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Re: new year's mandate
At 12:26 pm -0500 12/18/96, Chris Calloway wrote:
> chapel
>hill gets another notch in their cookie-cutter gumption-colonial "village"
>character, with a matching blockbuster video for its blockbuster records,
>its gap, its caribou coffee, and its bodyworks.
> consensus gets what it wants.
As hesitant as I am to open up another discussion with Friar Callahan, I
nonetheless must point out that (assumimg he is defining "consensus" to
include people outside the corporate oligarchy) he is falling prey to one
of the great corporate mind-schemes, that being that "You can't blame the
coroporations (in this case chains) for moving in; it's merely a case of
supply and demand and the consumer getting what he wants."
Once again, friends, 3.2.3 is the hapless intellectual lapdog of Wall
Street. Demand is not created by the consumer. It is sometimes participated
in by the consumer, but it is primarily created by (1) the creation of a
perceived demand (advetizing, advertorials, local "news" "stories," etc.)
(2) the obliteration of competition (usually locally owned) through
buy-outs, political bribery, or flat-out price war in which the chain
outlet temporarily sells things below profit in order to steal the
customers of its neighborhood competitors, and once the latter have been
driven out of business, it brings its prices back up. Having the resources
of a national corporation, it can afford to do this; Mom and Pop can't.
I'm with him on the colonial village, though.
---
alec vance
fringe multimedia, inc.
alec@fringenet.com
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