Five Ways America Keeps Getting Better

It seems no amount of statistical refutation will deter the doomsayers, so perhaps we should turn instead to the evidence of our own eyes. Material prosperity is an area of American life in which things have taken a turn for the better. It may even be the only such area. While there is plenty to snipe at — computers may cause downsizing, cable TV may be expensive and monopolistic, health-care advances may be eating into our national savings — the material changes in life are so widespread that it’s possible to name five pure improvements that have come out of the capitalist system over the last decade — absolute, unambiguous, no-doubt-about-it changes for the better — off the top of one’s head.

Since this is a magazine, we’ll start with books.

1BORDERS: Borders Books has now (or will have within the next few months) opened 114 of its enormous emporia. Most of them are in suburbs or rural areas, but some are in cities, like Phoenix and Fort Lauderdale, that had previously been literary wastelands. The typical Borders carries 100,000 titles. This is a larger selection than any bookstore in the country had a decade ago — and in almost every case when a Borders comes to town, it offers readers a larger selection than all the area’s existing bookshops combined. Borders has university monographs, Michelin maps, and compact discs. There is even a foreign language section, where you can buy One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish, the Collected Poems of Leopardi in Italian, and the occasional Chinese potboiler.

Some critics, like Jean Marbella of the Baltimore Sun, suggest that Borders outlets are “pre-packaged, cookie-cutter behemoths that will drive out the independents.” But this criticism doesn’t really pertain to Borders or the other super-bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Bookstop. It is, rather, an old complaint, chiefly about Crown Books, which brought the chain concept to bookselling. Making early use of computer inventorying, the Crown Books people found cost-effective ways of serving the schlock-fiction/self- actualization/home-health junk market that accounts for the vast majority of book sales — while discounting heavily, to boot. When a Crown moved into a neighborhood full of literary bookstores, the so-called independents began losing the segment of the market that was underwriting their less popular, more literary titles. The “independents” then tended to go under, leaving only Crown to serve a book-buying population that suddenly found its book selection radically diminished.

Crown created a classic “Wal-Mart problem,” in which consumers had to weigh whether lower prices were enough of a boon to compensate for the dwindling variety of retail outlets. There’s no such trade-off with Borders. Should a Borders lead to the bankruptcy of a poetry bookstore, it will be one that has a smaller poetry selection than Borders itself. The old bookstore that ” specializes in history” cannot compete with the Borders history departments — some of which carry 10,000 titles.

The Omaha World Herald reported last November that 13 local bookstores had banded together to fight off the Borders “threat.” Thanks, but no thanks – – the smaller bookstores could not do much better than steer customers to other little bookstores that might have books they lacked (in Omaha that means saddling up for quite a ride) or get them for customers by special order, which can take weeks.

And where competition fails, can regulation be far behind? The Canadian government’s culture ministry barred the opening of a new Borders in Toronto in February, citing a cultural variant of the Wal-Mart problem, specifically that it might be deleterious to Canada’s bookstore industry. (Read: to protect Canada’s own — and inferior — book giant Chapters, formed last year to take Borders’ market while getting government protection from it.)

As significant as any of Borders’ innovations is that all of their outlets have cafe/sweetshop annexes inside, with free newspapers, along with easy- chair sitting areas. This means that Borders bookstores have become social hangouts, among other things places of mating, which is heartening beyond words. It also means that the last five years have seen, in Borders-style bookstores and e-mail, the only two society-wide incentives to literacy since television was introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

National bookstore sales have risen from $ 7.8 billion in 1991 to $ 18 billion in 1994. Which leads one, incidentally, to ask: Where are all those little-bookstore owners who were bemoaning the decline of American reading habits 20 years ago? Probably the same place all the people who were complaining about “conspicuous consumption” went when Americans started owning their cars for longer.

2STARBUCKS: Until 1990, to get espresso in the U.S. you had to be an incredibly savvy Italophone native of New York City, Cambridge, Seattle, or San Francisco, and what you found was usually something that tasted like aerated pine tar. Only with the growth of the Seattle-based Starbucks cafe/coffee retailing chain, with its 700 outlets nationwide, has the heartland been able to try the stuff. Is this a mere novelty or an improvement in quality? There’s no question it’s the latter. Starbucks sells more units of American-style coffee than it does straight espresso, which proves there’s more than mere thrill-seeking involved. As for quality, an informal taste comparison (made by me) between one of the best espresso bars in Milan and (nine hours later) a Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue in Washington was a draw.

But all of the chain’s products are consistently better than they have to be, because Starbucks invests more money in its product than the average trendy clip joint. The key to Starbucks espresso is its machines, made by Florence-based La Marzocco. Whereas most restaurant-quality four-handle espresso machines cost $ 3,000, Starbucks’ Marzoccos run roughly $ 8,000 a pop. (They turn out to be necessary, as Americans drink their espresso drinks with so much steamed milk that it puts a strain on all but the best machines.)

No Wal-Mart problem here: Anyone who can make good coffee can prosper. ” There’s plenty of room for a second tier of smaller chains behind Starbucks,” says George Harrop, president of Barista Brava, a fledgling gourmet coffee bar (which also uses La Marzocco machines). The parallel would be to ABC, the British chain of tea-shops that spread like wildfire between the wars and is omnipresent in the English novels of the 1930s. ABC shops provided the backdrop to the conversational life of a hundred cities and towns but did nothing to threaten traditional English tea.

Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz is an outspoken apostle of “third places,” a hitherto little-known obsession of the civil-society movement, which believes that people need a venue for “relating” to others that is neither home nor office. There’s no disagreeing with the proposition of Christopher Lasch and others that we’re in desperate need of institutions to replace (in this health- and discrimination-conscious world) bars, social clubs, and union halls. This Starbucks does amply.

But Schultz’s civic project goes further than that, into one of those post- 60s amalgams of hippie culture and neo-traditionalism. It’s hardly surprising that Starbucks (like Borders) was founded in 1971. Starbucks, which, like any other coffee concern, gets its coffee from ill-paid peasants in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, plows some of its profits into CARE and other Third World aid organizations. Similarly, Borders was the first business to establish a partnership to help sponsor (privately) the National Endowment for the Arts. Call it exploitative if you will, but I’d rather view it as a victory of common sense over hypocrisy: Who better to pay for the NEA, after all, than a powerhouse of the culture industry that is drawing R&D benefits from it?

3NEXIS: The Nexis computer database includes 7,100 news and business sources, and is easily accessible on-line. Compare that with the pre-computer Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, a cumbersome series of volumes that indexes only 240 publications, and you can see what a resource Nexis really is. Nexis is timely: A journalist or scholar can find everything written on, say, Tony Blair, in every major Western newspaper yesterday — as against a wait of several weeks in the Reader’s Guide.

Nexis has only recently become a concrete boon, after years of being a boon in the abstract. In fact, it had previously been arguable that Nexis exercised an undemocratic influence on journalism — offering a privileged database only to journalists already affiliated with an organ of sufficient prestige to afford it. But now that Lexis/Nexis has instituted fiabrate pricing as low as $ 120 a month, the service is accessible to any journalist whose career is worth investing $ 1,500 a year in — which strikes me as a forgiving cut-offpoint. The Reader’s Guide is not cheap, either, at $ 200 per annum, plus $ 10 shipping. You can still trudge down to the library for it (and I know journalists who do).

There are side benefits to Nexis. First, royalties are paid to magazines and newspapers that put their copy on-line, a great advance in the protection of intellectual property that makes it theoretically possible for journalists to get paid by their readership. (Not that I’ve ever seen a red cent.) Second, a computerized system means that every time a paper corrects a mistake, that correction pops up together with the original article-an unprecedented protection for those who wind up on the receiving end of the inevitable mini- libels that creep into daily news coverage.

But the greatest thing about Nexis’s preservation of data is the incentives it offers to literary expression. It used to be that news stories and magazine essays were indeed the fish-wrap and birdcageliners of popular metaphor. Now, thanks to Nexis, a magazine article is forever; articles are now, willy-nilly, written “for the ages” — and it would be surprising if the quality of writing didn’t very soon begin to reflect that.

4LENSCRAFTERS: In 1983, when LensCrafters opened its first stores, getting a pair of glasses was still, for most people, an arduous multi-step ordeal: a visit to an ophthalmologist (for which a scheduled appointment was necessary), then an appointment with an optician, then a seven-to-ten-day wait while the lenses were ground, and a considerable expense at each stop.

Nowadays, if you smash your glasses playing tennis 3,000 miles from home, or drop them off a boat, you can go to LensCrafters or some other “super- optician” and have a new pair of glasses made in an hour. Since each LensCrafters outlet leases space to an optometrist, you can have your eyes examined for about $ 45.

As examinationu have become easier, prices for frames have come down. True, if you choose, you can pay hundreds of dollars for Italian designer eyewear that wasn’t on the market 15 years ago (particularly at LensCrafters’ upscale optique outlets), but high-end products haven’t driven the low-end ones off the market.

Frames start under $ 50, and at some other quickie eyeglass places can be as low as $ 29.95. What’s more, the huge volume of sales they do has made possible a whole range of side benefits. First of all, with dozens of patients filing through each day to amortize the cost of machinery, tests for cataracts and glaucoma are becoming more and more routine. That is not to mention new high-turnover optical products, such as disposable contact lenses, now available at $ 50 for a three-month supply.

Even though LensCrafters is the largest of such operations, doing $ 750 million worth of business a year at more than 600 locations, it’s still only taking up 6 percent of a $ 13 billion market. There are dozens of other super- opticians — Hour Eyes, Four Eyes, and the like — and 65 percent of the market is still made up of mom-and-pop opticians and optometrists. So again: Traditional outlets have survived to the point where we can dismiss the Wal- Mart problem.

We can dismiss a second problem as well, which might be called the ” hamburger-flipping problem.” The most innovative retail outlets all require special skills and pay above minimum wage for most jobs. LensCrafters requires its employees to know their way around prescriptions, ultraviolet resistance in sunglasses, fashion trends, etc. Similarly, Borders gives a test of literary knowledge to its incoming employees, while George Harrop of Barista Brava considers the superior training of his individual coffee baristas the single greatest competitive advantage his coffee outlet has. Contrast this with the we’ll-hire-anyone-who-blows-in-off-the-street service philosophy of an establishment like Hechinger’s hardware. We don’t have to glorify these jobs, but at none of the best new retail outlets is the labor, strictly speaking, unskilled.

What’s more, in the wake of the recent brouhaha over “downsizing,” the Council of Economic Advisers and the Department of Labor issued a joint report with stunningly good employment news: that 68 percent of the net growth in full-time employment in the last two years has been in industries that pay above median wages, and over half of new jobs are in the top 30 percent of job categories. Our hamburger-flipping problem, if ever there was one, is coming to an end.

5THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY: In 1975, the United States ranked with Australia and Ireland as one of the worst countries to eat in in the industrialized world. Today, it is arguably the best — not excepting France and Italy. “We’ve gone from Chicken Kiev to raw fish in about 15 years, ” says Stan Bromley, regional vice president and general manager at Four Seasons Hotels. John Mariani, restaurant critic of Esquire magazine, goes so far as to say that if you were able to transport any outlet of the Cheesecake Factory restaurant or the Bennigan’s chain back to the Atlanta of 1977, it would, with no exaggeration, qualify as the best restaurant in the city.

Mariani is doubtless thinking of the actual presentday Atlanta branch of the Cheesecake Factory. It’s something of a flagship outlet, located as it is in a disused airplane hangar, but all of the Cheesecake Factory’s outlets are elegant and unique. (The Washington, D.C., outlet has French tiles and Italian pillars, stone tabletops, and cherry Art-Deco wall fixtures.)

Founded in 1978 in Beverly Hills, the Cheesecake Factory has now expanded to 15 locations. That’s too slowly for its customers, who line up for incredible waits (two hours on Mother’s Day). Yet the company, now headquartered in Calabasas, California, adds only five restaurants per year and designs all of them individually; like all of the best new retail/service outlets, it is refusing to gouge and cut corners. For example, even with patrons lined up at the door, the Cheesecake Factory retains enormous, square booth tables, which allow customers to luxuriate. This means the chain serves only about 75 percent of the clientele it could if its managers wanted to jam people in like sardines. And, as at LensCrafters, none of the employees is really unskilled. In fact, all of them are trained, from a minimum program of two to three weeks for experienced waiters to a maximum stay of three to four months for incoming general managers.

What drags people in, of course, is the food, which draws from pretty much every genre and socioeconomic stratum of American restaurant cooking. The menu (which, incidentally, has advertising in it) is 18 pages long. Thus, a couple of paradoxes by which American commercialism works in the service of the personal touch. First, it is only the hugeness of the clientele (note the proud impersonality of the word “Factory” in the name) that makes it possible to keep such a large variety of foods fresh. There is nothing you can’t get here, and a few rare things (like Tex-Mex egg rolls and Louisiana andouille sausage pasta) you can’t get anywhere else. Second, the gargantuan servings make the slightly high prices cheap over the long haul. The appetizers are larger than most restaurants’ meals, and the waitresses happily bag anything you haven’t eaten, so if you don’t get two meals out of a night out at the Cheesecake Factory, you’ve ordered foolishly. The place may be a haven of consumption, but not of conspicuous consumption — in fact, quite the opposite.

It’s all rather like the afterlife in the 1991 Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life, where a waitress assures Brooks: “Everything we have here is sensational.”

The success of the Cheesecake Factory and its ilk has come with a nationwide explosion in food types. Take the tiny niche of the food world occupied by lettuce. In the late 1970s, there was widespread discontent when weather emptied the shelves in northeastern supermarkets of iceberg lettuce– and when the dust settled, Boston lettuce had been added to diners’ culinary lexicon. Within five years, Belgian endive was an elite favorite, and by 1988, it was well enough known to the middle class that Dan Quayle could score points berating Michael Dukakis in a national debate for his plans to grow it in Massachusetts. Today, arugula and a half-dozen lettuces not even in the dictionary yet are gracing the salads of the elite, and they are bound to be standard prole fare in this country in a matter of years. Salad makers have begun to veer out of lettuce into such exotica as dikon, chipotle, and jicama.

And ice cream? Would you compare the ice cream today to the stuff available in 19817

Much of the credit for the foodstuff boom comes from a consumer clamor for novelty, according to Mariani, but the greatest of the changes have come in the way food is brought to market. The international staggering of growing seasons, for instance, ensures that virtually all fruits are being grown somewhere in the world at any given time. To take one example, says Mariani, strawberries can be grown in Chile so we can eat them in the fall. ” Aquaculture” now accounts for 22 percent of the seafood we consume, so there’s far less seasonal fluctuation in the price and availability of fish.

And what is it that has made it possible to serve excellent function food? Twenty years ago, the rubber-chicken circuit earned its name; today, hotels can serve meals for hundreds that the picklest diner would be happy to eat. Bromley of Four Seasons credits the change to improvements not only in technology but also in organization. “You have to distinguish between big — a couple hundred people — and really big — thousands. At the massive establishments, they’ve certainly benefited from the technology: convection ovens, ‘blast-frozen” food that you can thaw with microwaves, new “proof boxes” to heat up bakery goods. The high-quality meals you get at the better, smaller establishments are made possible by advances in scheduling and planning. It would have been theoretically possible to prepare them 20 years ago.”

This is only the merest tip of the iceberg. As I was stapling together isome notes for this article, I noticed that Swingline now makes staples in clusters of exactly the length to fit into the barrel of a stapler, neither too short so they jam the head, nor too long so they have to be broken and left to get dusty. Shopping for baby products with my wife, I came across the hollowed-out baby bottles first popularized by the Ansa company in the late 1970s. Thanks to this hollowing, for the first time in the hundreds of years mothers have been using bottles, women have been freed from holding both the bottle and the increasingly heavy baby between the ages of three months and a year; because of the hole in the bottle, the baby can hold it — and can thus be put down.

It’s hard to keep from being terribly excited about all of this. “You raise standards somewhere, and the bar is raised for everyone,” says Wendy Webster of the National Restaurant Association. “This new level of excellence . . . the public has just come to expect it everywhere.” Improved products and retail outlets are not just consumer phenomena; they have wider implications for the culture. Among other things, they’re an indication that the quality- of-life gap that has endured for centuries between the United States and Europe may at long last be closing.

By Christopher Caldwell