The Arts & Leisure section of today's New York Times carries an article by the newspaper's architecture critic that quotes Mark Gottdiener on the topic of shopping malls. Mr. Gottdiener says, "The purpose of a mall is to sell consumer goods. The function of mall design, therefore, is to disguise the exchange relation between producer and consumer, which is always more to the former's benefit in capitalist society, and to present cognitively an integrated facade which facilitates this instrumental purpose by the stimulation of consumer fantasies."
The Times architecture critic writes, "Gottdiener conducts his exposure though a neo-Marxian lens. His approach is justified by the extreme deception practiced by mall designers in contriving to make private spaces look like public ones. The interior of a mall may resemble a small town Main Street, sometimes, or, in the case of the Mall of America, the ceremonial axis of a grand capital city planned on neo-classical lines. But the interior is enclosed within walls that discourage public access. Those without cars, for example, will find their right of entry curtailed."
How about this claim that in capitalist society "the exchange relation between producer and consumer" is always more to the producer's benefit? The Times quotes it approvingly, describing it as "neo-Marxian" and "justified." It doesn't seem justified to Smartertimes.com. In fact, free markets and capitalism are based on the idea that the transaction between producer and consumer takes place, in general, at the price point where the benefits to each are equal. To make this a little less abstract, consider a customer going into a store and spending $50 on a sweater. Gottdiener's claim, apparently endorsed by the Times, is that the $50 benefits the store more than the sweater benefits the customer. If this is the case, why would the customer, operating freely, spend the money on the sweater? The Times-Gottdiener claim, as typical of Marxist claims, "neo" or otherwise, is essentially elitist: that the masses are the victims of "deception," that they have been gulled by a "disguise." Smartertimes.com thinks Americans, and most humans, for that matter, are shrewder than that. In fact, if the sweater were priced at $1,000, no amount of disguising and deception would allow it to be sold in large numbers. Consumers would see that high price as representing an unreasonably large benefit to the producer compared to the benefit to them. Or, to put it simply, they'd say the sweater is too expensive. Similarly, the producer isn't going to sell the $50 sweater for 25 cents. The benefit to the consumer would be unreasonably large compared to the benefit to the producer. Or, to put it simply, the sweater would be priced too low. This all probably seems pretty basic to anyone who has run a lemonade stand or gone shopping in mall, but the Times doesn't seem to get it.
The fact that producers sometimes make a profit is one possible source for the Times claim that the exchange relation between producer and consumer is always more to the producer's benefit. But the profit is the payment to those who put capital -- including human capital -- at risk by investing in the business. Furthermore, contrary to the implication of the Times, in America, the line between producers and consumers is highly permeable. The "consumer" buying the sweater at the mall may be purchasing it with money he earned as a "producer" -- the profits from his lemonade stand. Or he may be a union worker whose union pension fund may own stock in the store that sold the sweater.
The line about malls being "enclosed within walls that discourage public access" is more nonsense. Would the Times architecture critic propose that computers and watches and jewelry be sold in stores without walls? How would the merchandise be protected from theft or from damage by water and snow? How would the shoppers be kept comfortable in the heat of summer or the snow of winter? And if the walls discourage public access, why do the owners of the stores -- who are presumably eager for traffic from shoppers -- build them?
The claim that "those without cars" will find their access to malls curtailed is similarly absurd. The Pentagon City Mall in Virginia has a subway stop built right into it. The Copley Place Mall in Boston is easily accessible by subway. The Mall of America in Minnesota, the only mall that the Times critic cites by name as an example, is a popular stop on cross-country bus tours. The editor of Smartertimes.com has been car-less since moving to New York several years ago and has never once had his mall access curtailed.
The great irony here, of course, is that the bills for printing this silliness in the Times, and the salaries of the editors and writers that produce it, are being paid largely by revenue derived from advertisements in the New York Times for department stores. Many of those stores are located in shopping malls. The Times this morning is telling the customers of those stores that the store owners and mall developers are engaged in an "extreme deception," an attempt to "disguise" the fact that every time a consumer buys something in one of those stores, the consumer is getting the worse end of the deal. Why these store owners do not take their business to a newspaper that supports the capitalist system under which they have prospered, instead of propping up a newspaper that attacks that system, is a mystery.