I Could Never Sell

An easy one first.

Freakonomics goes round and round with the question When Are High Wine Prices Justified?

Do wine prices rise because of production costs?  Because the cost of making the wine rises?  In pricing them (to sell or to buy) do we start with their cost of production and mark them up?

I didn’t know some wines are much harder to make than others.  Steep slopes.  Small valleys where land is scarce.  “Ice wines and botrytized wines” for which you need advanced chemistry.  I only knew that some wines had to be shipped around the world, sometimes in their home bottles, and sometimes in bulk, to be bottled by the importer on my side of the ocean.

Freakonomics (guest columnist, I think) gives the wrong answer for the wrong reason:

To me, when the consumer dollar is going more toward advertising than toward materials or production, it’s a paradigm case of overpricing.  It bothers me that the mainstream wine media doesn’t take brands to task for this.

The mistake here?  Same mistake we make at every handoff, every exchange, every trade, every transaction.  We are not pricing wine here.  We are not buying wine when we buy wine.  We are buying a prop for the long-running play Don’t You See What’s So Good About Me?  A cell phone, a house, a gym membership, a pet, a vacuum cleaner, a spatula, a tractor, a tarp, a trough…  All props for the same play.  When do we buy anything for itself, outside of its place as a prop in our play?  I’m worth it, we say.  I’ll show them.  One of these days they’ll see.

We aren’t paying for wine plus advertising here.  We are paying for advertising plus wine.  Not advertising about wine, either.  Advertising about us.  Same pitch every time.  Show them what you’re worth, goes the pitch.  Show them why you’re special.

When do we ever buy or sell anything except that story, and props for that story?  As T S Eliot said (I pull this from memory), Most of the trouble in the world comes of people struggling to give themselves importance.

Then how do they sell us anything?  By looking closely into our eyes and nodding Yes, I see what’s special about you, and one day everyone will see it, starting today, because you see what’s special about my offer, this [ fill in the blank: wine, spatula, baby crib, corn crib.... ].

Every transaction is first and last an exchange of meanings, words, and stories, with or without assorted props.

We aren’t buying what we pour from that bottle, we are buying what we pour from our mouth, the story we will tell.  We are buying something to say.  A speaking part in the play.  A few more lines for our part.  An extra chance to show the audience and critics what we’re made of.  Crappy wine works just fine for this.  See, I know crappy wine.  In case you didn’t know that about me.

DNA testing has largely destroyed our fond notions about one breed of grape over another.  Likewise race in humans, where DNA now tells us that nothing in nature supports our stories of race upon race.   So, have we thrown off those stories?   Stripped the libraries and arsenals?  Or do we still we pay in red for our stories of black and white and yellow?  For the shape and tint of the bottle and the label, around all the same blood?

In practice, we may fight more bitterly for our words and stories as DNA empties them of meaning.  I remember the owner of a liquor store in Tennessee who thumped his palm with an axe handle and instructed me that “the Bible says the blackbirds and redbirds, they don’t mix”  (sorry, I have not been able to locate the citation).  The termites of DNA were hollowing the floorboards under his feet as he spoke, under his shelves of clinking glass shapes and colored labels.  He knew nothing of DNA, but he knew blood, and mud, and the creak and crack of the boards between his blood and the mud below.  He would trade lives for hollow words, including his own;  and trade lives more fiercely for words more hollow.

OK, a harder one.

Why our irrational fear of baby-snatching is wasting money and risking lives, by Daniel Engber in Slate Magazine.  Spell it all out in your title, editors tell authors at Slate, I’m guessing.

Babies?  OK, this is wine but worse.  Here we are drunk on new life.

But it wasn’t the babies the industry was after so much as the moms.  Studies showed that women were responsible for 60 to 80 percent of the health care decisions for their entire families.  If you could get a young woman into your hospital when she was just starting a family, you’d have a shot at locking down four or five customers for life.

So began the “Maternity Wars.”  Birth centers across the country were renovated and ramped up to attract market share, and the maternity ward started to resemble a luxury hotel.

A competitive marketplace for moms has turned the baby-snatching panic into an expensive arms race: If Mercy West is using umbilical transponders, what kind of parent would risk delivering at Seattle Grace?

So praise my baby, the hope of the world and a six-decade extension to my favorite play: Don’t You See What’s So Good About Me?   Guard my baby like Fort Knox.

Are we buying the gadgetry or the story?  The story, of course.  The advertising.  The gadgets are just props, as always.

Even before the advent of high-tech umbilical tags, the likelihood of your infant getting stolen was one in 300,000, and the chance of her being physically harmed during an abduction was at most one in 3 million.

Still think we’re buying umbilical tags?  Here’s a danger with similar odds:

[In] perspective: One in 3.8 million Americans is crushed to death by a nonvenomous reptile.

We will crush to death more Americans with our story, our account of those umbilical tags, in the door to the nursery.  We paid thousands for the story, so you can damn well stand there another two minutes and hear it.

How can a story be worth everything to us?   Worth more than life?

I was the third person in the world to see my Alice (as we shall call her here) when she came into the world by Caesarian.  I have now been in Family Court for a year to see her again.  I saw Alice for an hour on her tenth birthday, at the courthouse, under the supervision of guards, in uniform and armed, and armed with clipboards so they could listen closely and write down what we say.  They listen more closely than Family Court does, to make sure nothing is said.

Why?  Am I a monster of some kind?  What’s my story?  Versus her mother’s story?

No one knows.

You see what your story is worth when you can no longer tell it.

Family Court is desperately overworked.  Family Court has no time for you or your story.  The smallest clinic in the county spends more on baby lojack than we voters budget for Family Court for the entire county.  If you want to abduct a child, then, Family Court offers your best odds: fifty-fifty, straight chance.  Get there first and you can call it, heads or tails.

Family Court is the Hall of Lost Children.  We never think our story will end there.  That’s for someone else, we think, not us.  We look down at that sleeping baby in the dark and see the thousands of places she will take us:  Carnegie Hall, El Capitan above Yosemite Valley, the Olympics in the Caucasus, by the Black Sea….

But you’ll get better odds telling your story to the clerk at the DMV.  Tell DMV about your baby, and how special she was, and what became of her.  Your girl will be crushed to death by a nonvenomous reptile before you walk across the park with her again, or she sits in your lap again, or dances with you in the kitchen, or makes French Toast for you in her pajamas…

===