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[pttedu]

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[seedfinance]

How debt enters students’ lives as early as kindergarten

Hello and welcome back to MarketWatch’s Extra Credit section, a weekly look at the news from a debt perspective.

This week we examine the challenges of the student loan shutdown during the pandemic and a proposal for a different type of unemployment benefit. But first, how debt invades elementary and high school classrooms.

Another type of student debt

We all know the loans that students take out for college, but a recent New York Times comment highlighted one way students pay off their debts years before they get into higher education.

Across the country, public school systems use debt to fund their operations, and the cost of debt servicing can impact students, families, and educators. School systems provide much-needed debt servicing resources. For example, in Philadelphia that year the school district paid $ 311.5 million to service its debt and $ 162 million went to creditors in interest, the notes said.

I wanted to learn more about debt-financed public schools and their implications, so I called Eleni Schirmer, the commentary’s author and research fellow on the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA’s Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Using debt to fund public schools is not a new phenomenon, Schirmer said. In fact, the practice can date back to the 19th century.

She hopes, however, through further research, when exactly the use of debt to fund public schools has shifted from a “sleepy, vanilla … fairly steady, low-risk funding mechanism” to one that has become much more expensive for school systems.

Schirmer hypothesizes that change “comes with major shifts in a financialized economy as finance became an industry on its own, not just a tool for doing things but an industry in and of itself,” she said.

School districts of all kinds are dependent on outside financing, said Schirmer. Wealthy communities can use debt to upgrade or expand their facilities. But it is the school districts that are already resource-bound – like those in urban and rural areas with high poverty – that are having the most devastating effects on debt, she said.

As with most loans, the terms of the money the public school districts borrow are based on a measure of creditworthiness. Districts where property value and resident incomes tend to be low are typically viewed as riskier, Schirmer noted in the statement.

“Debt is based on a very regressive logic that those who have the least pay the most, that’s just the rule,” she said. “If you use this rule to finance public goods, it will always be upside down.”

Schirmer and other activists fear that this form of funding will shift power over the school operations from the local community to the lenders, as in some cases the districts are obliged to service the debt before other priorities. The way to fix this is to give public schools more public funding so they don’t have to rely on Wall Street investors to function.

The pandemic offered a sneak peek of what more funding could look like for public facilities after the federal government sent billions of dollars to public schools and local governments. But it’s probably not enough for permanent change. Schirmer points to Chicago’s decision to use part of the funds the city received from the American rescue plan to pay creditors.

“Receiving one-time aid does not change the existing financing dynamic, it does not remove this balance of power,” she said.

Loan as unemployment benefit?

The federally funded emergency unemployment benefit, which expires this month, has been a lifeline for many Americans during the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic. They have also been controversial in some quarters, with politicians and business owners citing the relief in part as an explanation for labor shortages in some sectors.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has come up with a paper outlining an approach to unemployment benefits that he says could alleviate some economists’ concerns about traditional unemployment benefits and boost GDP.

The idea is to create an unemployment benefit package that combines traditional unemployment insurance with income-related loans, Stiglitz wrote in a working paper with co-authors Haaris Mateen, a graduate student in economics at Columbia University, and Jungyoll Yun, an economist from Ewha University in Seoul. The paper was circulated this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The package that the economists propose in their model would pay the unemployed more than the traditional unemployment benefit. By including the loan element, the package would be less costly to the government than a similar amount of non-binding unemployment benefit.

Income-related loans, or debts that a borrower pays back as a percentage of their income, are widely used in the education sector. In the United States, federal student loan borrowers have the option to repay their debts as a proportion of their income through a program known as income driven repayment.

One benefit of this arrangement, as Stiglitz describes it, is that it gives students the ability to essentially sell equity themselves, allowing risk-sharing in a way that traditional debt does not. Anyone who takes out a loan without an income-related option is on the hook for the same amount of money, regardless of whether the loan brings them an advantage in the form of better job prospects.

Stiglitz said he was wondering if this setup could be carried over to other areas and unemployment seemed a good fit. A period of unemployment is akin to taking out loans in the hope of increasing one’s job market potential, said Stiglitz, “especially when you think of spells of unemployment when you invest in search.”

It is difficult to estimate in advance whether someone will find a job and how much they will pay afterwards. To solve this, we as a society would finance the combination of traditional unemployment benefits and income-related loans – organized by the government – and share the risk with the job seekers.

“Some of us will be lucky and others will be unlucky,” Stiglitiz told MarketWatch. “And those who are lucky and get a job quickly pay back a little more, and those who are unlucky and can’t find a job just by chance pay back less.”

How is this an improvement on what we have now? Now, as the debate over improved unemployment benefits during the pandemic has shown, some fear that the provision of traditional unemployment benefits to jobseekers could deter them from looking for a job. Stiglitz notes that the evidence that this happened during the pandemic wasn’t very strong and, in fact, it appears that cutting unemployment benefits prematurely did not boost employment growth in the states that chose to do so.

By making more financial resources available to jobseekers during periods of unemployment, they may become less risk averse and willing to seek work that better suits their skills – and more pays – than if they just had traditional unemployment insurance after that Model that Stiglitz and his fellow researchers built for their study. And if more job seekers end up finding more paid jobs, that could boost GDP.

“It’s a way to improve the way we can provide the kind of security people need without worrying that at least some people have negative incentive effects, and actually the productive search for a better one Promote job, ”he said. “What we are proposing here would actually have a positive effect on our economy.”

Challenges in shutting down the student loan system

Borrowers’ wages are still being seized for defaulted student debt, despite the hiatus on student loan payments, interest and recoveries during the coronavirus era.

That’s an excerpt from the Department of Education’s data released this week to the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group. The data the organization obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request also shows borrowers are owed $ 37 million in reimbursements for wages that collectors confiscated during the pandemic.

The data is the most recent indication of the challenges the government has faced in shutting down the student loan system, and specifically the debt collection operation – an unwieldy program involving multiple actors, including organizations in the student loan industry and borrowers’ employers . Nearly six months after Congress passed the CARES bill that suspended the recovery of defaulted loans, thousands of borrowers were still facing wage garnishments.

Read more about what the data suggests here.

source https://seedfinance.net/2021/09/04/how-debt-enters-students-lives-as-early-as-kindergarten/

[duraservcorp20]

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[nedevnehecabilfac]

You Asked: Does Acupuncture Work?

For certain conditions—particularly pain—there’s evidence it works. Exactly how it works is an open question.

You hear the term “acupuncture,” and visions of needles may dance in your head. But the 3 million Americans (and counting) who have tried it know there’s a lot more to the treatment than pokes and pricks.

A typical visit to an acupuncturist might begin with an examination of your tongue, the taking of your pulse at several points on each wrist and a probing of your abdomen. “They didn’t have MRIs or X-rays 2,500 years ago, so they had to use other means to assess what’s going on with you internally,” says Stephanie Tyiska, a Philadelphia-based acupuncture practitioner and instructor.

These diagnostic procedures inform the placement of the needles, Tyiska says. But a visit to an acupuncturist could also include a thoughtful discussion of your diet and personal habits, recommendations to avoid certain foods or to take herbal supplements and an array of additional in-office treatments—like skin brushing or a kind of skin suctioning known as “cupping”—that together fall under the wide umbrella of traditional Chinese medicine.

But does it work? Figuring out whether each one of these practices may be therapeutically viable is a challenge, and determining how all of them may work in concert is pretty much impossible. Combine them with acupuncturists’ frequent references to “qi,” or energy flow, and it’s easy for a lot of people to dismiss the practice as bunk.

Not so fast, though. A recent meta-analysis, which examines existing research on a topic, compared acupuncture treatment to standard medical treatment (the kind involving a doctor’s exam and drugs) for musculoskeletal pain, chronic headaches, and osteoarthritis. It also compared real acupuncture to “sham” acupuncture, a procedure where needles are inserted at random to make patients believe they were receiving acupuncture when they were not. “There are many poorly designed acupuncture studies out there, so we tried to include only the best trials,” says Andrew Vickers, a biostatistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who coauthored the meta-analysis.

When comparing legit acupuncture to standard care, there was a statistically significant benefit to acupuncture, Vickers says. “We saw a measurable effect there,” he explains. “If acupuncture were a drug, we’d say the drug works.”

When Vickers and his team compared legitimate acupuncture to sham acupuncture, that benefit persisted, but shrank. There are a lot of ways to interpret this, Vickers says. “It could be acupuncture has a large placebo effect, or it could be that pressure points”—the precise locations at which needles are inserted—“are less important than acupuncturists claim,” he explains.

Many people equate placebo effects with scams. “The term placebo has always had this very negative connotation,” says Vitaly Napadow, director of the Center for Integrative Pain Neuroimaging at Harvard Medical School. But Napadow says our poor opinion of placebo needs revising. The human body has built-in systems for stoking or calming pain and other subjective sensations. “If a placebo can target and modulate these endogenous systems, that’s a good and a real thing,” he says.

But acupuncture may have effects even more profound than placebo. Napadow has conducted dozens of brain imaging studies on acupuncture in an effort to determine just how the treatment may or may not calm pain or related conditions like headache or arthritis. He says there are lots of ways acupuncture might work, and the specific mechanism may depend on the type of condition you’re trying to treat.

One possibility is that being jabbed with a needle induces a tiny injury, causing your immune system to respond by sending inflammatory proteins and other infection-fighting, would-healing chemicals to the source of that injury. “There’s the idea that by inducing many of these very small injuries, you’re ramping up the immune system so that it can deal with bigger problems,” Napadow says.

It’s also possible that the increased flow of blood and immune system chemicals to the poke site could help clear away accumulated cellular byproducts that may trigger or worsen a condition like plantar fasciitis or tendonitis, he says. “Or the needles might activate nerve receptors in the skin, which then pass info up into your spinal cord and brain,” he says. “That information might trigger a change in brain physiology, like the release of endorphins or those sorts of neurotransmitters that could lessen the sensation of pain associated with something like fibromyalgia.”

His research has borne out some of these potential mechanisms. One of his studies showed that after traditional acupuncture, opioid receptors were more available, or receptive, to the body’s natural pain-quelling chemicals. There was no such change after sham acupuncture.

It basically means opioid receptors were more available or receptive to the types of body hormones and chemicals that help quell pain.

Napadow says that more research has looked into the effect of expectancy on acupuncture outcomes—or whether people who believe the treatment will work experience more benefit than those who don’t. The evidence suggests that expectancy doesn’t improve acupuncture’s effectiveness. “Often it’s the guy who says his wife made him try it who has the greatest benefit,” he says.

Couple these promising findings with the fact that acupuncture is a low-cost treatment option with very few side effects, and Napadow says it makes sense to consider it a helpful partner to Western medicine—especially when it comes to chronic pain-related ailments for which Western medicine often relies on painkillers. “It won’t cure cancer,” he says. “But it could be effective for managing side effects of radiation or chemotherapy—things like pain or neuropathy or nausea.”

Tyiska, the Philadelphia-based acupuncturist, makes a similar argument. “I don’t tell people to stop seeing their doctors,” she says. “But if you’re being prescribed opioids, or you’re considering surgery, you lose very little by trying acupuncture first.”

 This post was originally published here: You Asked: Does Acupuncture Work?

[pttedu]

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[xeford2020]

Multiple Takes on Tomatoes

A perfectly ripe tomato is a classic summer joy. But did you know that the growing of tomatoes has ties to many aspects of our history and culture? Curator of Agriculture and the Environment Debra Reid uses our collections to reveal the many facets of the tomato.

The tomato -- a little fruit -- has big lessons to teach.

Tomatoes Growing in a Home Garden, circa 1915 / THF252180 First, yes, that’s right. Tomatoes are, biologically, a fruit – a berry that matures on a flowering plant. As this circa 1915 stereograph explains, “at first they were only small green things that grew where the blossoms dropped off.” Yet, the small green fruit grew into a plump, juicy “culinary vegetable,” considered such because of its low sugar content. (For example, processors transformed the fruit into a spicy vegetable sauce – catsup! – the savory contrast to sweet fruit sauces like apple butter.) The image above shows a boy named Bob and his two sisters amidst the tomato plants they raised from seed, proudly displaying plants loaded with fruit. The Keystone View Company included an educational message on the back of the stereograph to engage children with growing fruits and vegetables. Bob and his sisters planned to share their finest tomatoes with others during their school garden show. They became role models for other students sprouting seeds and planting seedlings and then weeding and watering their crops. By growing tomatoes, these children learned about domestication, the process by which humans select seed from bigger or tastier fruits or from plants that survive a disease or a drought. They cultivate these seeds (planting, weeding, harvesting, saving seed, and replanting year after year). This results in cultivars, each with different shapes, textures, colors, flavors. Over generations, humans have created more than 10,000 tomato cultivates by saving seed from their best tomatoes.

Why do tomatoes come in so many different shapes, sizes and colors?

Tomatoes in the background and white eggplant in the foreground of the wheelbarrow. Photograph by Debra Reid, taken Saturday, August 15, 2020, at the kitchen garden at Firestone Farm. Evolution resulted in distinctive varieties, but humans have also picked good-tasting fruits to propagate. (See how many different cultivars this proud gardener grew in the mid-1940s!) The historic gardens in Greenfield Village include heritage cultivars documented in historic sources and saved through traditional seed saving. Three tomatoes often grown at Firestone Farm (pictured above) include Red Brandywine, Oxheart and Yellow Pear. As demand for quality seeds grew during the second half of the 19th century, commercial seed businesses flourished. Companies such as Hiram Sibley & Co. contracted with growers to produce seed in clearly marked packages for customers to purchase. In addition to illustrations of the cultivar, the packet included descriptions of the qualities of the fruit, as well as best practices of cultivation (often in more than one language).

Hiram Sibley & Co. tomato seed packet, “Early Acme” cultivar, 1880s. THF278980/THF278981 Noted plant breeder Luther Burbank (1849–1926) crossed varieties to create hybrid cultivars that did not exist in nature. He sought disease resistance as well as a meaty tomato that had more pulp than seed – the meatier the tomato, the heartier the sauce! Some of Burbank’s varieties are still sold today.

Charles C. Hart Seed Company "Burbank Slicing Tomato" seed packet, circa 2018 THF276144/THF276145 Twentieth-century concerns about food quality and nutrition led to the popularity of seeds like “Double Rich,” which were certified organic and yielded tomatoes with twice the Vitamin C! You can learn more about organic cultivation and its relationship to the plant breeding process from the U.S Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Organic Integrity Database, and about biotechnology, including hybridization, from this USDA glossary.

Have you ever wondered who grows the tomatoes sold in cans or bottles?

Product label for tomato catsup by Heinz, Noble & Co., 1872-1873 THF117246 Anyone with yard space enough can grow tomatoes. Yet, by the time home gardeners like Bob and his sisters planted their crop in the early 20th century, many urban Americans wondered what a vine-ripened tomato tasted like. Why? Because tomatoes could be easily processed into affordable packaged products, and most urban consumers paid clerks in general stores to pick tomatoes off the canned goods shelf.

Workers harvest tomatoes at a Heinz tomato farm near Salem, New Jersey, 1908 / THF252058 Companies like the H. J. Heinz Company contracted with farmers to meet the demand for canned goods and catsup. Their production far exceeded the yields of home gardens. Heinz ensured success by growing seed tomatoes from which the best seeds became the basis for the next year’s crop. The company maintained a network of greenhouses to start the plants that growers put in the ground. A rapid, careful and organized tomato harvest and transport led to high-quality processed foods. A sense of urgency dictated the harvest season, which began with careful picking and packing of the delicate and perishable fruit in special crates and baskets. It continued as laborers moved the full containers from fields to shipping points. Specially designed wagons and baskets reduced stress on the ripe fruit during transit. Only the best tomatoes made the journey to H.J. Heinz plants. Laborers discarded damaged fruit into barrels and packed others into baskets for shipment.

Shipping tomatoes by boat, H. J. Heinz Company, Salem, New Jersey, circa 1910 THF292108 Transporting tomatoes from truck farms to Heinz processing plants sometimes involved sailing vessels loaded with ripe fruit. At the height of harvest, barges carried loads of tomatoes from farms to processors. Growers in Salem, New Jersey, used the Salem River, a tributary to the Delaware River, to send crops to processing centers near large east coast markets, including Philadelphia and New York.

Mass production of tomatoes did not make home gardening obsolete.

Man inspecting tomato plant in Victory Garden, June 1944 / THF273191 In fact, times of economic hardship increased the general public’s interest in growing their own tomatoes. During the Great Depression, Henry Ford dedicated 1,500 acres of Ford Farms land (between Birmingham and Flat Rock, Michigan) to vegetable gardens. Ford Motor Company employees could sign up to tend a garden plot and retain the produce. Interest in growing tomatoes remained high during World War II, largely through the U.S. government’s Victory Garden program. Home-grown tomatoes could even be symbols of resistance. George W. Carver encouraged farm families to grow tomatoes for the table as a strategy to strengthen their position, economically and socially.

Tomatoes have legal, ethical, and policy implications.

United Farm Workers Flag, circa 1970 / THF94392 Tomatoes have been at the heart of economic conflict between growers and laborers. California growers produced 85 percent of tomatoes canned in the United States by 1940. The larger the fields, the more urgent the need for laborers to harvest a crop that quickly moves from maturity to rot. Most large-scale growers relied on migrant agricultural laborers at harvest time. They worked for wages determined by the grower and did not receive protection under legislation passed during the New Deal that established minimum wage, maximum hours and workers’ compensation. Instead, growers had legal protection to hire agricultural laborers for wages below the legal minimum and were exempt from compliance with maximum hour and overtime regulations. This meant that laborers had to work until the perishable crop was completely harvested. Edward R. Murrow’s 1960 news report, Harvest of Shame, increased attention to the plight of U.S. agricultural laborers along the East Coast. Then, in 1965, Filipino-American laborers, members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, launched a strike to protest pay and working conditions. Latino pickers, members of the United Farm Workers Association, joined with them, and began a five-year strike in and around the grape fields of Delano, California. Consumers increasingly sympathized with the laborers on whom growers of other perishable crops depended.

FMC Tomato Harvester, 1969 THF151662 Mechanical tomato harvesters became commercially viable in the context of this successful strike. When the FMC Corporation introduced its Cascade Tomato Harvester, Model 69W, in 1969, it advertised the machine as the savior of a multi-million-dollar crop and the preserver of the American people’s eating habits. The machine did not eliminate humans from the picking process, but it sped it up. FMC explained that it “picks a crop at the rate of nine tons per hour and cuts the cost of handpicking by 40 to 50 per cent.” Crews who operated the machine included a driver, a mechanic, and ten to twelve individuals who rode on the machine and removed debris from the picked tomatoes. This machine carried crews through midwestern fields, last on a farm near Grant Park, Illinois, between 1983 and 1990, which produced for the Heinz catsup factory in Muscatine, Iowa. Changing harvesting practices required changing the form of tomatoes, too. Mechanical engineers believed the shape of San Marzano tomatoes would suit harvester belts. Plant breeders spent 30 years cross-pollinating tomatoes (including the San Marzano) to create a new hybrid that tolerated mechanical harvesting. In addition to uniform size and firmness, the fruits had to all mature at the same time on one plant, and they had to come off the vine easily. Could scientists really slow the aging process? Microbiologists at Calgene, Inc. began research with that goal in mind in 1981. Their work paid off by 1988 with the “first commercially available genetically engineered whole food,” the Flavr Savr™ tomato. Genetic modification had shut down a protein that ripened fruit. It resulted in a tomato that could “last up to four weeks in a non-refrigerated state” (Martineau, pg. 4). An assessment of safety of the genetically modified tomato published in 1992 determined that the Flavr Savr™ remained a tomato and was food. (It bears mentioning that genetically modified tomatoes tend not to be listed in the Cultivated Plant Code because they derive from lines still being developed.)

Page from Safety Assessment of Genetically Engineered Fruits and Vegetables: A Case Study of the Flavr Savr™ Tomato from The Henry Ford's library.

Hungry for more on this little fruit with big impact?

The Acme tomato in the Firestone Farm garden, August 21, 2018. Photograph by Debra A. Reid. The Henry Ford has resources to help you explore the complete tomato trajectory to date. You can….

See tomatoes growing in three gardens in Greenfield Village (Firestone Farm, Ford Home, and Mattox Farmhouse). And, learn why there are no tomato plants in the Daggett house garden!

Visit Luther Burbank’s Bureau of Information in Greenfield Village, originally located at the corner of his experimental gardens in Santa Rosa, California.

Take a closer look at the FMC Cascade Model 69W tomato harvester on exhibit in Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation.

Explore digitized archival materials from collections housed in the Benson Ford Research Center.

Put together your own virtual exhibit of THF tomato resources, from fruit on the vine with that just-picked taste, to artistic whimsy and mouth-watering graphic design, explore the possibilities.

Sources

Charles, Daniel. Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food. Perseus Publishing, 2001.

Dreyer, Peter. A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank. Rev. Ed. University of California Press, 1985.

Hersey, Mark D. My Work is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver. The University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Martineau, Belinda. First Fruit: The Creation of the Flavr Savr™ Tomato and the Birth of Biotech Food. McGraw Hill, 2001.

Redenbaugh, Keith and William Hiatt, Belinda Martineau, Matthew Kramer, Ray Sheehy, Rick Sanders, Cathy Houck, and Donald Emlay. Safety Assessment of Genetically Engineered Fruits and Vegetables: A Case Study of the Flavr Savr™ Tomato. CRC Press, 1992.

Debra A. Reid is Curator of Agriculture and the Environment at The Henry Ford.

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[ericfruits]

Ode to the shopping mall

May 7th 2020

IN ALMOST all its modern crises, America has looked to its merchants for leadership. In 1914 John Wanamaker, the greatest retailer of the age, made headlines by dispatching 2,000 tons of food aid to Belgium—then suggesting America buy the little country to make the peace. In 1942 his New York rival, Macy’s, announced it was cancelling its annual Thanksgiving parade and donating 650 pounds of balloon rubber to the war effort: “We’ve enlisted!” Department stores, America’s temples of commerce, could always be relied upon to sell war bonds with panache. In a Younkers store in Des Moines, Iowa, a coffin for Adolf Hitler was lowered mechanically from the ceiling to the floor whenever a sale was made.

Masters of self-promotion, the great retailers did not suffer by being associated with patriotism. Yet rather than deplore their opportunism, Americans celebrated the consumption it was designed to promote. During the Great Depression, they rallied to the retailers’ “Buy Now” campaigns. Shopping was not merely the surest way to boost the economy; it was urbanites’ main community activity. As recently as September 2001, President George W. Bush hinted at that dual truth when urging Americans to shrug off terrorism and hit the stores. By contrast, the current crisis is the first in over a century in which retailers have provided no comfort.

Online ones are thriving but unloved. The biggest, Amazon, is battling damaging headlines over its patchy service and treatment of workers. Traditional retailers are meanwhile looking into the abyss. This week J.Crew filed for bankruptcy. JCPenney, whose low-cost innovations helped it survive the Depression and proved inspirational to one of its employees, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, is also struggling under a heavy debt load. Macy’s, America’s biggest department store by sales, lost its place in the S&P 500 last month while all its 775 stores were closed. It reopened 68 this week but expects them to do around 15% of their regular trade: more a death rattle than a recovery. By one estimate, over 300 department stores could go under by the end of next year.

Losing your custom overnight will do that. Yet bricks-and-mortar retailers were struggling long before the virus struck, against e-commerce and other stresses, including Donald Trump’s tariffs, which many decried. The president was never going to turn to them as Herbert Hoover did to his friend J.C. Penney in 1929. Yet a weary sense of inevitability about legacy retail’s demise should not obscure how traumatic a development it is. Many of America’s shuttered cities were shaped by department stores: they would not have developed as they did, or at all, without them. Nor would the consumer economy; nor elements of American democracy.

The emergence of palatial, multi-line stores in New York, Chicago and other big cities in the mid-19th century was a first-world phenomenon, pioneered in Europe. Yet merchants such as Wanamaker, who opened his first department store in Philadelphia in 1876, added American characteristics. Their stores tended to be bigger than European ones and packed with extravaganzas; Wanamaker’s flagship store boasted 2m square feet and the world’s biggest organ. America’s retailers also poured their huge profits into advertising, which shored up the free press. And they were more egalitarian than Europeans, especially to women, as both customers and employees. By 1918 42% of Macy’s buyers were women.

Many promoted their enterprises as morally improving. Wanamaker, who also formed the world’s biggest Sunday school, described his stores as “beautiful fields of necessities”. With steepling cast-iron structures and acres of plate-glass, flooding them with light, they were America’s answer to Europe’s cathedrals.

Such stores’ impact on cities surpassed even their footprints. They feminised and commercialised them. They fostered civic identity as well as consumerism. To be from Philly was to know and shop at Wanamaker’s. Thereby the great downtown stores became synonymous with the forces that had fuelled their growth, industrialisation, urbanisation, democratisation. To this day famous names such as Macy’s, which retains its giant flagship store in Herald Square, Manhattan, retain an exalted place in the culture: over 3m turn out to watch its annual parade.

This is despite the fact that most Macy’s and other department stores are now in the suburban malls that began mushrooming after the second world war. They are less loved. Where Hollywood invariably depicts downtown stores as places of innocence and Santa Claus, it portrays malls as anonymous and prone to zombie attack. Those contrasting views are linked—the suburban expansion having devastated many cherished downtown areas. But the contrast is also unjust. Most Americans seem to associate malls with relaxation and family—a truth your columnist learned while staying on American bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. All the bigger ones had a rudimentary mall, selling fast food, sportswear, cheap carpets and Celtic swords, where the soldiers loved to saunter and unwind. Even conventional malls build social capital in a way it is hard to imagine e-commerce ever could.

Shop till you drop

Moreover, following a period of intense competition in the 1980s, America’s malls have increasingly come to resemble the extravagant old emporia. New Jersey’s $5bn American Dream mall, which opened last October, has an indoor ski slope, Legoland and Ferris wheel. The Grove shopping centre in Los Angeles takes its homage to early retail even further. It is a mock-up of a 20th-century town centre, including a tram-line and Art Deco cinema.

Such enterprises aim to retain a place in American life even as face-to-face retail recedes from it. The developers of the American Dream mall aimed to let only 45% of their area to retailers before the pandemic—and have since slashed the figure to 30%. That would seem realistic. Except, what if the virus persuades a generation of Americans to stay at home for their entertainment, as well as their shopping? And what kind of America would that be?■

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "What’s in store"

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