In the early 1980s, everything that I considered the apex of luxury was contained on the McDonald's menu. Once every school holiday my big treat would be a Big Mac and french fries, which I would then eke out for a parent-frustrating age. Poor Proust – stuck with a measly madeleine, when he could have had a dad who took him to see Return of the Jedi and on to Uncle Ronald's for a freshly incinerated apple pie.
I have just been looking at the food menu presented to McDonald's customers in 1984. It runs to five burgers, fries and the aforementioned apple pie ("with a touch of cinnamon", it promises, which comes as news to me). And that's it: an affair to be scanned in a few seconds.
Today the chain offers 10 items for breakfast alone. The entire bill of fare now takes as long to read as a short book review; it stretches to 49 dishes, some with names that – like emoticons – I can translate but whose point eludes me. Sweet chilli crispy chicken wrap, anyone?
Strolling down the high street is a much more various affair than it was 30 or even 20 years ago. Need caffeine? Starbucks boasts that it offers 82,000 combinations of "handcrafted beverage" (not all written on the blackboard, but on sale nonetheless) and more are dreamed up all the time by its "drink-category team".
Longing for a new motor? The most popular car on the market, the Ford Fiesta, comes in 101 variations of fuel type, engine size and on and on. And all this is before hushed showroom discussions begin of whether to pay more for a Moondust Silver paintjob. So much for Henry Ford's offer that you can have any colour as long as it's black.
Or take something as universal as a Billy bookcase. In 1987, an Ikea customer could choose between just two models. Next year they will be able to buy any one of 22 different versions.
This is a random selection: traumatised Christmas shoppers can supply their own examples of just how much choice is available in store and, especially, online. But let us agree that this is unprecedented.
Before the first world war, wrote Keynes, the well-heeled Londoner "... could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep".
Well, today, a coffee-drinking woman in Castleford could visit a Starbucks every day for the next 224 years and still not complete its drinks menu. In previous eras, choice was the preserve of the wealthy and the metropolitan; now it is much more democratic.
Yet if the British are more powerful shoppers than ever before, at work they are becoming less independent. I have written here before about research done by Irena Grugulis at Durham University into how staff in supermarkets have less and less say in carrying out their daily work. She and her colleagues found that the bread in the in-store bakery now comes ready-made; while the butchers behind the deli counter will more often than not get their meat ready-sliced from the local depot. Even senior managers must lay out their aisles according to instructions from HQ.
But the loss of autonomy extends to white-collar workers too. Since the mid-80s, academics have been carrying out regular skills surveys, asking detailed questions of thousands of employees. In 1986, two years after that rather basic McDonald's menu I quoted from earlier, 72% of professionals felt they had a great deal of independence in doing their jobs. By 2006, that had plummeted to just 38%.
Which is shocking but also makes sense: if you're a teacher you now have to work to a national curriculum. If you're a bank manager you have far fewer individual powers than your predecessor would have had in the 80s. And if you're a teller, it's standard practice to work from a script.
The forces that have increased our powers of consumption are often those that are reducing our sovereignty as workers. The power and cheapness of information technology makes it easier for managers to monitor their business's performance and also to strip out the idiosyncratic bits of an operation.
Applying for a mortgage is a much faster process than it was 30 years ago; but it also relies less on human interaction. And other professions are catching up. The New York Times recently reported on how American law firms are using computer software to scan and sort paperwork according to keywords. It's called e-discovery, and the story quoted an estimate from British software firm Autonomy that "it would lead to manpower reduction in which one lawyer sufficed for work that once required 500".
Nightmarish for lawyers; cheaper for those who pay legal bills – and with unknown impact on the quality of the actual work. In a recent book called The Global Auction, Cardiff professor Philip Brown and his colleagues quote an example of a high-up banker who used to be in charge of lending decisions. His expertise had now been supplanted by a credit controller, described as "a software package that automatically assesses a loan application according to specific criteria".
After years of research, Brown and his colleagues talk about a future workforce in which only 10-15% will have "permission to think". The rest of us will merely carry out their decisions; what the academics call "digital Taylorism", in which graduates will end up on the white-collar equivalent of a factory line. Think call centres rather than groovy offices and you're most of the way there.
Still, by then the fast food menus will be thicker than Russian novels.
http://thepressproject.gr/external.php?id=8015
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26-12-2011
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