by Bill Bryson
I know all this because I have just been reading a book on the history of the motel in America called The Motel in America. Written by three academics, it is a ponderously heavy piece of work, full of sentences like “The needs of both consumers and purveyors of lodging strongly influenced the development of organized systems of distribution,” but I bought it and devoured it anyway because I love everything about motels.
I can’t help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open. It is just one of those things—airline food is another—that I get excited about and should know better.
The golden age of motels was also, as it happens, the golden age of me—the 1950s—and I suppose that’s what accounts for my fascination. For anyone who didn’t travel around America by car in the 1950s, it is almost impossible now to imagine how thrilling they were. For one thing, the national chains like Holiday Inn and Ramada barely existed then. As late as 1962, 98 percent of motels were individually owned, so each one had its own character.
Essentially they were of two types. The first type was the good ones. These nearly always had a welcoming, cottagey air. Typically, they were built around a generous lawn with shady trees and a flower bed decorated with a wagon wheel painted white. (The owners, for some reason, generally liked to paint all their rocks white, too, and array them along the edge of the drive.) Often they had a swimming pool or swings. Sometimes they had a gift shop or coffee shop, too.
Indoors they offered measures of comfort and elegance that would have the whole family cooing—thick carpet, purring air conditioner, a big TV, nightstand with a telephone and a built-in radio, gleaming bathroom, sometimes a dressing area, Vibro-matic beds, which gave you a massage for a quarter.
The second kind of motels consisted of the appalling ones. We always stayed at these. My father, who was one of history’s great cheapskates, was of the view that there was no point in spending money on... well, on anything really, and certainly not on anything that you were mostly going to be asleep in.
In consequence, we generally camped in motel rooms where the beds sagged as if they had last been occupied by a horse and the cooling system was an open window and where you could generally count on being awakened in the night by a piercing shriek, the sound of splintering furniture, and a female voice pleading, “Put the gun down, Vinnie. I’ll do anything you say.” I don’t wish to suggest that these experiences left me scarred and irrationally embittered, but I can clearly remember watching Janet Leigh being hacked up in the Bates Motel in Psycho and thinking, “At least she got a shower curtain.”
All of this, even at its worst, gave highway travel a kind of exhilarating unpredictability. You never knew what quality of comfort you would find at the end of the day, what sort of small pleasures might be offered. It gave road trips a piquancy that the homogenized refinements of the modern age cannot match.
That changed very quickly with the rise of motel chains. Holiday Inn, for example, went from 79 outlets in 1958 to almost 1,500 in less than twenty years. Today just five chains account for one-third of all the motel rooms in America. Travelers these days evidently don’t want uncertainty in their lives. They want to stay in the same place, eat the same food, watch the same TV wherever they go.
Recently, while driving from Washington, D.C., to New England with my own family, I tried explaining all this to my children and got the idea that we should stop for the night at an old-fashioned family-run establishment. Everyone thought this was an immensely stupid idea, but I insisted that it would be a great experience.
Well, we looked everywhere. We passed scores of motels, but they were all franchised to national chains. Eventually, after perhaps ninety minutes of futile hunting, I pulled off the interstate for the seventh or eighth time and—lo!—there shining out of the darkness was the Sleepy Hollow Motel, a perfect 1950s sort of place.
“There’s a Comfort Inn across the street,” one of my children pointed out.
“We don’t want a Comfort Inn, Jimmy,” I explained, temporarily forgetting in my excitement that I don’t have a child named Jimmy. “We want a real motel.”
My wife, being English, insisted on having a look at the room. It was awful, of course. The furnishings were battered and bare. The room was so cold you could see your breath. There was a shower curtain, but it hung by just three rings.
“It’s got character,” I insisted.
“It’s got nits,” said my wife. “We’ll be across the road at the Comfort Inn.”
In disbelief, I watched them troop out.
“You’ll stay, won’t you, Jimmy?” I said, but even he left without a backward glance.
I stood there for about fifteen seconds, then switched off the light, returned the key, and went across to the Comfort Inn. It was bland and characterless and just like every Comfort Inn I had ever stayed in. But it was clean, the TV worked, and, it must be said, the shower curtain was very nice.
I believe I have just secured definitive proof that America is the ultimate shopping paradise. It came in a video catalog that arrived unsolicited with the morning mail. There, among the usual diverse offerings—Titanic, Tai Chi for Health and Fitness, every movie ever made by John Wayne—was a self-help video called Do the Macarena Totally Nude, which promises to guide the naked home viewer through “the hot moves of this Latin-influenced dance that is sweeping the nation.”
Among the catalog’s other intriguing offerings were a documentary called Antique Farm Tractors, a boxed set representing the complete oeuvre of Don Knotts, and an interesting compilation entitled Nude Housewives of America (volumes 1 and 2), depicting ordinary housewives “doing their daily chores in the buff!” And to think I asked for a socket wrench for Christmas.
My point is that there is almost nothing you cannot buy in this remarkable country. Of course, shopping has been the national sport in America for decades, but three significant retailing developments have emerged in recent years to elevate the shopping experience to a higher, giddier plane. They are:
•Telemarketing. This is an all-new business in which platoons of salespeople phone up complete strangers, more or less at random, generally at suppertime, and doggedly read to them a prepared script promising a free set of steak knives or AM-FM radio if they buy a certain product or service. These people have become positively relentless.
The possibility that I would buy a time-share in Florida over the telephone from a stranger is about as likely as the possibility that I would change religious affiliation on the basis of a doorstep visit from a brace of Mormons, but evidently this feeling is not universal. According to the New York Times, tele-marketing in America is now worth $35 billion a year. That figure is so amazing that I cannot think about it without getting a headache, so let us move on to retail development number two.
•Outlet malls. These are malls in which companies like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein sell their own lines at discounts. In many cases, outlet malls are not malls at all but rather whole communities that have been taken over by outlet stores. Easily the most remarkable of these is Freeport, Maine, home of L.L. Bean.
We stopped there last summer on the way up the Maine coast, and I am still trembling from the experience. The procedure for a visit to Freeport is unvarying. You creep into town in a long line of traffic, spend forty minutes hunting for a parking space, then join a crowd of thousands shuffling along Main Street past a succession of shops selling every known brand name that ever was or will be.
At the center of it all is the L.L. Bean store, which is huge. It is open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. You can buy a kayak there at 3 A.M. if you want. People apparently do. My brain is beginning to hurt again.
•Catalogs. Shopping by mail has been around for a long time, of course, but it has proliferated to a degree that is just beyond astounding. Almost from the moment we arrived in America catalogs began plopping unbidden onto our mat with the daily mail. Now we get perhaps a dozen a week, sometimes more—catalogs
for videos, gardening implements, lingerie, books, camping and fishing gear, things to make your bathroom a more stylish and convivial place, you name it.
For a long time I tossed these out with the rest of the unsolicited mail. What a fool I was. I now realize they not only provide hours of reading pleasure but open up a world of possibilities I scarcely knew existed.
Just today, along with the aforementioned nude macarena brochure, we received a catalog called “Tools for Serious Readers.” It was full of the usual assortment of blotters and desk organizers, bed lights and lap trays, but what particularly caught my eye was something called the Briefcase Valet, a small wheeled trolley that sits about four inches off the floor.
Available in dark or natural cherry and attractively priced at $139, it is designed to alleviate one of the most intractable office storage problems of our age. As the catalog copy explains: “Most of us are faced with the same nagging problem of what to do with our briefcase when we put it down at home or in the office. That’s why we designed our Briefcase Valet. It holds your briefcase up off the floor, making it easier to insert and retrieve things as the day progresses.”
I especially like those last four words, “as the day progresses.” How many times have I gotten to the end of a working day myself and thought: “Oh, what I’d give for a small wheeled device in a choice of wood tones to save me reaching those last four inches!”
The scary thing is that often these descriptions are written so artfully that you are almost taken in by them. I was just reading in another catalog about a fancy kitchen accessory from Italy called a Porto Rotolo di Carta, which boasts “a spring tension arm,” “stainless steel guide,” “crafted brass finial,” and “rubber gasket for exceptional stability”—all for just $49.95—when I realized that it was, in fact, a paper towel holder.
Obviously the catalog couldn’t say, “No matter how you look at it, this is just a paper towel dispenser and you would be a sap to buy it,” so they must try to dazzle you with its exotic pedigree and technical complexity.
In consequence, even the most mundane catalog items boast more design features than a 1954 Buick. I have before me a glossy book from another company announcing with undisguised pride that its flannel shirts feature, among much else, gauntlet buttons, extra-long sleeve plackets, two-ply 40S yarn construction (“for a superior nap”), boxed back pleat, double stitching at stress points, handy locker loop and nonfused collar, whatever all that may be. Even socks come with lengthy, scientific-sounding descriptions extolling their seamless closures, one-to-one fiber loops, and hand-linked yarns.
I confess I have sometimes been briefly tempted by these seductive blandishments to make a purchase, but in the end I realize that given a choice between paying $37.50 for a shirt with a superior nap and just having a nap, I will always go for the latter.
However, let me say right here that if anyone comes up with a Totally Nude Macarena Socket-Wrench Home Work-out Video with handy locker loop in a choice of colors, I am ready to place my order now.
The U.S. Congress, which never ceases to be amazing, recently voted to give the Pentagon $11 billion more than it had asked for. Do you have any idea how much $11 billion is? Of course you don’t. Nobody does. It is not possible to conceive of a sum that large.
No matter where you turn with regard to America and its economy you are going to bump into figures that are so large as to be beyond meaningful comprehension. Consider just a few figures culled at random from this week’s papers. California has an economy worth $850 billion. The annual gross domestic product of the United States is $6.8 trillion. The federal budget is $1.6 trillion, the federal deficit nearly $200 billion.
It’s easy to lose sight of just how enormous these figures really are. America’s cumulative debt at last count, according to Time magazine, was “a hair” under $4.7 trillion. The actual figure was $4.692 trillion, so that statement is hard to argue with, yet it represents a difference of $8 billion—a pretty large hair in anybody’s book.
I worked long enough on the business desk of a national newspaper in England to know that even the most experienced financial journalists often get confused when dealing with terms like billion and trillion, and for two very good reasons. First, they have usually had quite a lot to drink at lunch, and, second, such numbers really are confusing.
And that is the whole problem. Big numbers are simply beyond what we are capable of grasping. On Sixth Avenue in New York there is an electronic billboard, erected and paid for by some anonymous source, that announces itself as “The National Debt Clock.” When I was last there, it listed the national debt at $4,533,603,804,000—that’s $4.5 trillion—and the figure was growing by $10,000 every second, or so fast that the last three digits on the electronic meter were a blur. But what does $4.5 trillion actually mean?
Well, let’s just try to grasp the concept of $1 trillion. Imagine that you were in a vault filled with dollar bills and that you were told you could keep each one you initialed. Say, too, for the sake of argument that you could initial one dollar bill per second and that you worked straight through without ever stopping. How long do you think it would take to count a trillion dollars? Go on, humor me and take a guess. Twelve weeks? Two years? Five?
If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days— something over three years—to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost a thousand years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar (and even then you would be less than one-fourth of the way through the pile of money representing America’s national debt).
That is what $1 trillion is.
What is interesting is that it is becoming increasingly evident that most of these inconceivably vast sums that get bandied about by economists and policy makers are almost certainly miles out anyway. Take gross domestic product, the bedrock of modern economic policy. GDP was a concept that was originated in the 1930s by the economist Simon Kuznets. It is very good at measuring physical things—tons of steel, board feet of lumber, potatoes, tires, and so on. That was all very well in a traditional industrial economy. But now the greater part of output for nearly all developed nations is in services and ideas—things like computer software, telecommunications, financial services—which produce wealth but don’t necessarily, or even generally, result in a product that you can load on a pallet and ship out to the marketplace.
Because such activities are so difficult to measure and quantify, no one really knows what they amount to. Many economists now believe that America may have been underestimating its rate of GDP growth by as much as two to three percentage points a year for several years. That may not seem a great deal, but if it is correct then the American economy— which obviously is already staggeringly enormous—may be one-third larger than anyone had thought. In other words, there may be hundreds of billions of dollars floating around in the economy that no one suspected were there. Incredible.
Here’s another even more arresting thought. None of this really matters because GDP is in any case a perfectly useless measurement. All that it is, literally, is a crude measure of national income—“the dollar value of finished goods and services,” as the textbooks put it—over a given period.
Any kind of economic activity adds to the gross domestic product. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a good activity or a bad one. It has been estimated, for instance, that the O. J. Simpson trial added $200 million to America’s GDP through lawyers’ fees, court costs, hotel bills for the press, and so on, but I don’t think many people would argue that the whole costly spectacle made America a noticeably greater, nobler place.
In fact, bad activities often generate more GDP than good activities. I was recently in Pennsylvania at the site of a zinc factory whose airborne wastes were formerly
so laden with pollutants that they denuded an entire mountainside. From the factory fence to the top of the mountain there was not a single scrap of growing vegetation to be seen. From a GDP perspective, however, this was wonderful. First, there was the gain to the economy from all the zinc the factory had manufactured and sold over the years. Then there was the gain from the tens of millions of dollars the government must spend to clean up the site and restore the mountain. Finally, there will be a continuing gain from medical treatments for workers and townspeople made chronically ill by living amid all those contaminants.
In terms of conventional economic measurement, all of this is gain, not loss. So too is overfishing of lakes and seas. So too is deforestation. In short, the more recklessly we use up natural resources, the more the GDP grows.
As the economist Herman Daly once put it: “The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.” Or as three other leading economists dryly observed in an article in the Atlantic Monthly last year: “By the curious standard of the GDP, the nation’s economic hero is a terminal cancer patient who is going through a costly divorce.”
So why do we persist with this preposterous gauge of economic performance? Because it’s the best thing that economists have come up with yet. Now you know why they call it the dismal science.
I decided to clean out the refrigerator the other day. We don’t usually clean out our fridge—we just box it up every four or five years and send it off to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta with a note to help themselves to anything that looks scientifically promising—but we hadn’t seen one of the cats for a few days and I had a vague recollection of having glimpsed something furry on the bottom shelf, toward the back. (Turned out to be a large piece of gorgonzola.)