Whole Foods has built its reputation on being the fanciest grocery store in all the land, featuring morel mushrooms, emu eggs, and birch water. Amazon, meanwhile, has maintained a remarkably class-free identity—perhaps because of the sheer variety of items it sells. When you see an Amazon box on your neighbor’s doorstep, its contents could include anything: a case of Kraft macaroni and cheese or an assortment of Korean sheet masks; paper towels or silk pillowcases; a pair of Tom’s shoes or a replacement part for a soap dispenser. It’s impossible to draw conclusions about the recipient’s wealth or aesthetics from the box alone. [...]
How and where we spend our money has a great deal to do with class identity, as Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, the James Irvine Chair in urban and regional planning and professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, explains in her recent book The Sum of Small Things. Currid-Halkett argues that a new group, which she calls the aspirational class, has shifted the consumption patterns of the rich. According to her theory, conspicuous consumption—the purchase of highly visible signifiers of wealth and class identity such as cars, shoes, and designer handbags—is no longer in vogue. The aspirational class tends to invest in more subtle, but no less costly, goods and services, from private school tuition to boutique gyms and organic food. The designer handbag has been supplanted by the canvas NPR tote, and heavy bling exchanged for organic almond butter. [...]
Whole Foods branding isn’t just about the desirability of seaweed snacks. It sells a vision of the kind of people who shop there: a group that has collectively decided that organic food is healthier than non-organic; that it’s better to spend money on experiences as opposed to things; and that screen time is a problem. In all of these ways, the Whole Foods identity is about validating certain life choices and—by extension—judging others. New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks got flak for his much-mocked op-ed about the class signifiers of Italian sandwiches. But he’s correct that retail stores send signals to customers about who is and isn’t welcome with a myriad of features, from the language on a menu to the kinds of magazines stacked in a grocery-store checkout line.
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