You’ve Been Served, The New Yorker, Sarah Larson, September 4, 2023

Sheehan, forty-four, specializes in consumer-protection class-action suits. Specifically, he focusses on packaged foods, and on the authenticity of their ingredients and flavors. Sheehan has sued the makers of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts (dearth of real strawberries), Hint of Lime Tostitos (absence of lime), Snapple “all natural” fruit drinks (absence of natural juice), Keebler’s fudge-mint cookies (lack of real fudge and mint), Cheesecake Factory brown bread (insufficient whole-grain flour), Trident original-flavor gum (lack of real mint, despite package’s illustration of a blue mint leaf), and many more, generally seeking millions in damages from each. He also pursues class actions unrelated to food, involving subtle fraud in products such as toothpaste (Tom’s of Maine Fluoride-Free Antiplaque & Whitening, for containing no ingredient that fights plaque) and sunscreen (Coppertone Pure & Simple, for being neither).

I’m of two minds on this sort of thing. One is that it’s just stupid and mercenary and not real consumer advocacy. The other is that reasonably honest and straightforward advertising is a pretty basic expectation and an element of a kind of civic and public decency. For what it’s worth, I think Ralph Nader in his consumer-advocacy prime was amazing, and we need 100 more people like that in America today to represent ordinary people in a fairly nonpartisan and civic way. (Public Citizen, one of his original organizations, has a very smart, clever (old?) slogan, to the effect of, we’re the people’s lobbyists.)

It’s a fun read, and if you buy snack foods and drinks you’ll probably recognize some of your favorites.

I love this bit, because I actually wrote about this product once, here!

Cases come to Sheehan via many sources, including leads from the public and his own observations. He gave me an example. “So somebody contacted me about those little Fireball bottles,” he said. He was talking about Fireball Cinnamon, a beverage that looks like a tiny bottle of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky—red cap, auburn-colored liquid, label bearing Fireball’s signature fire-breathing dragon. But Fireball Cinnamon doesn’t contain whiskey; it’s a malt beverage with whiskey flavors, which it indicates in fine print. Sheehan was suing its parent company, Sazerac, for fraud. “We’re used to seeing mini bottles of alcohol, and we expect it to be hard liquor,” Sheehan told me.

I noticed that this wasn’t hard liquor, because I was familiar with the “malt beverage” loophole by which alcohol manufacturers legally reverse-engineer mixed drinks like vodka and lemonade with drinks like Mike’s Hard Lemonade, which technically and legally is beer.

Just like “life’s not fair” isn’t a public policy prescription, neither is “buyer beware.” These may be good bits of advice and they may be truisms, but it’s legitimate for the state to be a hedge against the vagaries of life. Why should everybody have to always assume every product name or description is a lie? Why should we tolerate that inculcation of cynicism at a mass scale? This is undoubtedly a small thing, but honesty starts with the small things.

How can we bring back neighborhood stores in Harrisonburg?, The Friendly City Urbanist, Brent Finnegan, April 16, 2024

The business-with-residential design of the building ensured that there were two sources of income: grocery store profits and rent from tenants. It also made the grocery store commute very short for residents of the surrounding neighborhood.

I spoke with Juanita Taylor, who rented an apartment at 133 N. Brook Ave. for almost 70 years. Juanita said there was a butcher counter in the back of the store, and most everyone in the neighborhood shopped there. Her son and his friends would often stop by on their way home from Waterman school and get candy or a soda from the store and then do their homework at her kitchen table.

This is a great and specific/applied piece on small neighborhood grocery stores. (It also links to one of my pieces on this subject, which I why I found the piece, but not why I’m sharing it!)

Here’s a good example of how the zoning and land-use status quo has upped the size and scale of commerce:

Harrisonburg implemented off-street parking minimums for grocery stores in the 1950s, which tilted the market in favor of bigger stores like Mick-or-Mack and Red Front. Juanita said more of her neighbors started shopping at the bigger stores to save money. By the 1970s, the Smith family, who owned Hilltop Grocery, threw in the towel: “We either had to expand and compete with the big stores or get out of the business.”

Read the whole thing.

How America Became ‘Family Unfriendly’, The Dispatch, Patrick T. Brown

The canonical American kid on a bike, meeting up with others to start a pickup baseball game or visiting each other’s houses, haunts Tim Carney’s new book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. If American childhood was a little more free-range, Carney argues, America’s fertility crisis would feel a lot more solvable. In such a world, many couples might feel a little more comfortable having a child—or more than one—and our culture might be more receptive to this compelling vision of what family can be. 

This rings true to me: it’s not so much that kids are expensive, but that so much is demanded and expected of parents. Especially all of the schlepping around here and there, like the sort of infamous grade-school travel sports games. This is in some ways a related phenomenon to regulation and red tape. Kids can’t just up and do things as much as they used to—but neither can anybody. I’m thinking of zoning, not surprisingly, but it seems like we regulate and attempt to organize lots of things we used to just sort of let happen.

I remember a book I read about fast food, and it had a chapter on Colonel Sanders of KFC fame. It sounded like a dispatch from another country: lie about your age to join the Army, work on a riverboat, build a gas station, play with chicken recipes in the tiny attached restaurant, lose it in a fire, go save up cash with odd jobs and build a new restaurant, etc. These things are financially and psychologically more difficult and “expensive” today.

The solution Carney proposes is to care a little less about children’s material outcomes (after all, if demographic trends hold, future generations will find it much easier to get into top-ranked colleges anyway.) He wants more frequent but less formal social gatherings—Carney agrees with a former first lady who said that “it takes a village” to raise a child—and to give parents the needed space for juggling their various responsibilities. With plenty of both personal experience (as a dad of six) and social science research under his belt, Carney argues that a society that does not intentionally build infrastructure and institutions with families in mind inevitably runs the risk of excluding them. 

This also rings true, and while it might sound conservative, it tracks with a lot of what I hear from more progressive urbanists. Many of those folks view thriving cities as places where children can exercise independence early on, requiring less shepherding and time from parents, and learning some “adult” skills while simultaneously getting to more fully experience an actual childhood. Maybe not surprisingly, then, both Carney and Brown are urbanists of some stripe.

That, of course, isn’t political at all.

You Can’t Go Home Again, The Hedgehog Review, Charlie Tyson, Spring 2024

What we might interpret as an exercise in nostalgia is often postmodern pastiche. That Hudson Valley general store that sent me, trembling and Proust-like, back to the sugar rush of happier days? It opened its doors, I later learned, in 2019.

This bit is interesting, arguing that right-wing politicians aren’t necessarily nostalgic for the past:

During the Falklands War, she peppered her speeches with references to Winston Churchill and the glories of the British Empire. Yet she also cut funding for museums and, in one spectacular gimmick, posed atop one of the bulldozers razing London’s Broad Street Station (built in the 1860s). For Thatcher and Reagan, the “comforting language of tradition” helped them present a radical and disruptive program of deregulation and privatization as a return to the past. But it was a ruse that could be discarded at will. Reagan himself used the word “future,” Becker reports, more often than any other term except “America.”

Short but dense and interesting little piece.

Related Reading:

New and Old #10

New and Old #11

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