There are times when I feel Salon.com should be accompanied by a laughtrack or at least a wide assortment of humourous sound effects from Hanna-Barbera cartoons. This week, there’s a confessional tale by a guy who loved a scam. Jason Jellick was man who says he preyed upon liberal returns policies and was willing to tell lies to get free food from McDonalds or free upgrades at 5 star hotels. These mad skills made his friends green with envy. His idea was purportedly to stick it to the man, the corporate hegemon,—not individuals, but over time it became clear that he was interested in the art of the steal. He makes the distinction between shoplifting and conning trusting individuals and gaming a system meant to ensure customer satisfaction, but those distinctions are lost on me. In consumer behaviour lingo, Jellick is guilty of slippage—consumer actions that result in losses, and the only moral high ground he can stand on over shoplifters or Winona Ryder is that his actions are harder to detect as crimes or torts.
He sets this all up by recounting a tale of his mother’s Christmas scam and his conjecture that she was a member of the enlightened bourgeoisie::
“This was something I learned from watching my mother, who knew all too well how to root out a good con. Her defining scam was the Christmas special, when, on the day after Christmas, she’d gather up the presents from under the tree and return them to the stores along with the masses — poor Mommy forced to return all of her thoughtful gifts. But unlike most of those people, she’d circle back to the stores (once the shift change had taken effect) and repurchase those same presents for vastly reduced prices. Was this out of necessity? Was it out of some need to display her cunning? Looking back, I suspect my mother had become convinced of some higher moral agenda, in which the weak (the middle class) outfox the strong (the rich). All I know is that we always got what we wanted for Christmas.”
Ha! No, mommy was a hustler and taught her kids that the ends justify the means. I’m sure mommy would say that she’s just working the system. Don’t bitch her out, bitch out the system.
Jellick goes on to chronicle how he laxed his rule of only targeting corporations once he got a sweet taste of the confidence scam, including a bizarre Minnesota motel scam that went sideways. There’s also a bit of mea culpa and penance thrown in, since Salon needs to have some semblance of a moral centre. Salon tried to use the article as a springboard for more confessional tales::
While I think that stealing from {e.g., de Certeau’s “perruque”} or engaging in antisocial behaviour towards {e.g., Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre”} those with power is part of everyday life, there’s a Machiavellian posture taken by Jellick that leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.
As an aside, this is the perfect Salon article attempting to get people to rethink pathological behaviour by ascribing some sort of higher meaning to the actions. Many commenters weren’t buying it and bitched Jellick out—there are 18 pages of comments, as of 2:25 PM EST. On Twitter, there are plenty of naysayers calling bullshit on his story {e.g., see @snarkysmachine}.
I think there are social implications for Jellick’s actions. I see them as the consumer counterpart to corporate practices that push in the opposite direction. I know of an instance at Wal*Mart in the 1990s where managers had unwritten policies that denied returns. Why? It helped the bottom line, which made the department manager look good, which made the store manager look good, which made the district manager look good…all the way to the shareholder. One could argue that Jellick and the Wal*Mart example are both pathological extremes. Jellick’s alleged “duping” of capitalism and Wal*Mart’s practices to limit returns are cut from the same bolt—these are highly individualistic actions motivated by gain. Jellick does recognize his own rationalizations for his behaviours, but one gets a sense that Jellick is just mouthing the words. His values are that of the theoretical homo economicus, acting rationally in his own self interest in a world of atomized, arms-length social actors. Mommy would be proud.
Twitterversion:: Jason Jellick @Salon article on conning capitalism. The grift is the reward, but sweeter w/phony bourgeois enlightenment. @ThickCulture @Prof_K
