Lost in Lualand

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

At first, I was devouring this book at a rapid clip. I visited Savannah, Georgia, ages ago, as a kid, and the descriptions here vividly reawakened those old memories. And the setup is compelling: you've got your rootless, Nick Carraway-esque observer-narrator; you've got your tense game of "psycho dice" played in a crumbling historic downtown mansion; you've got your eccentric gay antique-collecting millionaire; you've got a murder; and then you've got this whole compelling cast of characters, from the gentleman-lawyer who's always writing bad checks, to the volatile hothead who serves as an assistant/handyman/lover(?) for the aforementioned eccentric millionaire, to the quirky dude in the diner who's constantly threatening to poison the water supply of the whole town, to the flamboyant Lady Chablis who performs drag shows all throughout the southeast... Lots of fun! Lots of colorful vignettes!

But at some point, maybe a third of the way in, I found myself wondering why this novel didn't feel... story-shaped? I don't mind a heavily discursive writing style, or a wealth of subplots, but this wasn't either of those—it just felt like a bunch of of incidents loosely strung together.

That's when I googled the book and learned that this is not a novel at all, but nonfiction. Oops. Ha ha ha. And that's also when my interest started to wane. Not because I dislike nonfiction in principle, but because the narrative was starting to have the feel of a New Yorker piece gone on too long, where yes this writing is all very nice and these portraits are all very vivid but I feel like I got the point a while ago...

And yeah that's why I started this book all the way back in October but only finished it recently. Sigh.

It really leans hard into the "quirky portraits of maximally Southern TM stuff" thing, which I'm always half-fond-of and half-ambiently-suspicious-of. Complicated feelings there! Suffice to say a lot of southern writing always seems kind of interested in drumming up its own quirkiness in ways that can be charming or irksome or both, and doubly so for the northerner-coming-into-town-to-write-about-the-southerners genre.

Also: 200+ weeks on the NYT bestseller's list? Like I get the appeal but not to THAT extent, huh.

Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys by Joe Coulombe and Patty Civalleri

My vandetta against Business Books TM is a matter of public record, and so when someone told me this was their favorite business book they'd ever read, I checked it out with trepidation, fully prepared to chuck my Kindle across the room the instant I caught a whiff of Wharton in the air...

HOWEVER.

Turns out, the problem with the Business Book TM genre is that most of them aren't about actual business. Mostly they're about how-to-climb-weird-artificial-corporate-ladders or Toastmasters-but-explained-to-you-by-the-most-annoying-motherfucker-you-know or the like.

But a business book that's actually about business? Written by the dude who founded the Trader Joe's grocery store chain? Covering all the raw nuts-and-bolts of here's-how-we-broke-the-price-of-butter-in-Los-Angeles, here's-why-we-never-signed-a-continuous-operation-clause-on-a-lease, did-you-know-table-grapes-are-the-#1-cause-of-slip-and-fall-accidents-in-stores-so-we-keep-costs-down-by-not-carrying-them, here's-how-we-found-a-loophole-in-wine-importing-laws-and-became-temporarily-the-top-distributor-of-quality-champagne-in-the-US? Fucking fascinating. I'm now half-convinced there is no business on earth more interesting than the grocery business. My backup career is now "food wholesaler." Please let me do some arbitrage on cheese prices I am HERE for it.

It helps a lot that Joe himself is just a charmingly odd dude. He has a tendency to throw out random anecdotes that have you going "WHAT", and then he never elaborates on them. For instance:

The processing of almonds leaves a lot of bits and pieces of almonds behind. Doug Rauch came up with the idea of grinding almonds into an analog for peanut butter. Easier said than done. The technology for grinding almonds is completely different than the technology for grinding peanuts. Finally, Doug, whom you will meet often in these pages, found a religious colony in Oregon who had mastered the trick and taught it to Doug. For years we were almost the only retailer with almond butter. In some years, we could sell it cheaper than peanut.

I'm sorry, the reason Trader Joe's had almond butter before everyone else was they got their secrets from some Pacific Northwest cult? and some random employee found them, got their secrets, and Trader Joe-ified them? Sorry I would like to read ten chapters about how that came about???

But you do not get to read ten chapters about it, because what Joe really wants to tell you about is the profit margin on almond butter versus peanut butter and state regulations on dairy nomenclature. The cult is never mentioned again. But I'm happy just knowing that this is a real thing that happened.

Similar art:

Whenever I couldn't answer 'the bell' (like when I went into a coma for three weeks after unloading a truck in a rainstorm)

A... a literal coma, or...? you OK, Joe? (Presumably! Because we never hear another word about the incident again.)

And he's got a flair for the dramatic in describing just about everything: he refers to one company as "a rare ethical player in the now wholly corrupt California milk business" (who knew milk was so shady!), he spares a lot of vitriol for the "quasi-fascist" New Deal's National Recovery Act, he'll toss out a bit about how "[m]ost of my ideas about how to act as an entrepreneur are derived from The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset, the greatest Spanish philosopher of the twentieth century" and just keep rolling on uninterrupted while I'm googling whoever this Gasset guy is, and then he goes on a FURIOUS tirade about how senior discounts are not just bad business but perhaps morally bankrupt, and so on.

He's also frank to a fault. For instance: he talks about how he always tried to specifically hire left-handed people because, as a leftie himself, he was just convinced that left-handed people are better/smarter, and if you're thinking "that sounds like a discrimination case*, Joe," he says something in the very next sentence to the effect of "oh yeah you can't do that thing nowadays," and you're like ok fair this was a long time ago, except then the very next sentence he's like "so that's why I always tried to get them to write something down during the interview, that way I could find out if they were a leftie without actually asking them anything." Like. This dude. Lmao.

* Actually I have no idea if this is a discrimination case. Are right-handed people a protected class? Can you sue on the basis of "look this isn't a protected class per se but this is dumb as hell?"

Okay but I promised this was a book about business. Most the fun is in the details / anecdotes he shares, which I won't repeat in detail here, but there's some interesting high-level themes:

* Joe decided early on to pay employees highly—his target was the median household income in whatever city he was opening a store in. He says in hindsight this was the "right decision for the wrong reasons." Grocery margins are tight, and thus generally not the kind of thing where you want to pay significantly-above-market-salaries if you can get away with it, but he had a sense that, in order to beat the huge national chains, he'd need really good people able to do "a little of everything," minimize turnover (salaries are expensive but turnover even moreso, he argues), and so on.

* Also early on, he read an article in Scientific American about the burgeoning number of college graduates in the US, and Joe decided then and there that "overeducated and underpaid" were going to be his target demographic. His whole hunch was the newly-educated masses were going to spurn the hegemonic mass culture at the time (I don't think I'd appreciated just how narrow the scope of mainstream media was in 50s/60s America—he has a lot of contempt for broadcast TV at that time, and it really is kind of staggering that there was a decade-or-two-long period where nearly everyone was watching the exact same shows), and be more open to trying new/different foods, and so that's what they'd focus on. Their first location was Pasadena for this reason—with Caltech & other universities right nearby, plus lots of engineering firms. Based on the median person I know who goes to Trader Joe's, he seems to have hit this market bang-on.

* Early on, he realized that underbidding the likes of Wal-Mart or Kroger, in terms of raw numbers, is a losing proposition. They're willing to loss leader and undercut until the cows come home. But you can act faster and buy smarter than those companies, almost always. He paid his buyers significantly more than his competitors, and the buyers would hunt out deals and close quickly. Say someone needs to get rid of some cheese before it goes bad, but they haven't got enough to attract the likes of Wal-Mart, and anyway selling to Wal-Mart sucks because you have to schedule months in advance—then Trader Joe's says, we can meet with you this Wednesday, we're willing to buy the whole thing, here's our offer, take it or leave it. Maybe it's not the offer you dreamed of, but it's more than "zero", which is what you're gambling on if you're hoping Wal-Mart pans out two months from now. Generally, they take the deal, and that's how Trader Joe's manages to get surprisingly good deals on a lot of niche products. (Costco has somewhat similar underpinnings. Ever notice that chocolate chips are seasonal at Costco? Yeah, that.)

* He was aggressive about minimizing any kind of "fiddliness" with his products. There wasn't any produce in Trader Joe's during his tenure because produce is fiddly; employees have to baby them and be careful unloading them and all that. Stuff is sold straight out of the crates they're shipped in because unpacking those crates and making pretty displays is fiddly. You can save a surprising amount of labor, toil, and money by cutting these kinds of corners

* In general: a lot of the grocery business seems to be built upon goofy short-term arbitrages based on transient market ineffiencies or weird workarounds for various regulations. There's a part where Joe relates, with incredible pride, how this one time Tillamook had too much leftover butterfat from their cheese-making process, so they took the leftover butterfat and made it into "whey butter" (chemically identical to butter, just without casein), and then they sold this whey butter 15% cheaper than regular butter. (They did have to label the butter "second quality" as well, due to California regulation, but "whey butter" became the dominant item in people's minds: "oh it's a newer, fancier butter" or whatever.) Except Tillamook is based in Oregon and shipping that stuff to California is interstate commerce, so eventually the feds get pissed off and tell them to knock it off because there's no federal recognition of a thing called "whey butter", so they had to relabel it to just "butter," which confused customers because now all they're seeing is "butter, second quality" instead of "whey butter, second quality", so Trader Joe's responds by just finding someone in California to make the same thing (thus removing the interstate commerce protections). The book is full of goofy 15% savings for random corner cases like this and they're all weirdly fascinating in context.

There's another bit where he's super-pissed that the Wisconsin cheese lobby has mandated minimum prizes for most the types of cheeses people want to buy, which means he can't really undercut competitors the way he'd like to... but then he notices that said lobby overlooked brie. So Trader Joe's sold very cheap and very delicious brie and that put them "on the map" for their whole lil cheese section. Lol get rekt Wisconsin

So, yeah, I had a ton of fun reading this quick lil book. I guess I should note the copyediting is really wobbly—there's a couple paragraphs that are repeated word-for-word at various points in the book, some serious grammar errors and also a couple things where it just looks like copy-paste fucked up some—but it wasn't enough to detract from my overall enjoyment.

Also finally I'm sharing this excerpt because this might be the most stereotypically Californian set of paragraphs to ever California:

Each September [Scientific American] devotes its entire issue to a single subject. In September 1970, it was the biosphere, a term I'd never seen before. It was the first time that a major scientific journal had addressed the problem of the environment. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, of course, had been serialized in the New Yorker in the late sixties, so the danger to the biosphere wasn't exactly news, but it could be considered alarmist news. The prestige of Scientific American, however, carried weight. In fact, it knocked me out.

Within weeks, I subscribed to the Whole Earth Catalog, all the Rodale publications like Organic Gardening and Farming, Mother Earth, and a bunch I no longer remember. I was especially impressed by Francis Moore Lappé's book Diet for a Small Planet. I joined the board of Pasadena Planned Parenthood, where I served for six years.

Paul Ehrlich surfaced with his dismal, and proved utterly wrong, predictions. But hey! This guy was from Stanford! You had to believe him! And in 1972 all this was given statistical veracity by Jay Forrester of MIT, in the Club of Rome forecasts, which proved to be even further off the mark. But I bought them at the time.

Bob Hanson, the manager of the new Trader Joe's in Santa Ana, which was off to a slow start, was a health food nut. He kept bugging me to try "health foods." After I'd read Scientific American, I was on board! Just how eating health foods would save the biosphere was never clear in my mind, or, in my opinion, in the mind of anyone else [...]

That's the entire origin story for their health foods pivot. lol. love it

Maame by Jessica George

I got this book via a neat lil' "debut authors bookclub" subscription that I was gifted last year.

The premise: Maddie's twenty-five years old and a total homebody—doesn't drink, doesn't date, hasn't ever moved out of the house, and doesn't do much except a godawful dayjob, where she's a personal assistant for a clinically-depressed #girlboss in a catty whitey-mcwhite arts organization. This homebody-ness isn't entirely by choice—what Maddie doesn't tell most people is, her father got a Parkinson's diagnosis when she was 17, and she's been his primary caretake ever since. Her brother is no help: he's barely been at home since he was a teenager, let alone now, and is happy to let her take care of dad. Her mother's no help either, always traveling back to Ghana for months or years at a time to run the hostel she's got as a side business down there.

Until one day, her mom announces that she's returning from Ghana in a week, she's moving back into the house to take over caring for dad, and she wants Maddie to move out—get some roommates, get a boyfriend, try to have some fun.

The good: the family dynamics at play in this novel are vividly drawn, believably fucked up & believably warm in turn. Whenever Maddie's having a tense conversation with her older brother, or fielding another obnoxious phone call from her mom, or having a quiet & sweet moment with her dad, or some auntie's in town with some drive-by "help", it's just so, so good. I wanted to read like five hundred pages about this family. (The mom, especially, whose blatant tendency to make up "traditions" just to get her daughter to do what she wants is both infuriating and pretty funny, and whose backstory, which is only hinted at—well, I would like a whole additional novel about her, please.) Workplace dynamics are another strength of the book—though they're less front-and-center, that #girlboss character (legitimately Going Through A Lot and facing incredible pressure to make herself worthy in the eyes of her male peers; also legitimately a total bitch to her underlings) was really vividly drawn for someone who disappears entirely a third of the way into the book.

The I'm-ambivalent-about-it: On the one hand, a delayed coming-of-age is a pretty cool premise. I've known plenty of people who are a little sheltered or stunted or socially unadventurous into their 20s, because—well, because of reasons not-too-dissimilar from Maddie's. Life happens; the whole college-dorms-at-18-and-apartment-with-roommates-at-22 is not a universal or even majority experience; sometimes people are figuring out How To Date way later than their peers and that's just how it is. And a lot of those elements were bang-on: the roommate conflicts felt so aggressively like clueless-twentysomething-roommate-kerfuffles. But other parts felt a grating and juvenile—like, yeah, I get that she hasn't gotten out of the house much, but she is twenty-five, not fifteen, and some of her google queries make her sound weirdly closer to the latter at times.

The less-good: in the tail end of the book especially, there's a lot of lapses into therapyspeak and sentimentality. Some of them, I'd be willing to swallow—like, when it's her talking with her two twentysomething friends after a breakup, I can kind of buy the "this came out of a CBT manual" stuff, because I too have occasionally been in a room full of people who read Way Too Much Tumblr. But when the guy she's interested in dating does it? and also we get weirdly Correct TM outpourings of love from various other ancillary characters? It's just... way too cozy, way too group hug.

I mean, I feel kind of like a bitch saying that, because it's pretty obvious the author wrote this as a tribute to her own father (she makes it very clear in the narrative it's based pretty heavily on her own life), and so it ends up feeling like I'm saying something about the person who wrote it. I'm not, honest! I'm sure writing this was an enormous comfort for her, and probably also will be an enormous comfort for people in similar circumstances, and I'm glad for it—but I, alas, just ain't a group-hug-kinda-person.

I'd definitely be curious to read more by this author, though, if future work tones down the schmaltz a bit.

(A weird comparison that just struck me: Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety? That novel's also got a lot going on in terms of how caretaking taxes us even as we love those we care for, and damn I'm overdue for a reread on that one, it's been years)

A Pocket Guide to Hawai`i's Birds and their Habitats by H. Douglas Pratt and Jack Jeffrey

i did a little writeup over on tumblr!