I don't go to Wally World, but I'm surprised they water down the Tide. I was told that bottles of Tide were currency for drug sales. If the Wal-Mart bottles are not marked, that's inflationary.
Re the grayscale thing, it's an interesting trend, but it is just a trend. Thankfully the IG link, while wordy, does not do the "it's all capitalism" handwave (which I assume OP was being at least somewhat facetious at, although I can definitely envision lots of social media posts glossing it that way).
The scary thing is that Dollar General is growing and its niche is basically "people who can't afford Wal-Mart or can't afford a car to drive to one. "
2: My understanding is that with cars, it's because it's easier to find substitute parts for repairs if there's fewer colors.
I guess we're Costco people now. It's sometimes inconvenient because the mayo jars are too big to fit into the door of the refrigerator.
4: Suspiciously monocausal. I feel like the trend is much bigger than in cars, and I don't know that it would have started with them.
I definitely have a post and sustained rant on why a new Dollar General is the most depressing harbinger possible.
Dollar General is sadness, incorporated.
6: fair point. I do like reductionism though. It's a guilty pleasure.
I thought Dollar Tree was a bank until like three weeks ago.
My understanding is that with cars, it's because it's easier to find substitute parts for repairs if there's fewer colors.
I tried to replace the fuel pump on my silver Volkswagen with one from a red VW and it was rejected by the host.
6 you see this in cinema, it's bursting with color in the 1950s and 1960s, and even in the 1970s films that were celebrated for their dark cinematography (like those lensed by cinematographer Gordon Willis, known as the Prince of Darkness") have a lot more color than most contemporary films. Just pick something like Villeneuve's Dune and compare it to Lynch's.
5: Yes, my wife decided we're boycotting Target, and so we joined Costco, and we've gone shopping there twice. It feels like every purchase there is a major investment decision. Will we be able to eat all these berries before they go bad? Will we need to build an annex to fit all this toilet paper?
The problem is Frank Gehry horded all the bright colors for this monstrosity -- https://www.tourismpanama.com/culture-cuisine/historical-sites/biomuseo/
11: Barbie had a lot of bright colors, didn't it?
7: Dollar General is sadness, incorporated.
My observation driving through non-prosperous rural Colorado a few years ago:
Big town: Walmart, several "dollar" stores, many dispensaries.
Small town: A dollar store and several dispensaries.
Tiny town: A dispensary.
12: We get Who Gives a Crap toilet paper by mail.
I thought the big bottles of soda were currency, because you can get them with food stamps.
I tend to think the grayscale thing is Because Capitalism, at least as far as houses and cars are concerned -- auto manufacturers and house builders and flippers want to make their products the least objectionable to the most consumers as possible. When I redid my kitchen and bathroom, my designer and contractor tried to discourage me from having brightly colored tile and flooring, on the grounds that it would hurt resale value. (In other words - I have an anecdote, so my theory must be correct.)
Can we blame safety standards? You see this fantastic saturated colors in, say, Edwardian bathroom tiles, and discover they look that good because they're glazed with irradiated arsenic polycarcinogen and stuff.
18: I'm old enough to remember back to a time when people would take about how everything was so gray under Communism.
How much longer are we supposed to be boycotting Target?* A limited boycott -- to make a point -- made sense to me, but a permanent boycott seems silly and counterproductive if the result is to drive consumers to spend their money at retailers who never engaged in any DEI initiatives to begin with.
*I've adhered to the boycott so far, but I think I might stop soon, because I also quit Amazon, and I don't shop at Walmart, and it's just not reasonable to shop at Costco for most things.**
**peep, get the pistachio kataifi ice cream bars. You'll have to buy a second freezer and maybe refinance your house, but you won't regret it.
19: Good point! And now with RFK Jr in charge we won't even have bright colors in our Fruit Loops!
20: Also old enought to confuse "take" and "talk", apparently.
Capitalism:
https://www.theverge.com/electric-cars/655527/slate-electric-truck-price-paint-radio-bezos
21: It's not a total boycott for us, for the reasons you give.
Mostly, we've started buying less across the board anyway. Saving in case I get laid off.
You'll be fine. In a couple of months you'll be the only person in PA who remembers how to do stats without a chatbot.
I'm sure I'll be fine in the longer run. We have tuition to pay in July.
re: 4
The chart is from all of the objects in the museum, though, not just from cars. Like 6 and 12, I think it's a wider trend.
I really notice it in product design, too. All of the "objects" that I own, like or covet--hi-fi stuff, pens, cameras, etc--is just horribly bland and ergonomically "meh" at best when compared to anything similar that's more than 20 years old.
My Dad died a couple of weeks ago, and while I'm generally fine, I wouldn't mind some minor cheering up. SO I've been shopping for some little hi-fi thing, or similar, and it's all uninspiring until you get to silly prices.
21: The folks who called the Target boycott in the first place say to keep at it: https://apnews.com/article/target-boycott-diversity-equity-inclusion-dei-8d0b3367ff4585fcf069e286dbb601c1
(Definitely the most personally-annoying boycott I've managed. Boycotting Walmart never seemed like something I could claim to be doing, because there isn't one anywhere nearby anyway)
My condolences. I'm very sorry to hear about your dad.
Not being an American has to be at least a little cheering.
Sorry for your loss.
I think part of what's driving that "all the options are meh" thing is that there's so much less variety among the standard products. Where I specifically notice this is that everyone makes the same phone. I would like to buy a new phone that's 5.5in or smaller, but there's just literally none on the market. It's not that no one wants it, it's just that not enough people want it for any of the companies to bother making it. Clothing of course is also a big place where quality has just plummeted over the past 20 years.
On the subject of object hobbies, I recently got into watches. One interesting thing there is that there's a whole "microbrand" segment where you get actually different and interesting designs. A bunch of this is driven by the fact that there's commodity movements (from Miyota=Citizen, Seiko, or Sellita) that you can use for the inside, and Chinese factories willing to do small runs for cases and faces. Even from a performance viewpoint, if you actually regulate the commodity movements then they'll keep good time, which a small watchmaker can do. Of course tariffs are going to kill it all.
Today hasn't been a great day for my object hobby, since my 1940 Lancaster-made watch stopped running. But it looks like I did good research, because the guy who sold it to me is going to get it running again for free.
My condolences, Ttam. I will try to think of something cheering.
Sorry to hear that, ttaM. It is rough to lose a beloved dad.
I am very interested in the truck in 24. M is always lamenting the disappearance of compact pickup trucks, and a small, cheap, electric pickup with no touchscreen sounds really attractive.
I had a compact pickup truck (Dodge Ram 50). It was great, but people kept asking me to help move stuff. I traded it in on a Dodge Neon when the transmission went out. A year later I saw my old truck in the parking lot at the movie theater. The guy had the whole front seat covered in trash and lots of cups filled with cigarette butts.
I might have had a point when I started that.
Why would someone ask him to move cups of cigarette butts to a movie theater? That guy had weird friends.
The gray trend definitely exists in baby clothes. When I was a kid, there were lots of gender neutral baby clothes in primary colors. Even the gendered stuff was in bright colors, even if often ugly. When my oldest was born in 2018, I found stuff advertised as gender neutral = gray. Finding any baby clothes anywhere with green or yellow was very challenging, unless I wanted to pay $45 for a onesie. (Maybe the rich are hoarding color?) Onesies were bundled so the one brightly colored onesie was only sold with 4 gray onesies attached. It got even more dire when he hit the toddler years and everything was black, gray, or navy. Things are getting a little better now but still not great (Old Navy is a real lifesaver in terms of color).
Women's clothes aimed at my demographic are mostly still dire. There's a clothing company I like but often don't buy things I might otherwise because the color choices are beige, dark beige, and gray. Same with home decor. I'm in the market for a new table cloth but not one that is gray, beige, or "stone" colored.
When you've accomplished something grand, you can't hide the smile from within.
Our whole house is beige. I painted it with my in-laws and we were too exhausted to mess around with cleaning brushes or masking borders. So, beige everything. Including the ceiling.
We painted a whole three-bedroom house, two coats because we had to cover pink, in five days despite only one of us knowing how to paint and only one of us being under sixty (not the same as the first).
5: I don't buy Mayo there except for fancy Kewpie. market basket is just as affordable. We actually ordered mayo off of Amazon. During lockdown, two LA Times food critics reviewed different mayonnaises. I tried a bunch of them and found that although I liked Duke's, my favorite was Blue Plate. Like Hellman's only creamier. It's also less expensive. I think I can order it from Blue Plate directly.
I'm sorry for your loss, ttaM. This is not a very good year.
14 there are definitely exceptions and also that was very much part t of the point of that film
Very sorry for your loss, ttaM; my condolences.?
Fuck me I don't know how that question mark got there ( drunk, that's how it got there).
I tend to think the grayscale thing is Because Capitalism, at least as far as houses and cars are concerned -- auto manufacturers and house builders and flippers want to make their products the least objectionable to the most consumers as possible.
This feels like homunculus discourse - why is this the least objectionable? Because consumer tastes changed!
Also I don't see how home or car construction is more capitalistic than in the 50's or 80's or whatever.
If I can seem more capitalistic than my forefathers, it's because I can stand on the shoulders of capitalism in the 50's or 80's or whatever.
Maybe it's an urban rural legend, but isn't the supposed explanation for red barns and red schoolhouses that red was the cheapest paint?
The one room schools in Nebraska were usually white at least when I could see them. Red barns weren't very common in Nebraska either.
Probably because that's a hundred years or more later than the norm.
Sorry for your loss, Ttam, not sure what bright colors could console, but maybe estate sales for serendipity?
Pinball backsplashes, rave flyers, sci-fi paperback covers ? None of these are well-made objects, maybe entirely wrong. Nothing compares to saturated glass for bright colors imo.
I learned how to remake stained glass windows once.
It uses enough lead to make a Republican want children to do it.
I am a bit surprised that American farmers don't bother with advanced sale contracts but just wait until harvest and then think ooh, I need to find someone to buy this stuff now before it rots.
I am *very* surprised that *Walmart* apparently doesn't secure its supplies in advance but just buys stuff at the farm gate! I suppose that's why they can't compete in Europe.
As someone who survived the 1970s, I am here to report that the world did not look better when manufactured products were more colorful.
If I'm remembering the wisdom of Calvin's father correctly, the world was black and white up until the 1930s. Naturally since color was a new thing, bright colors were very popular. Since then we've come to take colors for granted, so things have toned down.
"https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c
Here's the original study. They draw a different conclusion from Instagram - "The most notable trend, in both the chart and the video, is the rise in grey over time. This is matched by a decline in brown and yellow. These trends likely reflect changes in materials, such as the move away from wood and towards plastic. A smaller trend is the use of very saturated colours which begins in the 1960s."
OT: The pointy bony bit of my ankle, the one on the inside, is growing pointier. It sticks about maybe 3/4" more than the other one. It doesn't feel swollen or anything. It's like the bone grew. But it doesn't hurt. My other ankle is the one that hurts.
And no-one's even asking you to go and kill the yellow man.
I haven't opened my work email yet.
53: part of the idea is that people are decorating with the expectation that its main purpose is resale value, which means as bland as possible so it never looks dated (which it does, of course.) Gray is in just because the eighties were beige.
69: A beige joke from the eighties that I heard c. 1985 from a grad school friend who had recently overheard it while waiting with her fiance at a sawmill near Albany, NY. I think what prompted her to tell it to me was that we had just been told by my son's new daycare to get some beige tape for all his belongings so he (and all the other kids) would know in particular which bottle was his.
70: tell me more about your decision to put hyperlinks in boldface. I'll leave "why marcel proust?" for another time. These are my priorities.
I think "Proust" is a guy who wrote a book that I'll never read.
The Wikipedia plot summary is pages long.
It's the best book. It doesn't have boldface hyperlinks, though.
Apparently, they don't call it "Remembrance of Things Past" anymore. Which I just learned.
I wonder if R/Proust would ban me if I asked for the gist of it in many 200 words?
"A turn-of-the-century Frenchman of privileged background and refined tastes recalls episodes from his youth in which he learned the difference between a prostitute, a mistress, and a wife."
Need a really good ensemble-cast UK spy film. Structurally something along the lines of "Traffic" - so you could have three separate but linked plots. Say, a tense thriller plot set in Russia about trying to smuggle an agent out of the country, Gordievsky-style; a hacker plot about a GCHQ analyst unpicking the secure comms of an international criminal gang, like the EncroChat case; and a fish-out-of-water plot about a British intelligence officer in Turkey working with possibly corrupt Turkish intelligence officers on some joint operation, constant who-can-I-trust tension. You gradually bring the three plotlines together so that by the end it's clear that they're all parts of the same story. Final two minutes is the main characters briefing the director of operations on what they've found. Final line is the director going "you've convinced me. I'm meeting the minister tomorrow morning and my advice to her will be to authorise deployment of a Double O."
Cue the theme music and everyone in the audience suddenly realising at once that they've spent the last two hours watching the new James Bond film.
On the film subject, Bluesky is playing "Implement a 100% Tariff and Ruin a Movie" with things like 4 Fast 4 Furious, Six Men and Two Babies, Fourteen, Ocean's Twenty-Two and so on.
Twice Upon A Time in the West.
Eight A Few Dollars More.
Four Catch Two Thieves.
The Thomas Ten Shilling Note Affair.
The Life of Tau.
The Last Tag-Team Match.
77: You can't ask a mistress to take a cab from the airport.
Tora! Tora! Tora! Tora! Tora! Tora!
Jack Lemmon, two Shirley MacLaines, and Jack Lemmon in "The Duplex"
"The Cook, The Thief, The Other Cook, The Thief's First Wife, Another Thief, The First Thief's Second Wife, The First Thief's First Wife's Lover, And The First Thief's Second Wife's First Lover".
71.1: Bold links... I often have trouble recognizing links in comment threads because they are insufficiently highlighted, so I do this in most places I comment (e.g., formerly Kevin Drum's blog(s) from time to time, similarly Crooked Timber, but I see I am dating myself). If it is stylistically offensive or aesthetically unattractive, I'll stop. But as a reader, I find it helpful.
71.2 Back when I was recently out of my salad days, when the world wide web was young [web 1.0, after mosaic but when netscape still reigned supreme), I had an all too rare reunion with my closest friends from HS. We were reliving the old days, and I was mostly fleshing out the others' tales with "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to ... otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative[s]" (or maybe not). One of them dubbed me "our Marcel Proust". Some months later, I set up an email with that identity for a silly online practical joke, and I have used that pseud almost entirely for blog comments and such-like for the last quarter century.
I know the author only by reputation, not having read anything by him.
I mostly lurk here and will continue to do so, but perhaps as often as monthly I think I have something to say that others here may find to be of interest.
Right, you've been around for ages.
86: Both great answers, thank you! Boldface away if you wish -- I was just curious.
..not having read anything by him
If you have a scholarly bent, I recommend with Wikipedia plot summary. Which I admit I did not finish.
"The writing of Jozef Czapski persuaded me to read Proust, and the writing of Marcel Proust persuaded me to stop. Czapski noted that Proust wanted popular success, and that one of the first translations of Proust into Polish had made him popular in that language, in part by rendering his famously extended sentences into more usual lengths for Polish prose. Warsaw wits then averred that the way for Proust to gain popular success was to translate him from Polish back into French."
https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/05/19/the-way-by-swanns-by-marcel-proust/
The aforementioned Czapski:
Not to cast any asperions on the local instance of proust, of course.
LB''s remembrance of commenters past.