LITMIR.BIZ

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leader of JIT managerial techniques and provides an example of how JIT increased production efficiencies by focusing on market demand. The JIT approach allowed small work teams to produce cars and parts as they were needed in the marketplace. This market-driven process was supposed to reduce costs associated with holding excessive inventories in both supplies and finished goods.⁴⁰ For example, parts were only produced after production teams received an order from Toyota’s assembly crews. Toyota’s JIT system was successful because it used emerging information technologies to build closer links between consumer demand and dispersed production networks. Of course this type of pull system—in which products are made in response to market demand—had existed long before JIT was invented as a concept.⁴¹ Yet what made Toyota’s JIT system so powerful was that it led to widespread adoption of market-driven manufacturing.

      Companies adopted JIT’s market-driven principles by integrating consumer desire into commodity design and procurement. Old top-down models, in which firms designed new products and pushed them out to market, gave way to more data-savvy manufacturing techniques, in which consumer demand shaped production and distribution.⁴² Dell Computers is a quintessential example of how this worked. The company mixed JIT part sourcing with direct market demand and revolutionized business-to-consumer relations. Under Dell’s system, consumers logged on to the company’s website, configured their desired computers, and placed their orders.⁴³ That simple act of clicking a button put an entire social and economic system in motion. The company famously claimed that it used JIT part sourcing to reduce stock from thirty-five days in 1995 to six days by 1999.⁴⁴ Other companies used JIT to incorporate market information into product design. An example is the Sony Walkman. Sony engineers developed a design process that incorporated consumer behavior and desire into possible iterations of the audio device. The intention was to make products that were more responsive to market dynamics by producing exactly what consumers wanted.⁴⁵ Sony’s demand-driven approach was reflective of a “cultural circuit” in which the “products both reflect and transform consumers’ behavior.”⁴⁶ Cultural circuits enable consumer demand to influence what is made, how it is designed, and when it is delivered.

      Market-driven production provided new opportunities for retailers to increase their leverage as intermediaries between consumers and manufacturers. Companies such as Walmart and Target developed new business strategies that gave them greater power in the JIT corporate world because they built their business models around real-time market information. Walmart revolutionized retail by creating a vast information system that made it the world’s largest purchaser of commodities.⁴⁷ Access to market data gave retailers tremendous purchasing power, which they used to influence what was made and by whom. The most successful retailers used their new influence to transform shopping behavior by merging more efficient supply chains with cutting-edge sales strategies.⁴⁸ They increased sales by monitoring and cultivating market demand, a practice that also transformed modern logistics. One way they increased sales was by blending style and status with low-cost goods to make discretionary shopping available to a larger audience.

      How new retail strategies affected logistics workers is described later in the book. Here I want to conclude by examining how companies used cultural circuits and retail strategies to increase the flow of consumer goods. For example, retail companies increased sales by shortening the time that products spent between design and delivery dates, thus increasing overall inventory turnover. Retailers also increased turnover rates by developing business models that focused on goods with shorter product cycles. All of this was made possible by JIT supply chain techniques and by logistics innovations that enabled smaller time-to-market distribution windows. As a consequence, consumers were lured into buying the latest thing by companies that constantly updated their product lines. Old ideas of seasonal buying were discarded because the constant flow of new merchandise made shopping a year-round experience. These new tactics propelled the circulation of capital by flooding the market with a constant stream of desirable products.

      Low-cost goods took on new cultural meaning by enabling customers to reposition themselves within a community of style that retailers transformed by changing the shopping experience. Retailers have routinely used space and style to change the practices and meanings of shopping. Major department stores, for example, were created as spaces in which shoppers could experience the wonders of modern commodities inside a fabricated and controlled environment. The mall, according to Michelle Lowe and Neil Wrigley, was designed as an “essential site for communication and interaction, a place for ‘hanging out’, for ‘tribalism’, where adolescent subcultures are formed and where key lifetime experiences take place.”⁴⁹ Shopping places set the spatial context for transactions that linked cultural and economic spheres.⁵⁰ They gave shape and meaning to otherwise mundane economic transactions by imbuing the act of shopping with particular lifestyle experiences. Culture and aesthetics have been key retail strategies precisely because they can establish lifestyle practices that effectively link individual identity to particular commodity types and social status. For example, certain products are marked as aspirational purchases: the value of buying the thing extends beyond function and need. Such commodities function as cultural symbols that convey status.⁵¹

      We must consider the connection between individual desire and social status more deeply, especially because it is such an important part of understanding the rhythms of contemporary commodity flows. Even if capital structures what people can and cannot buy, high-velocity retailing has provided merchants with the ability to embed style and class status into mass consumption practices. H&M’s multinational brand of fast fashion, for example, which encouraged up-to-date style at low prices, required customers to buy more and to shop more often to maintain their social status. Cultural motifs—the latest fabric or scarf—created an alternative style economy that let individuals escape the limits of economic capital by converting less expensive items into status-rendering goods. Low-cost goods that mimicked upper-middle-class commodity economies created new ways for people to participate in, even if they could not achieve, similar economic status. This disjuncture brings us back to debt and finance capital, which when combined with a greater array of cheap goods, enabled more shopping. As producers adopted market-driven business models—in which goods were produced and shipped whenever and wherever people wanted them—they also developed more efficient distribution systems and flexible labor supplies. The same technologies that sped up the circulation of capital and commodities also introduced new time and space demands into the labor process. Globalization, in the words of Andrew Herod, meant “greater pressure from employers and governments for workers to become more ‘flexible’, both in terms of skills and, more importantly, in terms of work organization, so that corporations may respond quickly to the vagaries of the market.”⁵² Such acceleration in the circulation of capital was a clear example of how globalization transformed the temporal experience of the economy for retailers, consumers, and workers. As retailers made more goods available to the masses, they also increased the amount of space needed to produce, distribute, and sell their goods.

      I return to this theme elsewhere, but before moving on to logistics in more detail, I want to review my argument so far. I began this chapter by discussing the role that desire has played in expanding consumption. I then illustrated how consumer desire became a powerful material force in the post-1980s period, when individuals were able to leverage credit to purchase larger quantities of goods. However, as much as consumer desire is an important actor in this story, it was producers and retailers who created the material spaces and physical infrastructure that allowed commodity consumption to play such a prominent role in contemporary economies. Finally, while retailers developed new sales strategies and business relationships to assume greater control in the commodities game, it was their distribution systems that had a profound effect on metropolitan regions. The next chapter examines how high-velocity retailing and global commodity chains reconfigured logistics space.

THREE

       The Spatial Politics of Southern California’s Logistics Regime

      THIS CHAPTER EXPLAINS HOW CIVIC leaders capitalized on two key political and economic phenomena to make Southern California into the largest distribution gateway in the

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