There's comedy, there's high comedy, and then there's the guy who sent his Sociology 20150 (class title: "Consumption") final paper on the Trader Joe's phenomenon to Consumerist. To the text:
Since a formal heuristic of organization and decision-making is not dependent on the judgment of individual agents, but rather requires only that trained individuals enact carefully engineered policy, a successful scheme is easily replicated and expanded. When applied to consumer society, rational processes take advantage of “means of consumption,” a term redefined by Ritzer as the counterpoint to Marx’s more familiar “means of production” to describe “those things that make it possible for people to acquire goods and services and for the same people to be controlled and exploited as consumers.”[2]Hell yes. (Or, as Consumerist paraphrases it, "In essence, people are willing to pay for shopping to not be so lame.") To those who say we love Trader Joe's a little too much, we now say this: Jesse Friedman loves it even just a little bit more.
· Trader Joe’s and the Reenchantment of Food Shopping [JesseFriedman.com via Consumerist]