The Longreads Blog

Every Kiss Begins with Kay… And Strategic Placement in Your Suburban Shopping Mall

In “Kay, Zales, and Marketing Diamonds to the Middle-Class Man”—a recent feature for Racked—Chavie Lieber wrote about Signet Jewelers, the parent company that owns such household names as Kay Jewelers, Jared, and Zales. Signet became the largest specialty jewelry company in America by targeting the midmarket jewelry segment, knowing their customer base, and doing some serious marketing. Trust also plays a major role in jewelry purchases, and Signet has honed customer trust via an unlikely strategy: store location.

Location is another incredibly important factor in the company’s success, says Angie Ash, executive vice president of jewelry marketing firm Fruchtman Marketing. Stores for Signet’s three largest brands (Kay, Jared, and Zales, which make up 41, 21, and 14 percent of the brand’s sales, respectively) are strategically placed. Most Kay and Zales storefronts are located in suburban malls populated with shoppers, while Jared storefronts are “normally free-standing sites with high visibility and traffic flow, positioned close to major roads within shopping developments,” as per the company’s 2015 annual report.

This emphasis on location not only correlates to sales, it also helps build brand recognition among shoppers.

***

Echoes Ash, “A customer that walks past the same mall jewelry brand every single week is going to eventually feel comfortable enough going when he’s ready to buy something. These mall jewelers also don’t have many barriers. They are an open storefront where people can go right up there and talk to an employee. In most cases, they also have price tags so shoppers can easily look at the items and see what they can afford.”

Read the story

The Art of Humorous Nonfiction: A Beer in Brooklyn with the King of the A-Heds

Barry Newman, in the monastic republic of Mount Athos, in the 1980s.

Mary Pilon | Longreads | August 2015 | 10 minutes (2,724 words)

 

“Why wait until the next story about coagulated fat in sewers comes along when you can read this one now?”

“All the world’s Grape Nuts come from a dirty-white, six-story concrete building with steam rising out of the roof here in the San Joaquin Valley.”

“With a WeedWacker under his arm, Dan Kowalsky was at work trimming the median strip of U.S. Route 1 in suburban Westport, Conn., when he was asked, above the din: Why not use a scythe?”

For 43 years, this is how Barry Newman has opened his stories. As a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, Newman developed a niche as the “King of the A-Hed,” the front page, below-the-fold feature story that had become one of journalism’s more peculiar corners since its inception in the 1940s. On a front page filled with the dryness of the bond market, the gravity of war casualties or the enduring egotism of Wall Street, the A-Hed was an homage to the ridiculousness of the world, a favorite among readers, reporters and editors, its existence constantly under threat. Read more…

What Is an Authentic Greek Salad?

At The Awl, Dan Nosowitz writes about the history and singular charms of what’s called the “Greek salad,” and about the slippery nature of authenticity. After the financial agreement Greece recently signed with its creditors, it’s a good time to be reminded of the strength of Greek’s handiwork with greens, veggies and herbs, and their influence on the world.

Like many other classic American dishes (ground beef tacos, spaghetti and meatballs, General Tso’s chicken), the Greek salad is a domestic creation with a vague reference to some other country. It is common to find excoriations of the American Greek salad that claim that a dish called horiatiki (pronunciation is close to whore-YA-tee-kee) is the truly authentic Greek salad, the one Greeks love, the reason that any real, authentic, Greek person from Greece and not America would look at an American Greek salad and think, “Pah! This is not authentic!” (Horiatiki is a salad of roughly chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, and sometimes sweet green pepper, with feta cheese, olive oil, olives, and oregano. It has no lettuce.) Ahhhh, authenticity.

Read the story

Whale Tales: A Reading List

Whales: We want to watch them, to save them, to read all about them. They are so large—larger than life—that they are symbols in our literature and in our lives. Yet they remain elusive to us, due in part to their nature (deep-diving and difficult to track for sustained periods of time) and to our nature (killing what fascinates us, industrialization, greed). These four stories demonstrate humans’ multi-faceted relationship with whales—where politics, the environment and the economy intermingle with love, terror and cruelty.

1. “Chasing Bayla.” (Sarah Schweitzer, Boston Globe, August 2014)

Let’s start off strong. Sarah Schweitzer has written a masterful story, here: one of hard work, daring rescues, danger and heartbreak. Dr. Michael Moore created a sedative to calm endangered whales trapped in deadly fishing wire. But is his invention enough to free the animals he studied all his life? (I cried.) Read more…

On the Difficulty of Separating Van Gogh the Artist from Van Gogh the Brand

It has become harder over the last 130 years or so to see Van Gogh plain. It is practically harder in that our approach to his paintings in museums is often blocked by an urgent, excitable crescent of worldwide fans, iPhones aloft for the necessary selfie with Sunflowers. They are to be welcomed: the international reach of art should be a matter not of snobbish disapproval but rather of crowd management and pious wonder – as I found when a birthday present of a Van Gogh mug hit the mark with my 13-year-old goddaughter in Mumbai. But there is so much noise around Van Gogh besides the noise of his paintings. There is the work, then the several hundred thousand words he himself wrote, then the biographies, then the novel, then the film of the novel, then the gift shop, then even (as at the National Gallery) the Sunflower bags in which you cart your treasures away from the gift shop. The painter has become a world brand. And so there is an inevitable coarsening, at the micro as well as the macro level…

We have a problem of seeing, just as we often have a problem hearing (or hearing clearly), say, a Beethoven symphony. It’s hard to get back to our first enraptured seeings and hearings, when Van Gogh and Beethoven struck our eyes and ears as nothing had before; and yet equally hard to break through to new seeings, new hearings. So we tend, a little lazily, to acknowledge greatness by default, and move elsewhere, away from the crowds discovering him as we first discovered him.

Julian Barnes, writing about Vincent van Gogh in the London Review of Books.

Read the story

The History of Weak American Beer

In The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker writes about the historical conditions that shaped the flavor and body of America’s popular commercial brews. Like the cultural melting pot of America itself, various factors, including market forces, thirsty laborers, WWII rationing, religious movements and the idea of temperance all thinned our big brand beers into the light, offensively inoffensive yellow water they are today, and helped birth our current craft brewing renaissance in response:

But Americans didn’t develop a more unified taste in beer until the mid-1800s, when huge numbers of German immigrants—including David G. Yuengling, whose brewery still operates today, outside of Philadelphia—arrived and brought lager with them. Less intense in flavor than porters, stouts, and ales, lagers were a hit with America’s growing number of factory workers and miners, who ate at saloons near where they worked. “It was normal to get a beer with your meal, but not allowable to be tipsy on the job,” says [economics professor Ranjit] Dighe. “So if you wanted a beer, your safest option was a weak beer.” As more and more immigrants came to the U.S. and unemployment stayed high, the stiff competition for jobs made this pressure for sobriety even higher.

From this perspective, wateriness was not a bug, but feature. In the late 1800s, when Anheuser-Busch started selling a milder version of Budweiser made with rice, it cost a nickel more than its competitors—and it sold quite well.

Read the story

‘Puro Amor’: A New Short Story by Sandra Cisneros

Still Life with Parrot and Fruit image via Flickr

The truth was that the Mister had always been dishonest. Not with his feelings but with his heart. He would be the first to tell you how honest he was about his dishonesties. He was like a chronic bed-wetter; he could not control himself. He would always be a bed-wetter even if he were not given a drop to drink. He had no wish to overcome this weakness. A big overgrown child indulging in whatever he saw, his eyes bigger than his pajarito.

And so Missus Rivera surrounded herself with animals. For what could be better than creatures when one has been betrayed, what finer emblem of loyalty and steadfastness and pure love.

Puro amor y amor puro. That’s what each pet gave her, pure and clean. Pure love and only love. Who wouldn’t want that?

“¿Quién quiere amor?” Missus called out. It was as if she was giving away treats and not simply love, for the creatures rose from all corners of the house and courtyard…

…The Guacamaya, who had the most acute hearing of all the household, stretched out his feathered neck, revealing flesh as pink as a toreador’s stockings, batted magnificent wings, bobbed like a prizefighter, the black orbs of his eyes growing larger, then smaller, larger, smaller, until finally he shrieked with wicked pleasure, “¿Quién quiere amor?” in the voice of a crone, as if making a mockery of the Missus.

-From “Puro Amor,” a new short story by The House on Mango Street author Sandra Cisneros–seemingly based on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera–in The Washington Post’s 2015 Fiction Issue (second story, below one by Curtis Sittenfeld and above another one by Padgett Powell).

Read the story

Industrialization and the History of the Matzo Machine

The Streit's matzo factory on Suffolk and Rivington. Photo by Leo London, Flickr

For centuries matzo was a handmade specialty, carefully rolled into a thin, cratered moon shape and pricked with a fork. Today, many Orthodox communities still make this version — called shmurah — which is supervised by a rabbi from start to finish. But industrialization in the mid–nineteenth century forever changed the matzo industry.

Historians trace the first matzo machine back to a French Jew named Isaac Singer (no relation to the American inventor of the sewing machine), who, in 1838, invented a contraption that automated rolling the dough, rather than kneading it, which cut prep time. The new contraption greatly increased the supply of matzo, which also made it cheaper. Countries around Europe soon began using the machine, a great boon for the growing Jewish population across the world. In 1888, Behr Manischewitz, a Russian rabbi, brought a version of Singer’s machine to America, settling in Cincinnati and establishing the country’s first matzo company. By 1915, when Aron Streit emigrated to New York from Austria and founded his matzo business, Manischewitz had upgraded to three rolling machines and was by far the largest producer of matzo, cranking out 1.25 million crackers a day. So, essentially, other American producers, like Streit’s, have been playing catch-up from the beginning.

Britta Lokting writing in the Village Voice about murky future of Streit’s, America’s last family-owned matzo factory. After 90 years on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Streit’s sold their Rivington Street factory in January without having yet secured a new location. The company is hoping to relocate upstate to a facility in Rockland: they are “frantically working out last-minute logistics” for a September move-in, but the deal has not yet been officially announced.

Read the story

It’s Friday, Friday: Rebecca Black, the Politics of Entertainment, and Growing Up

Had it been released today, “Friday” almost certainly would have gone to No. 1 on Billboard’s flagship singles chart the Hot 100 (which began counting YouTube streams in its formula in 2013), a distinction that, for an unsigned artist, would have made a recording contract a foregone conclusion. Black’s status as a previous unknown with a catchy but readily mocked hit would be far less anomalous in a mainstream that has stretched to accommodate songs like Psy’s “Gangnam Style” and Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.” But in 2011, YouTube was still widely regarded as a sideshow in the industry…

When “Friday” exploded, the YouTube community was a dubious ally — a source of more snark and vitriol than moral support; but now it’s home. Black’s life revolves around the platform…where she’s regarded as something of a grizzled veteran. In Black’s story, middle- and high school–age kids enmeshed in the unlovely “before” phase of life see a survivor and a role model, someone who lived through a social media nightmare of epic proportions and managed to emerge unbroken.

—Reggie Ugwu, writing for BuzzFeed. When she turned 14, Rebecca Black’s mom paid a couple grand to have her daughter record an inane, hyper-catchy music video in Los Angeles. “The video for ‘Friday’ was never supposed to be made public, and instead was meant for sharing among friends and family, like glamour shots or a wedding video,” but the production company posted it to their YouTube page, and it garnered 100 million views in mere hours. Cue chaos, a media tour, several thousand nasty comments, and a hell of an adolescence. But now, Rebecca Black is doing just fine.

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…