The Bookworm: Retail Anarchy

Retail Anarchy: A Radical Shopper’s Adventures in Consumption by Sam Pocker. 224 pages. Running Press. 2009.

You have to be a bit like a bull in a china shop in box boxes because they treat you like garbage. The only reason you exist is to give them your money, to fall for their marketing, to consume, to spend, and to come back tomorrow and do it again. Our feelings of helplessness, of despair at the state of the human race, and of discouragement when we look at those monolithic warehouses of mass-produced crap are all based on preconceived notions about the role of the consumer. People who attempt to “fight back” by only shopping at local, independently owned stores are misguided; you fight back by getting the stores to pay for your merchandise, by getting manufacturers to pay the stores for your merchandise, by getting banks to pay the stores for your merchandise, and you do it all legally and legitimately with various coupons, promotions, and rebates.

I’m unsure where to begin with Retail Anarchy, so let me start off by saying Zee German caught the whiff of 15 South Dubuque Street in Iowa City. I showed the book to him at work one day. He flipped through the pages, stopped, and put the binding to his nose. “Smells like incense,” he said. No. Smells like Prairie Lights. (I’ve never though PL smelled like incense, at least not Nag, but that’s his interpretation.)

Anyway, I bought Retail Anarchy during my last visit to IC. It was featured on the “staff picks” shelf and caught my attention; I was drawn to the connection of anarchy and consumerism. Since moving to California, I’ve become a much more conscious consumer (when I’m not being a cheapskate), and I’m eager to learn new ways to fuck over large corporations by the way I spend my money; the title and back cover description (“Pocker exposes the sheer inanity of marketing schemes, the plague of rude cashiers, and shows how anyone can rise up and beat the system by outsmarting the stores with their overly complicated rules for rebates, discounts, and sales”) piqued my curiosity. Plus, the staff recommendation said something like, “it’s the funniest book I’ve read this year.” Shopping anarchy and humor all in one? Sounds like a winner.

Not.

To be fair, Retail Anarchy does offer good advice and reveals shady corporate practices. (For example, Best Buy operates two nearly identical websites: one that is accessed outside the store, and one accessed inside the store. The only difference is that the prices on the inside store site are higher. If you argue with a salesman over the price you saw online at home, he will go to a store computer and show you the higher price on the inside store site.) However, Retail Anarchy is more of a memoir than a guide, recounting Pocker’s own experiences as a pirate consumer who legally plunders grocery stores and big box retailers. More power to him, but the level of retail anarchy Pocker describes and encourages is obsessive and borderline impractical. We’re talking about driving two states away and filling your car full of free prepackaged pudding, then adding 100 pounds of free cat litter to the load on your way home.

When Pocker bargain shops, he is armed with hordes of coupons (which he never explains how to get) and uses them to clean out whatever products he can get for free or for as little out of pocket as possible. We’re talking about cartloads of tin foil, canned vegetables, deodorant, tampons, pop, and teriyaki sauce. (Pocker actually went on a tour of the east coast and bought all the Kikkoman Teriyaki Sauce because he could get it for free.) Pocker plays the discount and voucher game like a pro. He exploits the system put in place by the very merchants he cleans out. It’s definitely affective — as he says, it forces stores and manufacturers to pay for what he buys, not him — but I feel it’s excessive and counter productive.

The most egregious example is a coupon deal for free gallons of Sunny Delight he takes advantage of. Each Sunny D label featured a mail-in rebate good for two free movie tickets, which was what he was after the whole time. Pocker goes to the store, buys all the Sunny D, then rips off the labels in the parking lot. Left with a cartload of perfectly good and unopened gallons of Sunny D — which can’t be donated because there are no labels — Pocker walks away from it and back into the store to continue his plundering. In these instances he comes off as greedy and wasteful. At multiple times he states he is no environmentalist, and it shows.

Pocker says what he does is better than shopping at locally/family owned stores, but to me it doesn’t seem to make a difference. The things he plunders cost their manufacturers nothing to produce, and his hoarding boosts sales numbers, likely prompting more production. He says he’s literally being paid to buy shit, and he is. But he’s doing exactly what retailers of mass produced crap want him to: take it off their shelves regardless of cost. That’s what sales and coupons are for in the first place.

At times the reading is tedious and uninteresting; the descriptions of his sale and coupon adventures are boring. I’ll admit Pocker is funny — he often shops while listening to the Rolling Stones on his iPod — but for me the humor was hit or miss. The PL staffer who said this book was funny is either 14 or normally reads darker, more serious, books. About a quarter of the book doesn’t even involve retail anarchy: Pocker bitches about chain restaurants, though he does reveal a few of their shady practices.

A major annoyance — for me, a typesetting Nazi, at least — was the sloppy production and style inconsistencies. The numerous typos are probably the result of poor or hurried proofreading, and the book’s use of emdashes is shamelessly erratic. I’m not talking about its use as punctuation, but the way it appeared in the text. Emdashes are the long dash marks (—), which, from my understanding, separate distinct but connected thoughts within the same sentence (see my use at the beginning of the paragraph). I like to bookend my emdashes with spaces, but Pocker and the typesetters at Running Press don’t seem to have a preference and don’t give a shit about being consistent. Most of the time the emdash was used like this: “word— word.” However, it also appeared like “word —word” and “word—word.” It’s a small thing, and not many would notice, but it reveals a degrading sloppiness. Someone didn’t care much about this book.

New words I learned: All descriptions thanks to my MacBook dictionary. Luddite: “a person opposed to increased industrialization or new technology.” Inculcate: “instill (an attitude, idea, or habit) by persistent instruction.” Evinces: “reveal the presence of (a quality or feeling).” Overage: “an excess or surplus, esp. the amount by which a sum of money is greater than a previous estimate.”