This past weekend, I went down to the Puyallup Fair, which dates back to the early 1900’s and is one of the largest in the country. Amid the rides, games, gastronomic atrocities, and livestock competitions, are hundreds of sellers pushing practically any product you could think of, and many you didn’t know existed. The halls [...]
James Ledbetter of Slate says the nation is experiencing a “troubling disappearance of salesmen” and the “hollowing out of the middle class.” Ledbetter spreads the blame around and he provides a backdrop for the changes. In his classic 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell discussed how sales–and its close cousin, advertising–were at [...]
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