Five Ways America Keeps Getting Better

...Now, thanks to Nexis, a magazine article is forever...

...Not that I've ever seen a red cent...

...First, it is only the hugeness of the clientele (note the proud impersonality of the word "Factory" in the name) that makes it possible to keep such a large variety of foods fresh...

...Borders has university monographs, Michelin maps, and compact discs...

...Compare that with the pre-computer Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, a cumbersome series of volumes that indexes only 240 publications, and you can see what a resource Nexis really is...

...Only with the growth of the Seattle-based Starbucks caf?/coffee retailing chain, with its 700 outlets nationwide, has the heartland been able to try the stuff...

...And, as at LensCrafters, none of the employees is really unskilled...

...Today, arugula and a half-dozen lettuces not even in the dictionary yet are gracing the salads of the elite, and they are bound to be standard prole fare in this country in a matter of years...

...The menu (which, incidentally, has advertising in it) is 18 pages long...

...It also means that the last five years have seen, in Borders-style bookstores and e-mail, the only two society-wide incentives to literacy since television was introduced at the 1939 New York World's Fair...

...No Wal-Mart problem here: Anyone who can make good coffee can prosper...

...The old bookstore that "specializes in history" cannot compete with the Borders history departments-some of which carry 10,000 titles...

...The "independents" then tended to go under, leaving only Crown to serve a book-buying population that suddenly found its book selection radically diminished...

...Starbucks sells more units of American-style coffee than it does straight espresso, which proves there's more than mere thrill-seeking involved...

...While there is plenty to snipe at-computers may cause downsizing, cable TV may be expensive and monopolistic, health-care advances may be eating into our national savings-the material changes in life are so widespread that it's possible to name five pure improvements that have come out of the capitalist system over the last decade-absolute, unambiguous, no-doubt-about-it changes for the better-off the top of one's head...

...Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz is an outspoken apostle of "third places," a hitherto little-known obsession of the civil-society movement, which believes that people need a venue for "relating" to others that is neither home nor office...

...Today, it is arguably the best-not excepting France and Italy...

...Twenty years ago, the rubber-chicken circuit earned its name...

...This means that Borders bookstores have become social hangouts, among other things places of mating, which is heartening beyond words...

...The Canadian government's culture ministry barred the opening of a new Borders in Toronto in February, citing a cultural variant of the Wal-Mart problem, specifically that it might be deleterious to Canada's bookstore industry...

...ABC shops provided the backdrop to the conversational life of a hundred cities and towns but did nothing to threaten traditional English tea...

...Thanks to this hollowing, for the first time in the hundreds of years mothers have been using bottles, women have been freed from holding both the bottle and the increasingly heavy baby between the ages of three months and a year...

...It used to be that news stories and magazine essays were indeed the fish-wrap and birdcage-liners of popular metaphor...

...Frames start under $50, and at some other quickie eyeglass places can be as low as $29.95...

...True, if you choose, you can pay hundreds of dollars for Italian designer eyewear that wasn't on the market 15 years ago (particularly at LensCrafters' upscale Optique outlets), but high-end products haven't driven the low-end ones off the market...

...The appetizers are larger than most restaurants' meals, and the waitresses happily bag anything you haven't eaten, so if you don't get two meals out of a night out at the Cheesecake Factory, you've ordered foolishly...

...Call it exploitative if you will, but I'd rather view it as a victory of common sense over hypocrisy: Who better to pay for the NEA, after all, than a powerhouse of the culture industry that is drawing R&D benefits from it...

...Crown created a classic "Wal-Mart problem," in which consumers had to weigh whether lower prices were enough of a boon to compensate for the dwindling variety of retail outlets...

...Second, a computerized system means that every time a paper corrects a mistake, that correction pops up together with the original article-an unprecedented protection for those who wind up on the receiving end of the inevitable mini-libels that creep into daily news coverage...

...The key to Starbucks espresso is its machines, made by Florence-based La Marzocco...

...As for quality, an informal taste comparison (made by me) between one of the best espresso bars in Milan and (nine hours later) a Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue in Washington was a draw...

...You raise standards somewhere, and the bar is raised for everyone," says Wendy Webster of the National Restaurant Association...

...Among other things, they're an indication that the quality-of-life gap that has endured for centuries between the United States and Europe may at long last be closing...

...1 BORDERS: Borders Books has now (or will have within the next few months) opened 114 of its enormous emporia...

...It is, rather, an old complaint, chiefly about Crown Books, which brought the chain concept to bookselling...

...And ice cream...

...Since this is a magazine, we'll start with books...

...We can dismiss a second problem as well, which might be called the "hamburger-flipping problem...

...The high-quality meals you get at the better, smaller establishments are made possible by advances in scheduling and planning...

...It may even be the only such area...

...This means the chain serves only about 75 percent of the clientele it could if its managers wanted to jam people in like sardines...

...The most innovative retail outlets all require special skills and pay above minimum wage for most jobs...

...John Mariani, restaurant critic of Esquire magazine, goes so far as to say that if you were able to transport any outlet of the Cheesecake Factory restaurant or the Bennigan's chain back to the Atlanta of 1977, it would, with no exaggeration, qualify as the best restaurant in the city...

...Even though LensCrafters is the largest of such operations, doing $750 million worth of business a year at more than 600 locations, it's still only taking up 6 percent of a $13 billion market...

...People watch documentaries with titles like "Losers for Life," "The No-Hope Economy," and "The Dead-End Society" on their 45-inch screens in surround-stereo sound...

...There's no disagreeing with the proposition of Christopher Lasch and others that we're in desperate need of institutions to replace (in this health- and discrimination-conscious world) bars, social clubs, and union halls...

...Similarly, Borders gives a test of literary knowledge to its incoming employees, while George Harrop of Barista Brava considers the superior training of his individual coffee baristas the single greatest competitive advantage his coffee outlet has...

...The international staggering of growing seasons, for instance, ensures that virtually all fruits are being grown somewhere in the world at any given time...

...LensCrafters requires its employees to know their way around prescriptions, ultraviolet resistance in sunglasses, fashion trends, etc...

...And yet you can see bookshelves lined with The End of Work, The End of Affluence, and Silent Depression in bookstores crammed with people spending their raises in the fifth straight year of economic expansion...

...But Schultz's civic project goes further than that, into one of those post-60s amalgams of hippie culture and neo-traditionalism...

...In fact, all of them are trained, from a minimum program of two to three weeks for experienced waiters to a maximum stay of three to four months for incoming general managers...

...It's something of a flagship outlet, located as it is in a disused airplane hangar, but all of the Cheesecake Factory's outlets are elegant and unique...

...2 STARBUCKS: Until 1990, to get espresso in the U.S...

...This is a larger selection than any bookstore in the country had a decade ago-and in almost every case when a Borders comes to town, it offers readers a larger selection than all the area's existing bookshops combined...

...like all of the best new retail/service outlets, it is refusing to gouge and cut corners...

...And where competition fails, can regulation be far behind...

...There's no such trade-off with Borders...

...Similarly, Borders was the first business to establish a partnership to help sponsor (privately) the National Endowment for the Arts...

...It seems no amount of statistical refutation will deter the doomsayers, so perhaps we should turn instead to the evidence of our own eyes...

...Would you compare the ice cream today to the stuff available in 1981...

...First, royalties are paid to magazines and newspapers that put their copy on-line, a great advance in the protection of intellectual property that makes it theoretically possible for journalists to get paid by their readership...

...That is not to mention new high-turnover optical products, such as disposable contact lenses, now available at $50 for a three-month supply...

...We've gone from Chicken Kiev to raw fish in about 15 years," says Stan Bromley, regional vice president and general manager at Four Seasons Hotels...

...There are dozens of other super-opticians-Hour Eyes, Four Eyes, and the like-and 65 percent of the market is still made up of mom-and-pop opticians and optometrists...

...Since each LensCrafters outlet leases space to an optometrist, you can have your eyes examined for about $45...

...What's more, in the wake of the recent brouhaha over "downsizing," the Council of Economic Advisers and the Department of Labor issued a joint report with stunningly good employment news: that 68 percent of the net growth in full-time employment in the last two years has been in industries that pay above median wages, and over half of new jobs are in the top 30 percent of job categories...

...The Reader's Guide is not cheap, either, at $200 per annum, plus $10 shipping...

...As I was stapling together some notes for this article, I noticed that Swingline now makes staples in clusters of exactly the length to fit into the barrel of a stapler, neither too short so they jam the head, nor too long so they have to be broken and left to get dusty...

...Read: to protect Canada's own-and inferior-book giant Chapters, formed last year to take Borders' market while getting government protection from it...

...The success of the Cheesecake Factory and its ilk has come with a nationwide explosion in food types...

...Starbucks, which, like any other coffee concern, gets its coffee from ill-paid peasants in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, plows some of its profits into CARE and other Third World aid organizations...

...It's hardly surprising that Starbucks (like Borders) was founded in 1971...

...This new level of excellence . . . the public has just come to expect it everywhere...

...But this criticism doesn't really pertain to Borders or the other super-bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Bookstop...

...As significant as any of Borders' innovations is that all of their outlets have caf?/sweetshop annexes inside, with free newspapers, along with easy-chair sitting areas...

...What drags people in, of course, is the food, which draws from pretty much every genre and socioeconomic stratum of American restaurant cooking...

...You have to distinguish between big-a couple hundred people-and really big-thousands...

...Improved products and retail outlets are not just consumer phenomena...

...What's more, the huge volume of sales they do has made possible a whole range of side benefits...

...Most of them are in suburbs or rural areas, but some are in cities, like Phoenix and Fort Lauderdale, that had previously been literary wastelands...

...Some critics, like Jean Marbella of the Baltimore Sun, suggest that Borders outlets are "pre-packaged, cookie-cutter behemoths that will drive out the independents...

...Take the tiny niche of the food world occupied by lettuce...

...We don't have to glorify these jobs, but at none of the best new retail outlets is the labor, strictly speaking, unskilled...

...In the late 1970s, there was widespread discontent when weather emptied the shelves in northeastern supermarkets of iceberg lettuce-and when the dust settled, Boston lettuce had been added to diners' culinary lexicon...

...They turn out to be necessary, as Americans drink their espresso drinks with so much steamed milk that it puts a strain on all but the best machines...

...National bookstore sales have risen from $7.8 billion in 1991 to $18 billion in 1994...

...Thanks, but no thanks-the smaller bookstores could not do much better than steer customers to other little bookstores that might have books they lacked (in Omaha that means saddling up for quite a ride) or get them for customers by special order, which can take weeks...

...That's too slowly for its customers, who line up for incredible waits (two hours on Mother's Day...

...Thus, a couple of paradoxes by which American commercialism works in the service of the personal touch...

...There's plenty of room for a second tier of smaller chains behind Starbucks," says George Harrop, president of Barista Brava, a fledgling gourmet coffee bar (which also uses La Marzocco machines...

...There is nothing you can't get here, and a few rare things (like Tex-Mex egg rolls and Louisiana andouille sausage pasta) you can't get anywhere else...

...Five Ways America Keeps Getting Better By Christopher Caldwell Our newspapers are so full of gloomy stories about income inequality, downsizing, destitution, and stagnation you'd almost think they're being generated by a buggy software program that somebody has neglected to de-install...

...Material prosperity is an area of American life in which things have taken a turn for the better...

...Within five years, Belgian endive was an elite favorite, and by 1988, it was well enough known to the middle class that Dan Quayle could score points berating Michael Dukakis in a national debate for his plans to grow it in Massachusetts...

...Second, the gargantuan servings make the slightly high prices cheap over the long haul...

...It's all rather like the afterlife in the 1991 Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life, where a waitress assures Brooks: "Everything we have here is sensational...

...The Omaha World Herald reported last November that 13 local bookstores had banded together to fight off the Borders "threat...

...Yet the company, now headquartered in Calabasas, California, adds only five restaurants per year and designs all of them individually...

...you had to be an incredibly savvy Italophone native of New York City, Cambridge, Seattle, or San Francisco, and what you found was usually something that tasted like aerated pine tar...

...And what is it that has made it possible to serve excellent function food...

...The place may be a haven of consumption, but not of conspicuous consumption-in fact, quite the opposite...

...Shopping for baby products with my wife, I came across the hollowed-out baby bottles first popularized by the Ansa company in the late 1970s...

...Probably the same place all the people who were complaining about "conspicuous consumption" went when Americans started owning their cars for longer...

...You can still trudge down to the library for it (and I know journalists who do...

...The Washington, D.C., outlet has French tiles and Italian pillars, stone tabletops, and cherry Art-Deco wall fixtures...

...When a Crown moved into a neighborhood full of literary bookstores, the so-called independents began losing the segment of the market that was underwriting their less popular, more literary titles...

...There is even a foreign language section, where you can buy One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish, the Collected Poems of Leopardi in Italian, and the occasional Chinese potboiler...

...Which leads one, incidentally, to ask: Where are all those little-bookstore owners who were bemoaning the decline of American reading habits 20 years ago...

...At the massive establishments, they've certainly benefited from the technology: convection ovens, 'blast-frozen' food that you can thaw with microwaves, new 'proof boxes' to heat up bakery goods...

...3 NEXIS: The Nexis computer database includes 7,100 news and business sources, and is easily accessible on-line...

...It would have been theoretically possible to prepare them 20 years ago...

...But now that Lexis/Nexis has instituted flat-rate pricing as low as $120 a month, the service is accessible to any journalist whose career is worth investing $1,500 a year in-which strikes me as a forgiving cut-off point...

...After all, the statistics-on per capita income, unemployment, job creation, income distribution, and the like- haven't supported the gloom for some time now...

...Founded in 1978 in Beverly Hills, the Cheesecake Factory has now expanded to 15 locations...

...The typical Borders carries 100,000 titles...

...First of all, with dozens of patients filing through each day to amortize the cost of machinery, tests for cataracts and glaucoma are becoming more and more routine...

...Our hamburger-flipping problem, if ever there was one, is coming to an end...

...they have wider implications for the culture...

...Salad makers have begun to veer out of lettuce into such exotica as dikon, chipotle, and jicama...

...Much of the credit for the foodstuff boom comes from a consumer clamor for novelty, according to Mariani, but the greatest of the changes have come in the way food is brought to market...

...As examinations have become easier, prices for frames have come down...

...The parallel would be to ABC, the British chain of tea-shops that spread like wildfire between the wars and is omnipresent in the English novels of the 1930s...

...articles are now, willy-nilly, written "for the ages"-and it would be surprising if the quality of writing didn't very soon begin to reflect that...

...It's hard to keep from being terribly excited about all of this...

...Is this a mere novelty or an improvement in quality...

...But the greatest thing about Nexis's preservation of data is the incentives it offers to literary expression...

...There are side benefits to Nexis...

...Mariani is doubtless thinking of the actual present-day Atlanta branch of the Cheesecake Factory...

...Making early use of computer inventorying, the Crown Books people found cost-effective ways of serving the schlock-fiction/self-actualization/home-health junk market that accounts for the vast majority of book sales-while discounting heavily, to boot...

...To take one example, says Mariani, strawberries can be grown in Chile so we can eat them in the fall...

...In fact, it had previously been arguable that Nexis exercised an undemocratic influence on journalism-offering a privileged database only to journalists already affiliated with an organ of sufficient prestige to afford it...

...Bromley of Four Seasons credits the change to improvements not only in technology but also in organization...

...There's no question it's the latter...

...So again: Traditional outlets have survived to the point where we can dismiss the Wal-Mart problem...

...This Starbucks does amply...

...Aquaculture" now accounts for 22 percent of the seafood we consume, so there's far less seasonal fluctuation in the price and availability of fish...

...Nexis is timely: A journalist or scholar can find everything written on, say, Tony Blair, in every major Western newspaper yesterday-as against a wait of several weeks in the Reader's Guide...

...This is only the merest tip of the iceberg...

...Should a Borders lead to the bankruptcy of a poetry bookstore, it will be one that has a smaller poetry selection than Borders itself...

...because of the hole in the bottle, the baby can hold it-and can thus be put down...

...Whereas most restaurant-quality four-handle espresso machines cost $3,000, Starbucks' Marzoccos run roughly $8,000 a pop...

...today, hotels can serve meals for hundreds that the pickiest diner would be happy to eat...

...But all of the chain's products are consistently better than they have to be, because Starbucks invests more money in its product than the average trendy clip joint...

...5 THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY: In 1975, the United States ranked with Australia and Ireland as one of the worst countries to eat in in the industrialized world...

...Nowadays, if you smash your glasses playing tennis 3,000 miles from home, or drop them off a boat, you can go to LensCrafters or some other "super-optician" and have a new pair of glasses made in an hour...

...Contrast this with the we'll-hire-anyone-who-blows-in-off-the-street service philosophy of an establishment like Hechinger's hardware...

...For example, even with patrons lined up at the door, the Cheesecake Factory retains enormous, square booth tables, which allow customers to luxuriate...

...Nexis has only recently become a concrete boon, after years of being a boon in the abstract...

...4 LENSCRAFTERS: In 1983, when LensCrafters opened its first stores, getting a pair of glasses was still, for most people, an arduous multi-step ordeal: a visit to an ophthalmologist (for which a scheduled appointment was necessary), then an appointment with an optician, then a seven-to-ten-day wait while the lenses were ground, and a considerable expense at each stop...