Moving captures the reality of modern capitalism in some fascinating ways that help to illuminate aspects of our system of capitalism that are not always visible in day-to-day life. I took the previous week off of writing as I moved from Chicago to St. Louis, and as I dealt with the stresses of moving, I couldn’t help but see how capitalism and moving are fundamentally tied together. Living within the system of capitalism, we don’t always notice its existence, and yet it surrounds us all the time.
Sets of experiences that don’t happen often, allow us to notice features of what David Foster Wallace might call water. In a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, Wallace begins a wonderful speech by telling a story:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Although many of us might not think about it much, one example of water in our lives is capitalism (for good or ill). First, moves are typically driven by jobs. In the modern United States, people are mobile, ready to move across the country for a new opportunity. Readying for a move, one has a whole range of options to consider: get rid of your stuff, use a company (full service moving, pod moving, or some combination), convince your friends to help and rent a truck from a company, or cobble together a solution from all the above options. Moving companies abound, competing for services, but are quite expensive. From Chicago to St. Louis, we were quoted $4,000 for the move by one of Chicago’s most popular companies to complete the move from our 3rd-floor walkup into a 2nd-floor walkup.
$4,000 was outside of what we wanted to pay, but having moved all our stuff into the 3rd-floor walkup myself, I wasn’t about to do it myself or convince my friends to do it, so we opted to rent a U-Haul (3 primary companies have fleets of trucks across the US for relatively simular rates) and pay for (and help) movers at both ends of the journey. The U-Haul ended up being $700 with insurance, and I had to buy $110 in gas. We paid $560 for movers in Chicago and $340 in St. Louis, so including miscellaneous moving expenses and mover tips, overall we spent about $2000 on the move.
In both places, the backbreaking and very sweaty work of moving was done by people of color. I wondered in both cases what percentage of the cost was pocked by the movers themselves, and what percentage was pocketed by the companies that employed them. My suspicion is that the movers were making no more than $15 an hour ($135/$560 for three movers in Chicago, and $60/$340 for two movers in St. Louis), and in both cases, the movers had completed big jobs the nights before. It was not easy work, and in both cases, the companies employing the movers certainly had a lot of additional people working behind the scenes. Nevertheless, the hard labor was certainly underpaid relative to the value they added.
Arriving in St. Louis, I had scheduled an appointment with AT&T to install fiber internet in our new apartment. As our movers arrived, an AT&T installation coordinator showed up. We did a brief walkthrough of the apartment discussing possible internet install locations, and then he began a sales pitch to encourage us to switch our phone plans to AT&T. As he did so, the actual installation worker showed up, and between discussing install locations, our gigantic rosemary plant, and helping the movers, I realized that our “installation coordinator” was actually just a salesman. With my attention split, my typically critical view was non-existent, and he proceeded to convince us to switch over to an AT&T phone plan, and to upgrade our phones with a set of price quotes and promises I later realized were fantastical.
Indeed, later that evening, perseverating on what we had signed up for it, I was frustrated, angry, and disappointed to discover that none of his promises were in writing and that we were effectively victims of a very unethical AT&T-sponsored scam. This was the element of the move that I found not only most illuminating but also the greatest inditement of the specific type of capitalism practiced by AT&T. Clearly, the company has realized that it is easy to take advantage of people while they are moving into a new place.
Needless to say, the next day we canceled the new plan (thankfully within a 3 business day window), although we did have to pay $110 in restocking fees. But, reflecting on the experience, I was angry to consider how many people probably get locked into 36-month phone installment plans, paying for a wide range of products and services they have no need for, not even realizing exactly what they signed up for.
These experiences – outside of the norm of day-to-day life – help make visible the “water” of capitalism and some of its manifestations, including the way this system often exploits labor and consumers.