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Capitalism Owes Its Success To Marketing
Turns out it’s a system ordained by advertising slogans, not God
When I was a library school student, I worked as a supervisor in the campus Business Library.
This was so long ago that we actually had both a Circulation department (meaning we checked books out to students) and a “Reserves” department, meaning students could check out photocopied course reading packets and other books, for two to four hours at a time.
I helped check items out to business students, but I also put things “on reserve” for professors, meaning they gave me class reading packets and I put them into our circulation system so they could be checked out and tracked. I also supervised student library workers, most of whom were business students.
Most professors created a few reading packets or one or two books, and their reserves occupied about one foot of shelf space. One of the marketing professors, however, gave us so many reserve materials that he took up a whole shelf.
This shelf was noteworthy not only for the amount of reading materials the marketing professor thought his students were going to read, but also because we rarely checked any of those materials out to any students.