On the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, members of the 99% trekked out to the New York Stock Exchange to protest, only to be halted by police who were there waiting for them. It seems like the NYPD has learned from the past OWM, but have the protestors?
The Occupy Wall Street Movement is often criticized as being led by members who are more interested in making noise over the issues rather than finding solutions to them. They blame the wealthy "1%" of Americans for usurping power in the United States. One of the demonstrators defines the movement as a rebellion against American "corptocracy," referring to the unbalanced amount of control big businesses have in the United States.
Demonstrations against a small, wealthy, industrial class have been prevalent in American society ever since the Populist movement of the Gilded Age. The OWS protesters are generally viewed in one of two ways: as brave souls who are willing to get arrested for standing up for their beliefs, or as deadbeat members of society who complain about being in the 99% of Americans yet do nothing to change their social status. Many of the protesters seem to have simply jumped on the Occupy bandwagon; when a demonstrator getting arrested was asked what he came to protest for, he said "freedom, the free-education movement... a lot of things." It seems as if the Occupy movement has become trendy for some, a modern movement that people can say they have participated in without actually knowing the movement's true purposes.
How many protesters do you think actually care about the state of the economy, let alone know what the occupy movement is about? Do you think the protesters are actually getting anything accomplished?
Besides
hitting up Forever XXI and the Auntie Ann's pretzel sample lady every time I go
to the Garden State Mall, I always end up going into Nordstroms. Not because I
shop there (have we all seen those price tags?!), but because the mall entrance
within it just happens to be the unspoken drop-off/pick-up spot of half the
teenagers who go there. I remember going shopping with my
friends during middle school, all of us savoring the "-teen" portion
of our new-found ages, reveling in the coolness that only kids who
could go to the mall by themselves could possibly achieve. While waiting for our rides
to come, we would loiter in the shoe department, admiring pairs of shoes that
we would never be able to afford, especially after spending what little money
our moms gave us at Sarku Japan.
Oops.
One thing that stayed consistent throughout
my Nordstroms loitering days was the snootiness of the employees. Granted,
I was loitering, but their
belittling treatment of me and my friends stuck with me and inspired
this blog post (if you can't tell, I hold a grudge like it's nobody's
business). Whenever
a person goes into a more high-end store, like Nordstroms, Sephora, or Lord and Taylor, the employees give them
an immediate once-over; if the shopper looks like he or she can afford the products being
sold, they scurry over to assist, ask them about their day, and perhaps
entertain the accordion of wallet-sized photos, fished out of a
Louis Vuitton satchel, all to make a big sale.
However, if someone wearing sweats and flip flops walked into an expensive
store ready to purchase the shelves of all their merchandise, the employees
wouldn't give the person two minutes of their time; an all-encompassing eye
roll would probably be their only acknowledgement. My friend once told me that her mom
went into Nordstroms and unwittingly tested that stereotype, and it held
true; her sweatsuit-look classified her as an "unworthy shopper," but
when she returned a week later in a full face of makeup and a minx coat,
salespeople bombarded her like paparazzi. In today's society, all it takes is
wearing some sweatpants into Coach to make the employees, and perhaps other
shoppers, think you're poor.
Girl, you are not fooling anyone with those booties, sweatpants = low class! DUH.
The
reverse effect is also prominent: if you don't look the part to shop at
certain stores, you might get a little too much
attention from staff there, who'll go far enough to assume that you'll shoplift
since your outfit is clearly the best indicator of your ability to afford their merchandise. Ageism and
racism come into play here often; in a stuck-up employee's mind, how could a teenager ever afford a $200 wristlet when they're dressed... comfortably? Even worse, there are prejudiced employees that will take skin color into account for judging the likelihood of someone to shoplift. this brings to mind that episode of That's So Raven in which Raven goes undercover to expose Chelsea's boss of being racist. She instructs Chelsea to keep a special eye on undercover-Raven, simply because she's black and assumes that he-who's-really-a-she is more likely to shoplift than all the other customers in the store.
Bottom line, what you wear, what you look like, and who you are should have nothing to do with how employees judge you. It's ridiculous to think that you can't go shopping without getting undeserved attitude from stores that you're patronizing. Next time you go to the mall, walk through Nordstroms or Sephora in baggy sweatpants, and count the disdainful looks or (negative) extra attention you get. If you had a nickel for every judgment passed against you, you'd probably be rich enough to clean the shelves of those high-end stores off, but after being so judged, I doubt you'll want to.
As
the first of a series of hard-hitting questions I'll be asking readers in the
future, I must ask you all: what would an Oreo be without its cream filling?
While it gives the Oreo its sleek, symmetrical appearance, the cream also
provides a cushion between the two extreme wafers of crunchy, chocolate-y
goodness, a stable middle-ground, if you will. No, I'm not just talking about
Oreos because I'm craving a midnight snack, but because milk's favorite cookie
serves as a wonderful analogy for the American middle class, the buffer group
between the rich and the poor.
Today's poor economy has caused the middle class to shrink,
as if a giant tongue of unemployment has licked its way across the central
rungs of the social ladder, a.k.a. our beloved cream filling (kind of a gross
metaphor, but accurate!). In this article, Kenneth Repoza, a Forbes contributor, reports that a study that Pew Research
conducted shows that a full 32% of Americans now report themselves as being
members of the lower class, when only 25% reported themselves as such in 2008.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
American incomes are at a standstill, the job market is a disgrace, and the
unemployment rate nearly makes history at 8.1%. The types of people who occupy
these classes has changed, too; people under 30 make up the majority of the
self-defined lower class group while the numbers of Hispanics and whites in the
lower class grows. However, the unemployment rate of black Americans has stayed
the same while those of the other races grew, placing a nearly equal percent of
whites and blacks in the lower class.
The four subsections of the middle class: the Top of the Class, the Satisfied Middle, the Struggling Middle, and the Anxious Middle.
The concept of the middle class disappearing is interesting
(and worrying) to me in itself; the fact that more and more people are slipping
into the lower class is a legitimate manifestation of the dire state of our
economy. However, Repoza's approach to this article is the thing about it that
really struck me. He decides to attack the demographics behind each social
group, making a point to single out white and black Americans. He says that "as a consequence, a virtually identical share of blacks (33
percent) and whites (31 percent) now say they are in the lower
class," and he even titled the article "America's Middle Class
Shrinks Further... Now, Blacks And Whites [Are] Equally Broke." He
obviously thought that highlighting the social equality between black and white
people would compel people to read the article, probably because they'd be
surprised by that fact. I found it interesting that though the article was
supposed to be about social classes and the dwindling middle class, but the
author spun it in a way that compared the types of people who made up each
class. Although the demographics of members of each social class should be put
on record, using them as the basis for evaluating the social classes seems to
be besides the point. Since the author used races of people to draw attention
to the article, it's clear that people are more intrigued by seeing how their
own race measures up to others than reading about the facts and figures of the
economy.
*generic joke about how that is the way the cookie crumbles*
Although the last things that anyone wants to think about right now are classes (hello, new school year), don't fret! My topic concerns classes of the social variety. The topic of social classes used to seem cut-and-dry to me; the rich were rich, the poor were poor, and that was that. However, over the years I've seen how a person's social standing can affect his or her life and relationships with others, and in today's unstable economy, one's position in the class system can be altered in the blink of an eye.
Still, I didn't choose this topic to simply extend my knowledge on the social classes. A natural sociology geek, I prefer to observe how members of different or common social classes interact with one another, specifically analyzing how their class standings affect their interactions and relationships. I'll specifically be exploring how social class affects relationships among people in America, and, hopefully, on an international level, as well. I'll aim to make this topic more interesting than anyone (including myself) ever thought it could be, and I look forward to keeping it classy with you all on here. Happy reading!
