JEDDAH, 16 April 2003 — One way of increasing sales of a product is to subdivide the market, advertise the product in three slightly different ways and sell to three sets of people where previously only one was targeted. That’s how the idea of “pre-teens,” “tweens” and “teenagers” produced three markets for children’s clothes instead of one. That means there are more shops specializing in specific market areas, more people employed to service the new market and a vastly greater opportunity for the breadwinners to have wallets raided by the ravening hordes who devoutly believe that they “need” these targeted clothes. In other words, there exists a market and an infrastructure for a product where none existed before. The question is: Did anyone miss it before it was invented? Probably not.
It’s easy to think that if there were no need for a product or service, then it would not have come into existence. These days, product-driven markets are a thing of the past. Industries are created, jobs materialize out of nowhere and few ask, “Is this really necessary?” or “Do we need a nail cuticle counselor or another Feng Shui practitioner?”
I ask the question because I really do not need three, admittedly smiling and pleasant gentlemen, placing each one of five tins of cat-food into separate carrier bags and graciously offering to carry them to my car. Neither do I wish to have the car, with fully 20 minutes dust dulling its shiny paintwork since it was last cleaned, lightly sandpapered by an aggressively helpful but damp Subedar Major with toweling turban and a bucket of viscous abrasive fluid that was once water. None of the regiments of hired help that surge around checkouts and car parks is necessary to me because as yet I haven’t learned to be so helpless that I can’t carry a bag, push a trolley or wash a car. (Or indeed, sort out my own cuticle problems.) Many have learned though, and careful segmenting of the market keeps it that way.
The army of, sometimes illegal, workers is only out there retrieving blue plastic bags from chain-link fencing on the Makkah Expressway because people have been trained to throw bags out of the windows of cars instead of responsibly disposing them properly. The battalions of bucket wielders only exist because no self-respecting young person would be seen cleaning a car for his father, learning that sweaty dirty work is difficult and yet earns money and encourages routine, conscientiousness and discipline. Trolley-soldiers are only there because customers have learned to do nothing and so avoid carrying their own purchases at whatever cost.
It’s all part of the same learned helplessness. By educating oneself through endless repetition to be helpless and pay someone else to do the simplest tasks, you abjure responsibility for your own life and teach the next generation that this is the right way.
There is a story circulating that describes two men sitting with a shisha, contemplating the eternal verities when one asks, “Is married life work or pleasure?”
The other, after a long pause, brightens and says, “It must be pleasure, because if it was work, I’d have the hired help do it.”
