By Stephen Lawson
The summer before I went to college, I worked at an import store. It was the size of a small warehouse and filled with wood carvings from Africa, brassware from India, bamboo furniture from Indonesia, and baskets piled up to the ceiling. To this day the smell of wicker reminds me of long, hot days taking inventory of all those foreign artifacts.
There still are stores like that one, and they still trade on the Indiana Jones excitement of discovering the wonders of the world, brought home and laid out in a clean shop with mellow music, overseen by white ex-hippies. One chain of import stores even jauntily calls itself the “World Market.” It’s tempting to think of the whole creative capacity of the world under one roof, curry next to castanets, with no communication barriers. But the reality of import and export, of exotic and utilitarian, is more complicated. The real world market has fewer baskets but a lot more languages. It’s called Costco.
Costco is a chain of members-only warehouse stores the size of airplane hangars. There are no sales or frills there: The forklift drivers put the products on the shelves and the shoppers load them into carts. The goods range from food, to books, to computers, to diamond rings for order. The shoppers include working-class families, small-business owners, and yuppies with Volvo station wagons. Everybody loves a deal.
Costco in San Francisco is where you’ll find the people of many lands whom you don’t often see in import stores. There are more languages spoken on a Sunday afternoon at Costco than I ever heard on a single street in Hong Kong, that legendary port of call. The other day at Costco, I heard the familiar sounds of Cantonese and of Taiwanese-accented Mandarin. There were mainland Chinese too, with their white socks and black loafers and their own, “correct” way of speaking Mandarin. Spanish-speaking families in sweatsuits ate pizza and hot dogs together at the snack shack, which is the only place to get a sit-down meal at Costco. I heard Russian too, spoken by an immigrant family in nylon jackets, each with thick, unruly dishwater-blonde hair. There were shoppers from the Middle East and Eastern Europe, too.
At Costco, everyone’s basket is filled with the same stuff as everyone else’s -- namely, everything: Sony TVs, Mexican beer, basmati rice from India, potstickers from across the bay in Hayward, Hollywood movies on DVD, down jackets made in China. Costco doesn’t sell everything, but everything it does sell, it seems to sell a lot of. All the packages are appropriately planet-sized, either to hold a month’s supply of something or, with smaller products such as Elvis-movie trilogies, to make sure you see them. This is pure, unabashed consumerism, the kind America is famous for everywhere. Is it any wonder the world is here?
As if the bounty and variety aren’t overwhelming enough, there are samples of a different food around every corner. A work force as diverse as the store’s membership hands them out. They are shifted around constantly, so white men push Filipino egg rolls, Chinese-American women serve spaghetti, and Filipinas hand out bagels. Shoppers mill around, nibbling on these morsels and sipping fruit beverages as if at a United Nations mixer.
Costco San Francisco looks like a dream come true for both free-trade capitalists and what Steve Lamy, my international relations professor at the University of Southern California, called “Kum-ba-yah” idealists. “Kum-ba-yah” is the folk song, widely sung in the Sixties, that calls for world peace and an end to suffering. The store seems to miraculously make ethnic differences disappear the same way it flattens the hierarchy of retail by putting Bulgari watches next to blue jeans.
The dream isn’t real. Most of the imported products at Costco are made by low-wage workers in Latin America, China and Southeast Asia who would have to save for years for a typical Costco shopping spree. The people who cash in on those products are people in places like San Francisco who brand and market them. The companies they all work for maximize their profits by shifting design, processing, and assembly around the world, with all barriers seemingly removed. The key to their profitability is flexibility.
Yet multinational corporations aren’t the only ones using the international system to advantage. According to Aihwa Ong, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, international migrants use flexibility, too. That’s because, despite the way people and goods seem to flow freely around the world, it still makes a difference where you are. Most laws are no good across international boundaries, and the best country in which to be a citizen may not be the best place to work or run a business.
In her 1999 book, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke University Press, 1998), Ong described ethnic Chinese families that choose different countries for investment, work, and the family home. For example, Hong Kong’s laws, proximity to business partners, and high-volume port might make it a good place to run a small family business. Shenzhen, across the border in mainland China, is where a lot of Hong Kong family businesses do low-cost manufacturing. Many take advantage of Canada’s welcoming laws to become citizens there. On the other hand, some consider the Bay Area a great place for real estate investment, higher education, and shopping. With careful planning, and sometimes by sending family members to live in several different countries, Chinese families can earn both economic and social status.
Filipino-Americans often use the flexibility of globalization to advantage, too. At a fair in San Francisco this month celebrating Philippine Independence Day, many of the booths featured U.S.-Philippines cargo companies. Many Filipinos come to the U.S. for American wages while their families stay back home. The name-brand goods they find at Costco, for example, may be unavailable or more expensive in the Philippines, so they buy them here and ship them home.
Just as globalization can make almost anything into an import, it’s transformed the all-American general store into an export warehouse. Alongside its Montana-sized portions, Costco is selling the American Dream. But in the real world market, that’s just one of many baskets.
Copyright © 2002 Stephen Lawson