Shiraz Janjua

From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton, about a cookie company:

Partially undermining the manufacturer’s ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?

Yet before ridiculing the Branding Director of Savoury Biscuits, or for that matter the Special Events Manager who had signed off on the tinned assortment featuring Prince Philippe and Princess Mathilde of Belgium on its lid, it was wise to remember that at the heart of biscuit salesmanship lay an imperative which was undoubtedly both urgent and simple enough to qualify as meaningful — namely, survival. Workers were preoccupied with the ancient task of staying alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all too easily confused with clownishness.

Despite a few years of healthy profits, United Biscuits’ balance sheet was perennially vulnerable. Following the closures of all local steel, textile and coal industries, the area around the factory had some of the worst unemployment figures in the European Union, and accompanyingly high rates of crime and suicide. Any miscalculation in branding or manufacturing techniques, or a sudden increase in the price of wheat, or an irregularity in the supply of cocoa, could at a stroke wipe out a section of the workforce, who would be unlikely ever to find adequate labour locally again. Pottier knew what responsibility he shouldered for his people. He expressed particular concern at the predatory behaviour of his main competitor, the misleadingly cosy-sounding LU brand, owned by the gigantic French Danone Group. The two enterprises regularly locked horns like stags fighting to the death over limited habitat, in this case, the ten or so metres of the typical biscuit-aisle in the supermarkets of Northern Europe. Their respective sales teams waged sly campaigns to steal each other’s market share. Every product which United Biscuits made in Belgium was imitated by LU: its Delichoc, a butter biscuit coated in chocolate, faced off against LU’s Le Petit Écolier; its plain butter biscuit Gateau went head to head with LU’s Le Petit Beurre; and its chocolate-and-orange Colombine was countered by LU’s Pim’s Orange, even as its Domino, a wafer cookie with chocolate cream filling, contended for existence with LU’s Le Fondant.

The manufacture and promotion of all these was no game, but rather an attempt to subsist which was no less grave, and therefore no less worth of respect and dignity, than a boar hunt on whose successful conclusion the fate of an entire primitive community might once have hung. For if a new wrapping machine did not operate as efficiently as anticipated, or if a slogan failed to capture the imagination of shoppers, there would be no escape from shuttered houses and despair in the suburbs of nearby Verviers. The biscuits carried lives on their backs.

Modern commercial endeavours may not be the kind we have been taught to associate with heroism. They involve battles fought with the most bathetic of instruments, with two-for-the-price-of-one specials and sticker-based bribes, but they are battles nonetheless, comparable in their intensity and demands to the tracking of furtive animals through the deadly forests of prehistoric Belgium.

[...]

It was in the eighteenth century that economists and political theorists first became aware of the paradoxes and triumphs of commercial societies, which place trade, luxury and private fortunes at their centre whilst paying only lip service to the pursuit of higher goals. From the beginning, observers of these societies have been transfixed by two of their most prominent features: their wealth and their spiritual decadence. Venice in her heyday was one such society, Holland another, eighteenth-century Britain a third. Most of the world now follows their example.

Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. But the premises of a biscuit company are a fruitful place to recall that there has always been an insurmountable problem facing those countries that ignore the efficient production of chocolate biscuits and sternly dissuade their ablest citizens from spending their lives on the development of innovative marketing promotions: they have been poor, so poor as to be unable to guarantee political stability or take care of their most vulnerable citizens, whom they have lost to famines or epidemics. It is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centered and the childish ones have, off the back of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines.

Amsterdam was founded on the sale of raisins and flowers. The palaces of Venice were assembled from the profits of the carpet and spice trades. Sugar built Bristol. And yet despite their amoral policies, their neglect of ideals and their selfish liberalism, commercial societies have been graced with well-laden shops and treasuries swollen enough to provide for the construction of temples and foundling hospitals.

At my window seat in the motorway service station outside Ostend, observing the departure of a lorry carrying toilet rolls to Denmark, I opened a box of Moments that Pottier had presented to me as a farewell gift and thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to our sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends, and where we are hence prone to fall into crises of meaning at our computer terminals and warehouses, contemplating with low-level despair the banality of our labour while at the same time honouring the material fecundity that flows from it — knowing that what may look like a childish game is in fact never far from a struggle for our very survival. All of these ideas seemed embedded in an unexpectedly comforting set of glutinous, chocolate-coated Moments.