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The Secret Life Of Groceries By Benjamin Lorr

552 Words3 Pages

Looking at Karl Marx, his contributions attempting to explain social changes arising from the industrial revolution linger in current developments and the working class are still very prevalent today. The conflict within the economy, or capitalism, was Marx’s main focus in his theories as he described the two main groups in our economy, the working class and the ruling class. The working class were simply proletariats under the power of the ruling class. These citizens would sell their labor power in exchange for money as they simply operated production equipment, they did not own it. The ruling, or capitalist, class were the more powerful people in the economy that owned these means of production. The ruling class would provide compensation to the working class in exchange for …show more content…

However, the wage minimum held true for the entire working class, which simply means that they must be compensated enough to live off of and pay for necessities. In Karl Marx’s eyes, the concentration of wealth a person obtains, is also the concentration of power they hold in society. Connecting to modernized society, within The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr, we discover Marx’s contributions to Trader Joes. We see the clear establishment of gratification and commodification of many products in the business industry. As stated within the book, “What Joe did - was one of the first to do, if not the first - was to create a store that provides products that reflect an identity, that exist in opposition to some generally homogenized mainstream. In the process, by necessity, he commodified individuality. He learned to sell you, you. If you were the precise person he was after,” (Lorr, 2020, 36). What Joe is doing is simply modifying the individuality of citizens and taking advantage of these differences to sell to a specific consumer

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