Kaufmann

The pragmatic merchant has no values, standards, or outward beliefs. Those are a potential liability because they could offend customers. The merchant appeals to 100% of the audience so he can get their money. Specifically, he is interested in selling what people already want so he can most easily gain profit.

The merchant aligns with established companies to sell products being advertised by their sustained campaigns, ensuring influenced consumers will compliantly purchase whatever product they saw advertised. For merchants and the producing company, this tried and true process of training consumers to tolerate and buy whatever commercials advertise is better than printing money because it's totally legal.

Companies spend millions on commercials because they return many times their cost by making those items popular. This popularity signals to consumers that an item is good.

Ten large companies sell almost exclusively junk, with their major products being sugar water, high carb snacks, and atrocious chocolate-like candy. They know that year after year, people with poor self-control, sugar cravings from a terrible diet, and denial of consequences will buy those things. The merchant knows he can sell those items with regularity, building steady profit.

Disposable products, such as entertainment items, cater to a base public taste for generic, low grade amusement that takes away your time. The industry holds award shows and lavishes praise on mediocre efforts considered the best among many similar versions. Bold columnists go farther and call these products art, though they express no new idea and only exist to extract money from bored people who have no interest in doing things.

The modern educated person is unfamiliar with excellent books, music, and ideas produced throughout civilization. He suffers in ignorance and low taste, preferring inartistic drivel, and not even the substantial efforts in modern genres. Sellers strive to be popular and maximize their market by serving these sensibilities, individually using this wise approach that in the aggregate establishes a standard founded on satisfying the base and trivial.

The same few stores repeat through every strip-mall, appealing to a large and persistent mass of shoppers despite offering crummy products. You'd think a better alternative would bankrupt the inferior, but the majority prefer a well known inferior version to a lesser known excellent version. This result sheds light on the workings of democracy.

With the average McDonalds store grossing $2,600,000 a year, why strive to create something good when you can just run a popular franchise and take in easy money from a steady crowd of people who think they need those meals in their lives?

The merchant technique of mass appeal starves excellence, making the inferior the standard across all consumer areas. The merchant just wants to move units, and doesn't have an ideological position or deep thought about the consequences to culture when garbage becomes the demonstrative cultural norm to export.

Low quality products and two note songs replace what came before from public votes of purchases calculated after expensive media campaigns promoting dross for dopes.

By itself, a small number of pragmatic merchants is practically harmless. In a healthy society, they would seem ridiculous for trying to sell trash in a community preferring superior alternatives from conscious comparisons of better options.

Selling sugar water, unhealthy snacks, and prison-grade food first becomes tolerated and then normal as degrading descent takes hold. The resulting obesity epidemic stifles romance, makes humanity idle, and explodes health care costs.

A market selling entertainment for idiots gives us bad music, books, and movies to displace good products and make idiotic inartistic hacks the standard replacing geniuses.

The merchant claims innocence, saying he was only giving people what they want. He avoids offending anyone by saying they brought this upon themselves.