Al Neiman Could've Had a Coke
…and in which the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Fund has a bad day at the bank.
The Store (1983)
It was 1905, and Abraham Lincoln (“Al”) Neiman was running American Salvage Co., in Atlanta, Georgia. A born huckster, Al had convinced his brother in law Herbert Marcus — a department store manager with whom (or on whom, it’s not exactly clear) he was running light sales scams — to join his business. For both Herbert and his sister Carrie (Al’s wife) the money was good, but the job of salvage, filled as it was with stupid gaud and gimmick, was miserable work compared to the more glam work running a department store. American Salvage was a success, but both longed for a way out. The buy-out offers started coming $25,000 in cash, or an offer to swap American Salvage for the Coca-Cola bottling facility in Missouri. The trio picked the cash, using it to set up the Neiman Marcus Company in Dallas, the first speciality department store in the growing American southwest.
Might it have seemed like the winning bet at the time? Consumer culture was beginning to emerge in earnest, and Coca-Cola was in the process of eliminating the cocaine from its recipe, rendering it substantially less fun. On the other hand, Dallas was still a dusty outpost of the American frontier, and most of the oil money was still locked in the ground.
The store seemed doomed. They burned through all their cash before opening, and had to borrow nearly as much from friends. Their Dallas competitors were circulating rumours that the store was already failing. The week before opening in 1907, Herbert Marcus got typhoid fever and Carrie Neiman had a miscarriage. Opening the store fell on Al Neiman, the inveterate salesman, the huckster, the man who would have been perfectly happy back in Atlanta, the man who may have thought to himself in that moment that he really should’ve picked Coke. But calamities be damned September 10, 1907 the store opened. Someone there that day caught the reaction of a visitor, who entered the store and asked:
‘what the hell is this?’
Fast forward to the early 1980s. After a string of films exploring the external power the United States imposed on the world — Canal Zone, Sinai Field Mission, and Manoeuvre, released respectively in 1977, ’78, and ’79 — in the 1980s, the focus of Frederick Wiseman’s films turned towards America at home: its rituals and its bizarre customs. After exploring America’s ongoing colonization of the world, Wiseman begins making films about things like department stores or the Kentucky Derby, films that are way more fascinated with modern class and culture, consumer capitalism and the rituals of the American aristocracy. (Model, The Store, and Racetrack were all released between 1981 and 1985. Later in the decade, he makes four films about the disabled, and the institutions that are in many cases meant to fashion them, however imperfectly, back into workers.)
So we come to The Store, which takes place during the Christmas shopping season at the Neiman-Marcus department store in Dallas, Texas. The store itself beautifully mirrored and decorated in bright 80s colours, looking an eerie cool-posh temple to consumer capitalism. Things were good in Texas. The logic of extraction capitalism was still making people rich whether by pumping water out to make Coca-Cola or drilling oil out of the great Permian Basin. Oil prices had not cratered yet; power and money were still very much at home in early-80s Dallas. George HW Bush was VP, while his future-president son was running Arbusto Energy. Power flowed out, money flowed in. There’s a show on TV called Dallas, and it’s a huge hit. Dallas is by any measure very hot right now, and adjacent to it all was Neiman-Marcus — a flagship downtown department store, home to the affluent consumer, where we see that $45,000 fur coat can be dropped on the floor, where the bigger the cereal bowl is the better, where if you can’t have exactly what you want then there’s no point in having it at all. “There’s one word, the whole reason for this all,” says a middle manager type early in the film. “Sales. A simple little word.” Just as doctors cure, the salesman sells. A.B.C. baby; always be closing.
It is a good film to start off on, containing so many of Wiseman’s signature moves, in a tight, theme-heavy two hours. It never strays from Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall vignettes (if you’re this far, you probably know this by now), the clever mashups of footage and background audio, the figure in the film who emerges to breath its themes into it. The film goes through many of the sights and sounds that you would expect: the sales experience with customers, the discussions of sales targets, the preparing of merchandise, and at least one six-minute shot of a dancing, stripping, singing bird. There is, as usual, plenty of shots of the modest tediums the workers at the bottom of the pay scale (who the film makes clear are mostly women) endure every day to make it all possible. And the main point the film wants to make, a deep abiding contempt for everything that happens within its four walls, is clear enough: “Retail buyers in many cases, are unnatural, unethical, and deserving the worst kind of treatment,” says Stanley Marcus, prince to the Neiman-Marcus empire, in the film. “They promise the moon and deliver nothing. Entirely reprehensible behaviour, which in the end they will pay for.”
Whatever winning hand he had been dealt, Al Neiman did a good job of squandering. He and Herbert had competing egos; Al cheated on his wife constantly, even while she was working on different floors of the store. He hated it. He was miserable. He had Herbert buy him out, for the original $25,000. He divorced his wife, who had half a brain and threw her lot in with her brother. Al hopped around the United States — Kansas City, Chicago, New York — but in the end, simply outlived his own money. Al died penniless many years later, owning nothing more than a cuff link in a cigar box, and last year, the company finally went bankrupt. Coca-Cola, on the other hand, is now glugged down by the gallon the world over. It doesn’t matter where you are, a developed country or impoverished and oppressed parts of the Global South — we still see to it that the water below your feet, flowing down the mountain, is sucked out of the ground and processed into Coca-Cola.
This past May, Neiman Marcus filed for bankruptcy, hit by all sorts of trends — coronavirus, online shopping, and a world where their particular blend of affluence and decadence finds less purchase. Of course, Neiman Marcus was no longer Neiman Marcus, but an investment product to be passed from hedge fund to hedge fund. Because we live in a truly reprehnsible and deeply financialized society, this was considered a “big blow” to the folks at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which for some unknown fucking reason turned out to own Neiman Marcus, a company that did not have a single store in Canada and which reminds me of my nana, which I guess is all part of the process of playing with nearly $500 billion in public money. Anyways.
The innate desire to buy has been practically grafted onto the North American brain stem. This is the point the film still makes, nearly 40 years after its release: we were made this way. We all live like this — like consumers all the time, in all sorts of new and macabre ways. Maybe you’re upset about this now, but watching the film now will tell you that you never had a chance, not really, that for two generations now the ridiculous rituals of consumerism are woven directly into the fabric of who we are. There is certainly no love in this film for all those who uphold this ridiculous system, for the tyrants many of us would recognize as assistant managers and floor supervisors, but there is not much love for the witless wealthy consumer, either. Virtually nobody comes away looking good — the only demographic that seem to get off the hook are forlorn husbands, and even then the film seems to regard them with outright pity. There’s a reason, I’d wager, you end your film about a department store on the singing chicken: because everything else that came before it was meaningless, too. It wouldn’t be the first time a Wiseman film leaves you feeling grim and bleak about things, and as his work meanders into places like the Miami Zoo, or Aspen Colorado it’s something that inevitably returns. The Store, one of the earliest of his films to steer away from an official institutions, is an early example of a recurring theme and a key feature of the Wiseman Cinematic Universe: that if you look at anything long and thoroughly enough, the people involved all begin to look insane. You start to look insane. You begin to feel like you are losing your mind.