Last year I learned about how not to engage with shoplifting in a hardware store. You never know what will be on the body of a desperate shoplifter when her/his theft is exposed. But what if a shoplifter walks in a store with many luxury brands?
This sounds like a good short story prompt. I had the opportunity to visit a fancy design center last week. The center is a showroom for high-end earners who plan to give their kitchen, bathroom and flooring a makeover for a unique carpe diem experience.
In exchange for that experience, customers will have to spend on a five-digit price tag in the center, hiring a team of professionals from design to installation. I give a thumbs up to the salespeople for their detailed introduction. Even they admitted a good salesperson must hone their skill of storytelling. These high-earning prospect customers enjoy good-branding stories of elegance and class.
You can tell I’m not the type of customers the center is hunting for. I don’t recognize many luxury brands of kitchen and bathroom design. They are brands only familiar to a small group of customers and manufacturers. Do you remember the M-shaped Society mentioned in my writing? The concept came from William Ouchi, an American business educator. The shape of letter “M” describes vividly a polarized society with only the extreme rich and the extreme poor. The middle class in the society gradually disappears. The luxury brands of kitchen and bathroom design are for the extreme rich, the hump of the M-shaped Society.
I asked a saleswoman how her new products attract young high earners who are conscious about sustainability. Not surprisingly, she first referred to California compliance. She said her products all meet Californian environmental laws and standards. She showed me one of the stainless steel valves with a glossy galvanized finish. She explained to me that the valve enabled the user to adjust the water level from full to half of the amount. I didn’t feel impressed by this feature that she deemed innovative. Perhaps she saw my skepticism on the face. She continued, “Our brand of Victorian bathtubs is made of volcanic ash. We won’t run out of volcanic ash. In that regard, the material resource is abundant.”
Different from an iron cast bathtub, the luxury bathtub made of volcanic ash is allegedly more durable in terms of keeping the right temperature of the water in the bathtub. It’s news to me about the making of a bathtub from volcanic ash. In my reading about volcanic activities, they are linked to a high threat to public safety. If volcanic ash is that “sustainable” as the saleswoman touted, why can’t we make such a luxury brand more affordable to middle-to-low income consumers?
My reading also tells me that carbon dioxide and fluorine gases are toxic to humans and they can collect in volcanic ash. If inhaled, volcanic ash can cause breathing problems and damage the lungs of humans. So, I can’t help thinking further about the safety of the craftsmen who have handmade these luxury bathtubs made of volcanic ash. It’s likely they’re risking their life to make a living. Consumers who can afford these expensive bathtubs presumably don’t really know or even care about the danger. None of the employees in the design center, from lower-ranked designer to store manager, talked about a responsible business practice in educating and directing consumers toward a healthy quality experience in home improvement.
The discrepancy of understanding the source of consumers’ goods and their manufacturing processes is really huge in our societies. I remember a story about the risk-takers harvesting the small shellfish, also known as percebes, or goose neck barnacles, on the Atlantic coast. (Check out below video if you’d like a peep on the dining table of the rich.) The most highly prized percebes are the most dangerous to harvest, growing deep below the waterline in the Atlantic. I kept hearing the word “experience” throughout my tour in the fancy design center. I wonder how our trending metaverse, or virtual reality technology, can popularize a replica of rarity living that is unique to the rich?
At the end of my tour, I was waiting for my turn to visit the restroom. I happened to meet a Spanish-speaking cleaning lady. That gave me an opportunity to verify what I learned about the daily cleanup of the spotless kitchen and bathroom in the showroom. The cleaning lady was happy to work there because she could imagine how her fancy kitchen could be look like. She showed me how she would like to roast her chicken in a cabinet for a built-in oven. That luxury brand kitchen design is listed as a six-digit price tag. I asked her if she used special clean products to clean the counter top. She nodded her head and smiled. I joked, “So the chemicals in Walmart won’t work in this kitchen, right?” She grinned wider to affirm my guess.
When I say elites push our societies toward contributing more of a carbon footprint to our shared planet, I review the Diderot Effect that makes sense to me about the interrelationship between a human being’s consumption of natural resources and services and her sense of social identity. Our identities are tied to our clothes, gadgets and even fengshui of our furniture. Any fiction writer will tell you if you know your character well enough, you’ll utter as your own the character’s taste for life via scene setting, dress code and self-expression. My visit to a fancy design center certainly gives me fantasy and imagination for my characters. But as a sustainability advocate, the expensive, fancy appliances of the design center make me grim about how we educate ourselves and future generations to lead a balanced life in responsible sourcing and consumption.
We have only seven years left to achieve the UN’s 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. How much can we confidently accomplish for the 2030 Agenda? This year, making COVID-19 manageable and covering financial losses from climate change could make headlines. And last year UN’s COP15 on biodiversity ended with a landmark agreement to halt and reverse nature loss, including putting 30 percent of the planet and 30 percent of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030. It’s time to roll up our sleeves!