Dynamic Marketing
by Theo Wilson
My mother told me I was born to do great things. With such a destiny, I was confident that all I had to do was to sit back, and wait. However, it appears that I have waited for too long; destiny has passed me by, and I am dubious as to whether it will return. My life is a monotonous cycle, punctuated by brief moments of banality.
My name is Charles Stevens. I work at Swiftmart, and this is my third day as the Regional Distributions Workfloor Manager. As impressive as the name sounds, my actual job—as well as my paycheck—is hardly befitting of the title. I’m not sure what my official duties are. So far, I’ve been doing the same thing I’ve always done. So far, no one has bothered to correct me. If I am doing something wrong, I honestly couldn’t care less. In high school, I was voted “Most likely to still be a bagboy at Swiftmart in twenty years.” Thirteen years later, I still work at Swiftmart, although I have been promoted several times. I suppose that makes me successful. However, I suspect that my promotions did not come out of ambition or merit; Swiftmart, much like the town of Anderson, has a very high personnel turnover rate.
I wonder where my life is going. I mention this because, at the age of 32, I have reached the height of the Swiftmart career ladder, only to look down and see how depressingly close to the bottom I still am. I have considered starting a new life. A jump from the ladder, so to speak, at this height wouldn’t be too bad. It’s not too late; I still can find a new career—a new life. I wonder only how this is possible in Anderson.
Swiftmart was the beginning of the end for Anderson. When the developers announced their plans to build one of their branches in Anderson, the townspeople were outraged. Our town had been a bastion of traditionalism, and the people had vehemently opposed the project. But consumerism triumphed over conservatism and the Store was built on the location of an old orchard on the edge of town. The people promised boycotts and protests. They promised the developers that their venture would fail. They said that the people of Anderson had values and that they cherished their town and would never let it change. They said this and the developers just listened and smiled.
At first I really thought the people would win; they really did protest, and they really did boycott, and, for a while, the parking lot of Swiftmart was empty. But the town of Anderson was in the middle of a long economic decline. Times were rough for everyone. Gradually, the protesters put down their signs and took up shopping carts, and then, gradually, the parking lots of Swiftmart began to fill.
One by one, the mom-and-pop stores closed down. One by one, the old, massive Victorians came down and their lots were subdivided. For every house that came down, a half-dozen homes arose. I watched as Anderson’s asymmetrical skyline smoothed out to uniform conformity. They called it gentrification. Dad called it murder.
No one lives in Anderson anymore. No one besides me, anyway. People come and stay, but for them it is never home. It is just stepping stone, an intermediary between where they are, and where they want to be.
I live in my parents’ home. That is not to say that I live with my parents. I’m the only one who stays here. When Dad died, he left it to my mother. When my mother ran off to California with her boyfriend, she left it to me. The house is a large crème-colored Victorian. Unlike the other Victorians that had surrounded it many years ago, it is not excessively adorned. It was simple compared to the other houses, many of which made use of bold colors and elaborate trims, but I’ve always found it beautiful. Now, all of the other houses are gone, replaced by acres of tract homes and town houses. Only my house remains, a single, massive relic in the middle of Levittown.
• • •
Growing up, my family never had a television. We never had a microwave, and we never had a food processor. We had a phone, but only for emergencies. Whenever the phone rings, I greet it with a fair amount of suspicion. The only people who call me now are phone solicitors and pollsters. The pollsters, I don’t mind so much. Sometimes we can find some thing of mutual interest to discuss, but most of the time they just want to talk politics. Sometimes I just hang up on them. Sometimes they hang up on me.
I’m not sure how the telemarketers got my number. I suspect that my ungracious employer gave it to them, but I cannot say for sure. Every time telemarketers call I ask them politely to remove my number from “the list,” but so far they have ignored my request. I try to talk to them sometimes, but they never have anything particularly insightful to say.
Anyone who calls me nowadays wants something. Pollsters want my political opinions—of which I have none; telemarketers just want my money—of which I have none. The last time I answered the phone, it was my mother. She wanted me to move out to California. She told me that I was wasting my life in Anderson. I told her that I have a wonderful job. She told me that I needed to get a girlfriend. I told her that I have a beautiful girlfriend. She told me that I was lying. I told her she’s a judgmental bitch. She told me that I’m miserable. I hung up.
I don’t particularly enjoy lying to my mother. I’m not even sure why I do it. I suppose it might be out of habit. That’s probably why she calls me too. Our family interactions have been reduced to sharing lies and obscenities over the phone. Although it is true that, on some days, we have decent conversations, usually we’re just like a normal family.
• • •
Dad once told me that there are two things that every man needs in life: a good drink, and a good woman. Two years later, he died, defeated and alone, unaware that my mother had been sleeping with another man. The moral lesson that I inherited was this: don’t try, life will always fuck you over. As you may imagine, this had a very sobering effect on any future ambitions I might have had. I once thought that I could change the world. Now, I would give anything just to escape it. As a side effect of my father’s sudden demise, I came away with an acute fear of death. I find its unpredictability to be frightening and unsettling.
The other day I woke up with an intense chest pain. There are no hospitals in Anderson. There used to be a small doctor’s practice in the town, but that was before the Leston Medical Center opened. When it opened they offered everyone in Anderson cheap medical insurance. The insurance is no longer cheap and the local doctor is no longer in practice. I hesitantly voiced my concerns to a coworker and he suggested I use the Swiftmart Pharmacy’s online diagnosis program. I did, but rather than give me the definitive answer I had been hoping for, I received a list of possible diseases, each accompanied by a myriad of symptoms. According to the computer, if I develop a fever and cough, I have pneumonia. If I get severe pain in one eye, then I have Lupus. If my face swells, then chances are that I have Lassa Fever, a rare rate-born African viral disease. And, if I feel a sudden pain in my left arm, an irregular heartbeat, and then collapse, chances are, I am having a heart attack.
They all sounded so unpleasant. I crossed my fingers, and hoped for Pneumonia. For three anxious days I waited. Every day, I expected to develop a whole range of exotic symptoms. Now, finally, the pain in my chest is gone, but has been replaced by a sharp discomfort in my stomach. I looked it up on the computer—I fear it may be an ulcer.
• • •
Dad used to own a small, modest bookstore, back when Anderson was still a small, modest town. Dad had collected books since he had been a boy, and he said that it was his dream to share his love of books with other people. He said that, no matter what happens in the world, people would always read. Before the advent of Swiftmart, people did buy books. Dad was quick to point out the surprising amount of interest among the townspeople, although it must be noted that Anderson had, at that time, neither movie theater nor video rental shop, and the only other bookstore in the town specialized only in nineteenth century Russian literature. Nonetheless, it appeared as though Dad’s hard-earned dream and effortless optimism would pay off.
When Swiftmart opened their branch in Anderson, Dad said he still wasn’t worried. After all, no matter what happens in the world, people would always read, and it was a fact that Swiftmart did not sell books. But, for some reason people started to come in less. Dad said that he wasn’t worried. He said that people would always read. But then our friends moved out of Anderson, and strangers moved in. At first, Dad wasn’t worried. For every one of our friends that moved out of Anderson, three new families moved in. More people meant more books, means more sales, means more readers. The math was so simple; Dad was always optimistic. But the new people who came never read. They might stop by once or twice a year to buy books for birthdays and Christmases, but these books were never read. They were, for these people, visual distractions, eye candy, shelf fillers, doorstops. I asked Dad how he could tell these people from the ones who read. I thought he was going to say something about their mannerisms or something about their eyes. Instead he told me that they only bought the new books. He explained that old books made poor gifts, as they made the book-giver appear cheap, defeating the purpose. I asked him how he knew for sure. He told me that he once received an entire shipment of some foreign book by mistake. The distributor offered to take back the shipment, but Dad decided to keep it. The book, written entirely in Italian, nonetheless had an elaborate binding that was covered in some shiny faux gold material. Dad charged twice the suggested retail and sold them all in a week. Soon after that, he stopped carrying new books.
It wasn’t long after Swiftmart moved in that it opened its Literary Department. As a loyal Swiftmart Employee, I know that that the Store uses a tactic called “Dynamic Marketing.” It’s a lovely euphemism. Here’s how it works: because every Swiftmart location has a different sales audience, the Stores, when they first open, offer very few “specialty items” (with books falling into this category). When the Stores open, the executives watch and see what local shops close down and which stay open. They analyze the ones that stay open, and then start to stock the merchandise that these shops sell. The shops cannot compete with Swiftmart, so they close down. The theory behind this tactic being that it promotes an image of Swiftmart that portrays it as a “local” store that appeals to very “local” interests.
Dad did not have “Dynamic Marketing” techniques. Dad didn’t even know what “Dynamic Marketing” was. When people stopped coming into the store, I asked him if he was worried. He said that as long as people were reading, he would keep his store open. And then, unexpectedly, he closed the store one day and never opened it again. When I asked him why, he told me that the world has gone to hell.
After that, he would just stay at home and read. Every now and then, he would open up the store just to find a specific book to bring home. I asked him once why he bothered to keep the store at all. He didn’t respond. I never brought up the subject again, but I suspect that he wasn’t ready to give up on his dream entirely.
For my fifteenth birthday, Dad gave me a book. I can’t remember what it was. I do remember, however, that he appeared far happier about the book than I was. I was certainly happy, but it wasn’t because of the book. It was just nice to see him act like he used to. Inside of the cover, he had placed a thin note written in neat print. It’s amazing what your mind chooses to remember and what it so easily forgets. For some reason though, I can still remember what Dad wrote: “A man can work his entire life and be nothing. Reading allows him to be anything. Remember what Twain said, ‘A man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.’”
I really wanted to show my dad how much I cared about the book. I only wanted to please him. I signed my name in cursive on the front cover so no one would ever mistake it for their own. Dad told me to keep it safe, so I kept it with me at all times. I made sure that Dad always saw me with it; a couple times, I even opened it up in front of him and pretended to read. I noticed that it was becoming slightly worn around the edges, but such was the price of my protection. One day, a couple months after my birthday, Dad asked me what I thought of the book. When I told him that I hadn’t read it, he took it away and I never saw it again.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read the book, it’s just that the thought of doing so never really occurred to me. I really wish I had read it, but at the time I thought that as long as I had the book with me, Dad would be happy. In retrospect, I suppose that I could have been a little more perceptive. I don’t think my dad was mad at me, although I can’t say for sure. He was simply quiet for a long time.
During this same period, I saw my mother less and less. Every time I did see her, she seemed different, more alien. She got new clothes and new jewelry to go with her new hair. She got new friends to go with her new look. I asked her once how she paid for all her new stuff if Dad wasn’t working at his store. She never answered me, but I suspect now that I know.
I remember the day that Dad died. It was the same day that Swiftmart announced that they would be dissolving their Literature Department due to poor sales. When I came home from school, Dad was in his chair, as always. I thought he was asleep, but I remember him looking so uncomfortable. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to fall asleep in that position. I was affronted by the pungent stench of alcohol. I found the bottle resting on one of Dad’s books, but it was empty. The book was in fair condition, but when I lifted the bottle it left a dark, discolored ring on its back cover. I looked at Dad, and again; he didn’t look right. I replaced the book to its natural place on the shelf and put the bottle in the garbage, and walked over to Dad’s chair. He wasn’t breathing.
It was forty minutes before the ambulance made it to our house from Leston, and another fifty before we got to the hospital. He was dead long before that. They didn’t tell me, of course, but I knew it all the same. The doctors said they didn’t know what it was that killed him. I told them about the alcohol, but they shook their heads. It would’ve taken more than that to kill him, they told me. I asked them if a man could die from sorrow, but they assured me that such a thing wasn’t possible. It was three hours before my mother showed up. She was wearing a new dress. Her mascara was only slightly upset.
After Dad died, my mother sold the store, though she couldn’t get rid of the books. She was on the verge of throwing them out when I saved them. I couldn’t take all of them, but I took what I could. From what I could tell, she quickly exhausted any money she gained from the sale of the shop. She didn’t seem to regret anything. On the contrary, for the first time in a long time, I thought she seemed happy. She introduced me to her boyfriend, and told me to call him father.
• • •
A couple of months ago, a girl came to my door, hoping to sell magazine subscriptions for some softball tournament. As cute as she was, I told her that I wasn’t interested. She persisted, and I gave in. I looked at the list of subscription she offered: none of them appealed to my taste. I asked for her recommendation, and she signed me up for a year’s worth of a magazine called Vogue.
I had intended to cancel the magazine subscription as soon the girl walked off my property, but somehow it slipped my mind. I forgot about it. And then the first issue arrived at my door. The men in the magazine had bright blue eyes and bone white teeth. Their hair was clean-cut and their chests were waxed. The clothes they wore were loose, but gave away a hint of their muscular bodies underneath. I, of course, noticed a slight disparity between their appearance and mine. I was in shape, but they were fit on a whole different level.
I had always considered myself rather attractive. I wasn’t exactly a ladies man in high school, but I certainly didn’t have a lot of trouble. In school, having good skin and straight teeth was usually qualification enough to get a date. I hadn’t been on the dating scene since then—apparently the standards had changed. My hair was too messy and long. My shoulders were too narrow, my stomach was too soft, my arms were too thin, my chin was too feminine, my eyes were too brown. The sudden awareness of my newfound imperfections had a drastic effect on my self-confidence. I was no longer young, a fact that was affirmed by the mirror with greater and greater clarity every day.
If you want it, Swiftmart has it. That’s the slogan. I wondered, after studying my Vogue, whether Swiftmart would have what I needed. The Store did indeed have it all.
Today, I have creams that promise to make my wrinkles disappear. There is an abdominal machine on top of my father’s table that is supposed to make me look like Chuck Norris. I bought a cover for the car I don’t own. I bought a necklace for the girlfriend that I don’t have. The dining room is filled with consumer products, all unused and unopened, all promising a new, better, improved me.
• • •
Swiftmart just opened up a new department. They call it eConsult. Apparently, there was a store in Anderson not too long ago that appraised items for you and sold them at online auction sites; now, it is just another successful casualty of Dynamic Marketing. On a whim, I decided to bring in a couple of Dad’s books from home today. I figured that I might be able to make enough money to get out of Anderson once and for all. At the least, I would be able to clear out some more space in the dining room—the place was getting tight and I had a stationary bike on the way.
When I got to Swiftmart, I brought my box over to the eConsult station. The man who works there was new—Ralph, I think his name is—and I have the faint impression that he was the former independent owner of the online auction store, though I’ve never bothered to ask. Swiftmart that morning was sparsely occupied and I couldn’t see the harm in asking a favor. I asked Ralph if he could look up a few old books for me. He told me that his name was, in fact, Ross, and that the whole system is automated. He explained that all you do is type in the title and author of the book, and its condition, and the system will search for auctions and give you an estimate, all automatically. I asked him, then, what his purpose was. Nothing, he told me, he did nothing.
I pulled out a book that appeared to be in decent condition, an old copy of Peter Rabbit. It thought it was a fine book, aesthetically speaking, though I couldn’t imagine that anyone would be willing to pay money for it. According to the computer, though, people would be willing to pay money for it—a lot of money. My amazed reaction, however, was somewhat delayed. I was mindful of the fallacies of my recent prognosis using a similar technology, and I invited Ross to come over and take a look.
I now suspect that Ross is paid on commission, as his reaction to the computer’s message was positively ecstatic. He looked at the book, and confirmed that the book was indeed worth that amount. He appeared more than eager to assist me.
Aside from the first-edition Peter Rabbit, my dad had collected several other books of considerable value, the most impressive of which was a book entitled On the Tendency of Species to Forms Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, by Charles Darwin, a book which sounded to me to me excessively dull, but which would supposedly fetch around $43,000 online.
We were nearly at the bottom of the box when I pulled out a book that was very familiar. It was a first edition copy of Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming. I turned to the first page, and my name was still on the inside cover, as was the note from Dad.
Much to the distress of Ross, I left work early—I didn’t even bother to clock out. Rather than take the bus as I usually do, I walked home slowly, intently mindful of the box tucked under my arm. It was dusk as I neared my house. Every house that I passed along the way was exactly the same. In the front window of every home, I could detect the faint glow of the television set.
I excavated Dad’s chair from under a stack of boot-cut blue jeans—the ones with the strategically placed holes and rips, added for authenticity— and drew it into a more comfortable spot in the living room. The living room had been uninhabited for so long that I almost forgot it was there. However, it seemed an appropriate location. Sitting down, I opened Ian Fleming’s novel and read Dad’s note:
A man can work his entire life and be nothing. Reading allows him to be anything. Remember what Twain said, “A man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”
I turned the book over and noticed a faint watermark on the back cover. Smiling, I turned back to the first page and began to read.