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A review by lpm100
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr
medium-paced
2.5
Book Review
The Secret Life of Groceries
3/5 stars
"Relative proportions of information and agitprop"
*******
I almost wanted to believe a lot of this book, but it is a little bit on the sensational side.
I think he is the Barbara Ehrenreich of the grocery industry. (By "Barbara Ehrenreich," I mean somebody who came in with his own pre-existing perspective and just used working people as props to support a book that had already been written in the author's mind--before a single interview--as an emotional self-actualization project.)
And I learned this when I read his chapter on truck drivers. (Over 38 pages, I counted 11 things that were factually false and another few things that were misrepresentative. Some of this might be expected when you research a book in 2015 and then actually write it 5 years later, when conditions are not the same.)
So, how many errors are in the other pages / chapters? (I know this because I'm a trucker.)
Misrepresentative:
1. He chose to show us a woman whose teeth had rotted out of her mouth and who chose to urinate in a bag in the back of the truck rather than go to a bathroom 25 ft away.
As if she is typical.
2. He showed us the way that a driver can gross $200,000 per year but have only $17,000 take home pay. But, lease purchase and owner operator are scams that
trucking companies run on people who CHOOSE NOT TO BE company drivers. (There's a sucker born every minute, so why not?)
The rate for over the road company truck drivers is about 65 cents per mile. A leisurely 46 weeks out (home 2-2.5 days per week and off 6 weeks per year) at 2,500 miles per week is a $75,000 salary. 50 weeks out (home 2 days per week) at 3000 miles per week is more like $97,000 per year.
Let me just go through some of the things that the author put on paper that were frankly false. (Only for this chapter.)
1. (79) "A trapper keeper serves as her logbook."
NO. Paper logs have been finished for several years. It's all electronic now.
2. (82) ".. pressure in your landing gear, or the temperature of your brake lines."
NO. There is no pressure in your landing gear. Hence no gauge for it
3. (82) "... The unwillingness to get out of the cab to stroll around."
NO. No truck driver needs to be encouraged to go out and get some fresh air.
4. (85) "... boasting the highest total number of deaths per year of any job."
NO. Logging workers have 101 deaths per 100,000. Truck drivers have 30.4 per 100,000.
5. (90) ".... quarter tank Lynne estimates she loses when we idle overnight."
NO. Trucks burn about 3/4 of a gallon of diesel per hour when they idle. 10 hours is 7.5 gallons. A quarter of a tank would be 67.5 gallons. At the rate of $4 per gallon, all trucking companies would put their drivers in hotels overnight to save on fuel. (They could put you in a $200 room and still end up way ahead.)
6. (95) ".... Trainer at one of the larger companies.... When describing his attempts to weed out substance abusers."
NO. All CDL holders have urinalysis drug testing as a condition of getting their license, and every time you hire a company you have to take the same test, and you can expect to be tested between 4 and 12 times per year. Failing any one of those tests is grounds for immediate loss of job.
7. (98) "..... After the 8th week, they shift to team driving"
NO. When you go out with a trainer, You can expect the training to last about 6 weeks and you get paid and progressive jumps every 2 weeks. Probably start at $500 and finish at $750 these days
8. (100) "Half the time there is a blowout, a fist fight, a brawl in the cab And they leave the freight in the middle of nowhere."
NO. All trucks and trailers are GPS tracked, even back then. Nothing can be left anywhere.
9. (103) "DAC report."
NO. 90% of companies don't use it, and the ones that do are training ones.
10. (103) "... hundreds of miles away from help or cell phone reception."
NO. Can you tell me a single place in the United States that is "hundreds of miles away" from cell phone reception?
11. (105) "Every woman I spoke with had a story of an abusive trainer, one who assaulted them, harassed them, threatened to rape them, or did one of those things to a friend."
NO. Women are NEVER sent out with male trainers, and have not been for at least the 20 years that I have had my license.
Second order thoughts:
1. The rubber has to meet the road at some point. Price of labor (or any other price) can exist at market clearing levels; if the price is too low you'll get a scarcity, and if it's too high you'll get it shortage.
It's nice that the author tries to turn this into a morality play of Big Evil Corporations/ Heartless Industries against Valiant Workers..... But all these things are more parsimoniously / non-normatively explained by basic Economic concepts.
If a customer sees milk at Walmart for $2.25 and $2.99 at Kroger, then all the information that he needs to know about ALL details is contained in those prices.
2. Questionable information quality notwithstanding, the book unintentionally shows the reader that from conception to successful execution of a product requires many steps with actual risk. And that the silent evidence of the people that do not succeed is overwhelming.
3. (224) "The trade-off is one we accept almost unconsciously. After all, as the cliché goes, out of sight, out of mind." This phrase seems to be a rehashing of Marx's "theory of worker alienation." But the question is: if you purchase 20 things per week and each of them has a thousand steps... How many do you need to understand? 1,000? 5,000? And once you do understand the steps, then what?
4. Even Paul Krugman knows this: Jobs at low wages are better than no jobs at all.
So, the chapter about the Burmese migrants could be reinterpreted to explain the incentives of the working men from a country that is war-torn and unstable finding that their best options were on Thai fishing boats.
Verdict:
Recommended at the price of about $5. Not worth keeping. Not worth rereading.
Vocabulary:
sophrosyne
vista
daps and pounds
pinner joint
chthonic
SKU (shop keeping units)
benthic
trawl
thanaka
peeling shed
aquaculture
Factoids:
(134) 20,000 new products hit the shelf each year. 89% of those fail within 18 months.
(138) The cost of national rollout for even a single frozen SKU [product] is about $1.5 million.
(?) Profit margins at grocery stores≈1.5%
(9) The average store has 32,000 SKUs. The biggest have 120,000. (70) A typical Aldi holds only 280.
Minor quibble
(p.55) "He studied fair trade regulations like it was midrash, digesting thousands of pages of law, case law, and legal commentary... "
NO. When people study case law (in a Jewish context, since that context was presumably the purpose of his throwing in the word "Midrash"), what they study is Mishna / Gemara.
The Secret Life of Groceries
3/5 stars
"Relative proportions of information and agitprop"
*******
I almost wanted to believe a lot of this book, but it is a little bit on the sensational side.
I think he is the Barbara Ehrenreich of the grocery industry. (By "Barbara Ehrenreich," I mean somebody who came in with his own pre-existing perspective and just used working people as props to support a book that had already been written in the author's mind--before a single interview--as an emotional self-actualization project.)
And I learned this when I read his chapter on truck drivers. (Over 38 pages, I counted 11 things that were factually false and another few things that were misrepresentative. Some of this might be expected when you research a book in 2015 and then actually write it 5 years later, when conditions are not the same.)
So, how many errors are in the other pages / chapters? (I know this because I'm a trucker.)
Misrepresentative:
1. He chose to show us a woman whose teeth had rotted out of her mouth and who chose to urinate in a bag in the back of the truck rather than go to a bathroom 25 ft away.
As if she is typical.
2. He showed us the way that a driver can gross $200,000 per year but have only $17,000 take home pay. But, lease purchase and owner operator are scams that
trucking companies run on people who CHOOSE NOT TO BE company drivers. (There's a sucker born every minute, so why not?)
The rate for over the road company truck drivers is about 65 cents per mile. A leisurely 46 weeks out (home 2-2.5 days per week and off 6 weeks per year) at 2,500 miles per week is a $75,000 salary. 50 weeks out (home 2 days per week) at 3000 miles per week is more like $97,000 per year.
Let me just go through some of the things that the author put on paper that were frankly false. (Only for this chapter.)
1. (79) "A trapper keeper serves as her logbook."
NO. Paper logs have been finished for several years. It's all electronic now.
2. (82) ".. pressure in your landing gear, or the temperature of your brake lines."
NO. There is no pressure in your landing gear. Hence no gauge for it
3. (82) "... The unwillingness to get out of the cab to stroll around."
NO. No truck driver needs to be encouraged to go out and get some fresh air.
4. (85) "... boasting the highest total number of deaths per year of any job."
NO. Logging workers have 101 deaths per 100,000. Truck drivers have 30.4 per 100,000.
5. (90) ".... quarter tank Lynne estimates she loses when we idle overnight."
NO. Trucks burn about 3/4 of a gallon of diesel per hour when they idle. 10 hours is 7.5 gallons. A quarter of a tank would be 67.5 gallons. At the rate of $4 per gallon, all trucking companies would put their drivers in hotels overnight to save on fuel. (They could put you in a $200 room and still end up way ahead.)
6. (95) ".... Trainer at one of the larger companies.... When describing his attempts to weed out substance abusers."
NO. All CDL holders have urinalysis drug testing as a condition of getting their license, and every time you hire a company you have to take the same test, and you can expect to be tested between 4 and 12 times per year. Failing any one of those tests is grounds for immediate loss of job.
7. (98) "..... After the 8th week, they shift to team driving"
NO. When you go out with a trainer, You can expect the training to last about 6 weeks and you get paid and progressive jumps every 2 weeks. Probably start at $500 and finish at $750 these days
8. (100) "Half the time there is a blowout, a fist fight, a brawl in the cab And they leave the freight in the middle of nowhere."
NO. All trucks and trailers are GPS tracked, even back then. Nothing can be left anywhere.
9. (103) "DAC report."
NO. 90% of companies don't use it, and the ones that do are training ones.
10. (103) "... hundreds of miles away from help or cell phone reception."
NO. Can you tell me a single place in the United States that is "hundreds of miles away" from cell phone reception?
11. (105) "Every woman I spoke with had a story of an abusive trainer, one who assaulted them, harassed them, threatened to rape them, or did one of those things to a friend."
NO. Women are NEVER sent out with male trainers, and have not been for at least the 20 years that I have had my license.
Second order thoughts:
1. The rubber has to meet the road at some point. Price of labor (or any other price) can exist at market clearing levels; if the price is too low you'll get a scarcity, and if it's too high you'll get it shortage.
It's nice that the author tries to turn this into a morality play of Big Evil Corporations/ Heartless Industries against Valiant Workers..... But all these things are more parsimoniously / non-normatively explained by basic Economic concepts.
If a customer sees milk at Walmart for $2.25 and $2.99 at Kroger, then all the information that he needs to know about ALL details is contained in those prices.
2. Questionable information quality notwithstanding, the book unintentionally shows the reader that from conception to successful execution of a product requires many steps with actual risk. And that the silent evidence of the people that do not succeed is overwhelming.
3. (224) "The trade-off is one we accept almost unconsciously. After all, as the cliché goes, out of sight, out of mind." This phrase seems to be a rehashing of Marx's "theory of worker alienation." But the question is: if you purchase 20 things per week and each of them has a thousand steps... How many do you need to understand? 1,000? 5,000? And once you do understand the steps, then what?
4. Even Paul Krugman knows this: Jobs at low wages are better than no jobs at all.
So, the chapter about the Burmese migrants could be reinterpreted to explain the incentives of the working men from a country that is war-torn and unstable finding that their best options were on Thai fishing boats.
Verdict:
Recommended at the price of about $5. Not worth keeping. Not worth rereading.
Vocabulary:
sophrosyne
vista
daps and pounds
pinner joint
chthonic
SKU (shop keeping units)
benthic
trawl
thanaka
peeling shed
aquaculture
Factoids:
(134) 20,000 new products hit the shelf each year. 89% of those fail within 18 months.
(138) The cost of national rollout for even a single frozen SKU [product] is about $1.5 million.
(?) Profit margins at grocery stores≈1.5%
(9) The average store has 32,000 SKUs. The biggest have 120,000. (70) A typical Aldi holds only 280.
Minor quibble
(p.55) "He studied fair trade regulations like it was midrash, digesting thousands of pages of law, case law, and legal commentary... "
NO. When people study case law (in a Jewish context, since that context was presumably the purpose of his throwing in the word "Midrash"), what they study is Mishna / Gemara.