Wal-mart is where America shops, right? Therefore, the magazines offered by Wal-Mart must be what America reads. On this assumption I traveled to a sprawling St. Louis Wal-Mart supercenter yesterday to photograph the magazine rack. There were many titles, indeed. You’ll see them in the photos embedded in this post. Because there are so many titles, there must also be quite a breadth of information, right? You’ll be the judge. I’m putting up this post with the hope that we can all put our heads together and do a bit of anthropology.
Now for the tour. Here are the magazines of Wal-Mart from left to right):
The first thing you might notice is that the literature is categorized a bit differently than it is in a public library. For instance, the Dewey Decimal System [1] uses the following major categories:
000 Generalities
100 Philosophy & psychology
200 Religion
300 Social sciences
400 Language
500 Natural sciences & mathematics
600 Technology (Applied sciences)
700 The arts
800 Literature & rhetoric
900 Geography & history
It’s a bit different at Wal-Mart, where you’ll find these categories:
- Automotive
- Fashion
- Teen
- Entertainment
- Woman
- Information
- Sports
- Men’s
- Home/Garden
- Puzzles & Games
- Computers
There doesn’t seem to be any overlap at all. Perhaps the Dewey system can be revamped to take advantage of this cutting edge Wal-Mart catergorization. I realize, now, that these Wal-Mart topic labels are not literal and exact. For instance, the fact that one section is called “Information” doesn’t mean that there is no information in any of the magazines in the other sections. As you can see, I’m on the verge of being sarcastic–I’ll do my best to resist and move on. I will really try.
Say, I thought we were all past this “Women” versus “Men” thing a long time ago, but the division is plain as day where America shops. I will have to assume that Wal-Mart makes this stark division because it has determined that it’s simply for the best that men and woman not share certain sorts of information. For example, computers, getting rich and getting abs mags are up there together in the Men category for the convenience of dudes like me.
One shelf down, you’ll notice that there is actually a magazine called “Shop.” I didn’t see any counterpart that might have been called “Don’t Shop.” And look at all of the puzzle books! Do so many peole really have nothing better to do? I know that this will sound narrow-minded, but I’ve always thought of crossword puzzles as the kind of thing you would do if you had to be on a lifeboat for a long time, waiting to get saved–only because there’s so nothing else to do. I know that this is really not fair to say to you guys who waste all that time doing crossword puzzles. But let’s not tarry. Let’s move on. Here’s the next section over (to the right):
You can see, above, that dudes like me can slide seemlessly from our computers and get rich mags into our fitness and sports magazines. When we read lots of sports magazines, we start strutting around assuming that the women think we look a lot like the guys who take those steroids. That’s not always how the chicks see us, though.
The middle row is dominated by domestic advice. How to decorate and remodel one’s home. We’re still far from the endcap, that high traffic area where the magazines are likely to be noticed.
Now check out the bottom row. Quilting and beading, along with other hobbies, before morphing to that most-general sounding of categories: information. If you look closely, you’ll see two bona fide science magazines: Discover and Scientific American. I’m assuming that these were placed in this store as the result of a court-enforced set-aside lawsuit brought by the scientists. I’m not certain about this, though.
You can see from the upper shelf that we are seriously into man-territory (guns and sports), balanced out by all of that chick stuff on the middle shelf. There is a lot of counter-balancing like this going on. For instance, there are many articles focusing on eating, about as many as focus on dieting. Also, check out the Me Me ME magazine, not counter-balanced by any magazine called “NOT Me.”
I love books of maps, but I didn’t know that other people actually considered them to be “Entertainment.” Hey! Not much here on current events . . . Ooop, actually, we passed it already. It consists of Time Magazine. If you want to spend a day boning up on international events and culture, then, you’d better read your Wal-Mart Time real-l-l-ly slowly.
Time to keep moving.
It is at this far right side of the magazine shelf that we are into the manliest of man things and the womanliest of woman things, it seems. LOTS of wedding magazines tucked into the chick lit–much more popular than in older times, when people got married only once.
The man shelf offers a really epiphany for people like me who keep thinking of vehicles as simply a gadget for moving me from Place A to Place B. It’s apparently FAR more than that.
Now I’m not trying to be cruel here, but I did find myself looking at those numerous athletes and models on the magazines. I then carefully glanced around the store, unsuccessfully, to see if anyone at Wal-Mart resembled the beefcake and cheesecake people populating the front covers.
It is in the bottom-right section when we finally hit those realest of realities: Television Reality and National Examiner Reality.
We’re almost done. Assume that you almost made it out of the store without buying a magazine. You panic, though, because you do want to keep yourself informed. After all, there are elections coming up at least every two years. Have no fear! You get one last chance to inject lots of knowledge (though not “Information”) right at the register:
Pies, sex, fancy clothes, dieting, being glamorous, knowing the latest on the private lives of actors. And don’t overlook Real Simple, a very slick magazine that teaches us how to live the simple life by buying lots and lots of things.
What do I make of all of this? I’m not sure. Here’s one thing: we really seem obsessed with our own bodies, clothes, food, hobbies, cars and fantasies. We also appear to be rampant materialists, based on the cover “bait,” all of those clothes, gadgets, hairstyles, fancy houses and cars printed on all of those front covers. Finally, even though Americans constitute less than 5% of the Earth’s population, we just don’t seem interested in foreigners. Not interested at all. Not one bit.
I’m going to keep giving this project some thought. I do suspect, though, that these magazines tell us much less about the things depicted in them than they tell us about the people who buy them.
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