlfriend and I went shopping for some jeans for each of us. I figured that since I am going to start working, I might want more than 2 pairs of pants. Anyway, our retail experience was pretty bad. Bad enough to comment about it on this blog. I am a tall guy and it is hard to find my size (34″x36″). The store layout and displays at the Levi’s store did everything in their power to make sure that, in the unlikely event that they had my size, I would not be able to find it. The jeans were not really organized by size, were folded and turned the wrong way, and were draped in piles that made them impossible to scan through.  I ended up craning my neck, crawling on the floor, flipping the jeans every which way, and opening hidden cupboards. It was dehumanizing. When I finally found one pair of jeans in the sale rack that fit me, I learned at the check-out that they weren’t, in fact, on sale (a new color).  Our next stop was Diesel. It was worse. The sales clerks were in-attentive and disinterested (the Levi’s folks, in contrast, were very nice), the music was loud, the displays were abstract, and the other customers were just milling around and seemed out of it. We were directed to different areas of the store, couldn’t really find what we wanted, and eventually just looked around and said to ourselves: “We feel like we are on drugs right now. Let’s go. Screw this.”

I knew what I wanted and I was ready to buy - but those two retail environments just drove me away. I could have been in and out in 10-15 minutes if I had been able to find what I was looking for efficiently. Next time I’m going to head straight to Old Navy.

I loved the illustration on the recent NY Times article about package design for organic & natural foods (”Be It Ever So Homespun, There’s Nothing Like Spin” by Kim Severson). Check out the image below.

If you can’t read the text, some highlights are:

• “In 2005, Grandma Peach (R) foundted Wildmeadow Farm ™ with one simple mission ~ to save the planet. And along the way to provide all natural biodegradable products for you and your beloved pets.”
• “For Today’s Healthy Lifestyles ~ And For De-Icing Driveways”

I hate having to wade through green-washed products at the grocery store. This article points out the common packaging tricks. “I’ve uncovered the essential elements of a greenwashed product. Start with a gentle image of a field or a farm to suggest an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family. To that end, strangely oversize vegetables or fruits are good. If they are dew-kissed and nestled in a basket, all the better. A little red tractor is O.K. Pesticide tanks and rows of immigrant farm laborers bent over in the hot sun are not.”

One good point that the article makes is that a lot of consumers assume that hard core “green elites” are being watchdogs for the rest of us for every product on the shelves…and that if the product says its “good” it must be or these green elites would have held hunger strikes, protests, and sit-ins to protest it and take it off the market. These are probably also the same consumers who don’t realize that “Dehydrated Cane Juice” is sugar. According to the article, this “design desperation” should continue for another 5 years or so before consumers wise up.

I receive the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi’s quarterly publication, “The Bent.” In the past I haven’t read it very much - but I picked up the past two issues and was pleasantly surprised. The writing is not stellar and the subjects are often decidedly nerdy but it is a fascinating counter-point to the design-y, innovation focused media I usually peruse and also to my staple NYTimes and Economist reading. One thing that I was particularly impressed with in the most recent issue was the pre-highlighted text of the feature article. I was mildly interested in the subject but I didn’t have the time or desire to read the whole article. So I just read the highlighted section and got the gist of the whole article, reading a bit past the highlights when my interest was piqued.

I have not seen this technique before and I liked it. It seems like I have mountains of stuff to read and this makes my life easier. All of the information is there if I want it (unlike digest publications like The Week) but if I am in a hurry I can just skip through the highlights (unlike the full articles of most magazines). It was as though I inherited a pre-highlighted text book to focus my attention on the main tidbits. I guess there is an inherent assumption built into this technique that some publishers will find hard to swallow (the article is not worth spending time to read in its entirety). I found it effective and wonder when I will see it again.

I recently read an article in the New York Magazine about a new social phenomenon of people in their 30s and 40s who are still on the cutting edge of fashion, music, and culture (Up With Grups - The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who Are Redefining Adulthood). They are living like 22 year olds but with have the jobs, paychecks, responsibilities, and families of adults. Basically, in certain circles, the generation gap has disappeared. This is actually something I have been thinking about for a little while. There was a huge generation gap between my grandparents and parent’s generation and a smaller (but still very tangible) generation gap between my generation and my parents’. While the “Grups” in the article are still a few years my senior, I can relate. I think a few things are at work here:

1) My generation was brought up to be hard-wired for change. If there is one constant in society, it is change. And it comes faster and faster these days. In my grandparents’ generation, things changed an incredible amount. Cars weren’t widely adopted when they were kids, let alone the boom of computers. While they were good at driving this change with business , their culture (probably inherited somewhat from their parents) was more fixed. They were not used to things moving so fast. Not so at all with my generation. Since I was in middle school my generation has been used to keeping up with the latest trends - not just fashion trends but trends that redefine the way people live, like cell phones and e-mail. We are used to accepting change and learning how to adopt it.

2) We are spoiled. We have grown up in an era of incredible affluence and haven’t really been challenged as a generation. My grandparents had to deal with the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, etc… My parents had to deal with Vietnam. Our lives haven’t been disrupted by “duty” - either to country or family. Furthermore, my parents didn’t have Wal-Mart or China, Inc. to cater affordably to their every material need as they were growing up. My generation has grown up taking our incredible affluence and freedom of personal choice as a given - and we are choosing to continue to live a fast paced, ever-changing, life of fun. We are free to follow our passions.

3) We live in the era of “the long tail.” Our tastes and preferences are not defined in a generational way. Largely gone are the days of mega-blockbuster hits (movies and music) that are fed to us by huge media companies and widely adopted by a certain age group. Groups are now defined not as much by age, but by mindset. You’ll find me watching Bollywood movies, reading Tom Robbins, or listening to Merle Haggard. So at once my contemporaries are Indians, quirky baby boomers, and old-school blue collar republicans. There is no way you can cater to me in one fell swoop. My tastes and preferences change at different speeds in different areas of my life. As an avid music fan who grew up in the days of Napster, I can’t imagine ever not being at the cutting edge of the music scene. I’ll always be mingling with 18 year olds who choose to appreciate my kind of music.