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Aug. 29th, 2013 05:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyNew Neighbor’s Agenda: White Power Takeover
http://tinyurl.com/pe2kxcv
LEITH, N.D. — The bearded man with thinning, gray-and-bleach-blond hair flapping down his neck first appeared in this tiny agricultural town last year, quietly and inconspicuously roaming the crackly dirt roads.
Nettie Ketterling thought nothing of it when he came into her bar to charge his cellphone in an outlet beneath the mounted head of a mule deer. To Kenneth Zimmerman, the man was just another customer, bringing his blue Dodge Durango in for repairs. Bobby Harper did not blink when the man appeared in front of his house and asked him if he had any land to sell. And the mayor, Ryan Schock, was simply extending a civic courtesy when he swung by the man’s house to introduce himself.
Their new neighbor, they thought, was just another person looking to get closer to the lucrative oil fields in western North Dakota known as the Bakken.
But all that changed last week.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and The Bismarck Tribune revealed that the man, Paul Craig Cobb, 61, has been buying up property in this town of 24 people in an effort to transform it into a colony for white supremacists.
In the past two years, Mr. Cobb, a longtime proselytizer for white supremacy who is wanted in Canada on charges of promoting hatred, has bought a dozen plots of land in Leith (pronounced Leeth) and has sold or transferred ownership of some of them to a couple of like-minded white nationalists.
He is using Craigslist and white power message boards to entice others in the movement to take refuge in Leith, about two hours southwest of Bismarck. On one board, he detailed his vision for the community — an enclave where residents fly “racialist” banners, where they are able to import enough “responsible hard core” white nationalists to take control of the town government, where “leftist journalists or antis” who “come and try to make trouble” will face arrest.
The revelations have riveted this community and the surrounding area, drawing a range of reactions from disgust to disbelief to curiosity.
“If that man wanted to live in Leith and be a good neighbor and be decent and not push his thoughts on the people, then he could live there,” said Arlene Wells, 82, a farmer and local historian. “But to come in and want to change everything and be the big dog — no. I don’t like bulldogs.”
It is all people are talking about, in bars and in their homes, at funerals and at church. They are poking around on the Web to read Mr. Cobb’s positions for themselves. A stream of cars creep through the streets where horses occasionally trot, their passengers hoping to catch a glimpse of some action or take a peek at Mr. Cobb’s peeling, two-story clapboard home. Sheriff’s cars, too, are making more rounds.
This is not how residents wanted Leith to get back on the map. Founded in 1909, the town bustled in the middle of the century, a regional center for festivals, movies and skating. The population began slipping after peaking at 174 in 1930, but the death knell was the closing of the railroad some 30 years ago. Though the 2010 census said the population is 16, Mr. Schock puts it at 24, and the Leith Bar is the only one of the five remaining buildings on Main Street still open. Most lots are empty and overgrown, laden with high-flying grasshoppers, in this town that sits in a bowl surrounded by wheat and sunflower fields.
Mr. Cobb happened upon the community, he said, through an ad for the home he eventually bought on Craigslist. He paid a total of about $8,600 for the house and 12 plots, he said, making his first purchases in 2011. He moved here in May 2012, he said, after fleeing Canada in 2010 to avoid the criminal charges. He spent some time in Montana, before coming to North Dakota to find work in the oil patch. He said he lost his construction job last week after the story broke.
People have knocked on Mr. Cobb’s red door to offer to buy back his land and to preach the Gospel. The City Council is looking into potential ordinance or health code violations (his home has no septic tank or running water). There is a doomsday plan in place, Mr. Schock explained: If enough of Mr. Cobb’s friends move in to gain a majority that could vote out the current government, the Council would immediately dissolve the town.
Mr. Harper, Leith’s only black resident, said a lot of people approached him at his mother-in-law’s funeral on Monday to tell him they had his back.
“People told me to leave town for the weekend and they’d take care of everything,” he said.
But he and his wife, Sherrill — who found herself referred to as a “filthy race-mixing white woman” in one of Mr. Cobb’s online posts — said they were not going anywhere.
Mr. Cobb, meanwhile, seems to be soaking in the publicity and mocking it.
“Just want to let you know I’m not going to cause any trouble,” he said to Don Hauge, 61, who rolled up in a red Chevy pickup truck to where Mr. Cobb was sitting on a bench, peering through smudged rectangular glasses that slid down the bridge of his nose. Mr. Cobb is a lanky figure, dressed neatly in a button-down shirt tucked into slender black slacks he says he bought from someone who had stolen them, and rubber sandals.
In rapid-fire speech, Mr. Cobb cuts through a vast trove of facts and thoughts in his head, inevitably veering toward racial slurs. But he maintained a soft, calm tone, and was friendly when chatting with a black reporter who knocked on his door this week. He said he admired Louis Farrakhan because “he organizes people and they’re for themselves.”
But in that interview he also said that he hoped his plans in Leith would “excite” white people and “give them confidence because we’re being deracinated in our own country. We’ve been very, very tolerant about these major sociological changes.”
His beliefs began developing at an early age, he said — he read Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” when he was 11. To hear him tell it, he has had a colorful, nomadic life that has brought him face to face with James (Whitey) Bulger (the mob boss piloted the tugboat he rode to boarding school in Boston) and Barack Obama (he claims to have driven the future president in his taxi in Hawaii in the early 1980s).
It is difficult to tell whether Mr. Cobb wants or expects his vision for Leith to succeed.
Although he said that four fellow white nationalists have bought or acquired some of his plots, he said he did not know if or when they would be moving to the town, nor would he push the issue on them.
He gave the community’s run-down former meat locker and creamery to the National Socialist Movement. Jeff Schoep, the movement’s leader, said he was unsure how easy it would be for people, in a tough economy, to pack up and head to Leith. But he said he thought it was a fantastic idea to establish a community for white nationalists so they could have a safe place to land in a crisis — say, a civil war.
“I would like to see it prosper and move forward,” Mr. Schoep said. “People should move there and get the process going. It gives us a base of support for elections and things like that.”
But as Ms. Ketterling has been hearing from her bar patrons all week, residents would rather see the venture fail.
“They’re not happy,” she said. “We don’t like that kind of stuff.”
Gay Marriages Get Recognition From the I.R.S.
http://tinyurl.com/nqmgldf
WASHINGTON — All same-sex couples who are legally married will be recognized as such for federal tax purposes, even if the state where they live does not recognize their union, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday.
It is the broadest federal rule change to come out of the landmark Supreme Court decision in June that struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and a sign of how quickly the government is moving to treat gay couples in the same way that it does straight couples.
The June decision found that same-sex couples were entitled to federal benefits, but left open the question of how Washington would actually administer them. The Treasury Department answered some of those questions on Thursday. As of the 2013 tax year, same-sex spouses who are legally married will not be able to file federal tax returns as if either were single. Instead, they must file together as “married filing jointly” or individually as “married filing separately.”
Their address or the location of their wedding does not matter, as long as the marriage is legal: a same-sex couple who marry in Albany, N.Y., and move to Alabama are treated the same as a same-sex couple who marry and live in Massachusetts.
“Today’s ruling provides certainty and clear, coherent tax-filing guidance for all legally married same-sex couples nationwide,” Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said. “This ruling also assures legally married same-sex couples that they can move freely throughout the country knowing that their federal filing status will not change.”
Gay and civil rights groups praised the ruling. “Committed and loving gay and lesbian married couples will now be treated equally under our nation’s federal tax laws, regardless of what state they call home,” said Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign. “These families finally have access to crucial tax benefits and protections previously denied to them under the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act.”
But the Treasury decision could have ramifications for many gay couples’ tax liabilities, said Roberton Williams of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington. Couples with similar incomes often pay the “marriage penalty,” with their tax liability as a couple being much higher than it would be if they were single.
At the same time, same-sex couples will also be able to file amended returns for certain prior tax years, meaning that many couples might be eligible for refunds. Couples do not have to file amended returns if they do not want to, a senior Treasury official said, meaning that couples who might pay the marriage penalty would not owe back taxes.
But the ruling creates complications for same-sex couples who live in any of the 37 states that do not recognize their marriages. Previously, such couples filed federal and state tax returns as individuals. Now, they will have to file their federal returns as other married couples do, but may be required to file their state returns as individuals.
“There’s going to be a cumbersome workaround,” said Nanette Lee Miller of Marcum L.L.P., a public accounting firm. She sees it as a paperwork bother more than a financial issue.
States might also respond to the federal ruling with changes of their own. “Most state income tax regimes begin with federal taxable income as the starting point,” Marvin Kirsner, a tax lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, said in an e-mail. “These state taxing authorities will have to figure out how to deal with a same-sex married couple who file a joint income tax return for federal tax purposes.” He added,
“We will need to see guidance from each nonrecognition state to see how this will be handled.”
The rule change is likely to provide a small increase for federal revenue, as more same-sex couples pay the marriage penalty, Mr. Williams said, describing it as a “rounding error.” But it would be partly offset by new federal spending on benefits for same-sex spouses.
The ruling applies to all legal marriages made in the United States or foreign countries. But it does not extend to civil unions, registered domestic partnerships or other legal relationships, the Treasury said.
The Treasury ruling is one of many that are starting to emerge from all corners of the federal government as Washington changes regulations to conform with the Supreme Court decision.
Separately, the Health and Human Services Department said Thursday that Medicare would extend certain key benefits to same-sex spouses, “clarifying that all beneficiaries in private Medicare plans have access to equal coverage when it comes to care in a nursing home where their spouse lives.”
But federal agencies are not moving in lock step. Instead, they are creating a patchwork of regulations affecting gay and lesbian couples — and may be raising questions about discrimination and fairness in the way that federal benefits are distributed.
Medicare and Treasury officials have said they would use a “place of celebration” standard for determining whether gay couples are eligible for benefits. That means same-sex couples would receive benefits as long as they are legally married, regardless of where they live.
But the Social Security Administration is now using a “place of residence” standard in determining spousal benefits, and a gay couple in Alabama might not receive the same benefits as a gay couple in New York until final determinations are made or Congress acts. The Obama administration has pushed federal agencies to ensure the Supreme Court’s ruling is carried out quickly and smoothly.
“It would be nice if they were consistent,” Ms. Miller said. Creating federal regulations is a process and could change, she said.
Salmonella in Spices Prompts Changes in Farming
http://tinyurl.com/pedzfvk
IDUKKI, India — Spices grown in the mist-shrouded Western Ghats here have fueled wars, fortunes and even the discovery of continents, and for thousands of years farmers harvested them in the same traditional ways. Until now.
Science has revealed what ancient kings and sultans never knew: instead of improving health, spices sometimes make people very sick, so Indian government officials are quietly pushing some of the most far-reaching changes ever in the way farmers here pick, dry and thresh their rich bounty.
The United States Food and Drug Administration will soon release a comprehensive analysis that pinpoints imported spices, found in just about every kitchen in the Western world, as a surprisingly potent source of salmonella poisoning.
In a study of more than 20,000 food shipments, the food agency found that nearly 7 percent of spice lots were contaminated with salmonella, twice the average of all other imported foods. Some 15 percent of coriander and 12 percent of oregano and basil shipments were contaminated, with high contamination levels also found in sesame seeds, curry powder and cumin. Four percent of black pepper shipments were contaminated.
Each year, 1.2 million people in the United States become sick from salmonella, one of the most common causes of food-borne illness. More than 23,000 are hospitalized and 450 die. Symptoms include diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps that begin 12 to 36 hours after infection and can last three to five days. Death can result when infection spreads from the intestines to the bloodstream and affects vital organs. Infants and older people are most at risk.
Mexico and India had the highest share of contaminated spices. About 14 percent of the samples from Mexico contained salmonella, the study found, a result Mexican officials disputed.
India’s exports were the second-most contaminated, at approximately 9 percent, but India ships nearly four times the amount of spices to the United States that Mexico does, so its contamination problems are particularly worrisome, officials said. Nearly one-quarter of the spices, oils and food colorings used in the United States comes from India.
The findings, the result of a three-year study that F.D.A. officials have on occasion discussed publicly and recently published in the journal Food Microbiology, form an important part of the spice analysis that will be made public “soon,” agency officials said.
“Salmonella is a widespread problem with respect to imported spices,” Michael Taylor, deputy F.D.A. commissioner for food, said in an interview. “We have decided that spices are one of the significant issues we need to be addressing right now.”
Westerners are particularly vulnerable to contaminated spices because pepper and other spices are added at the table, so bacterial hitchhikers are consumed live and unharmed. Bacteria do not survive high temperatures, so contaminated spices present fewer problems when added during cooking, as is typical in the cuisine of India and most other Asian countries.
Mexico’s chief of food safety inspections insisted that Mexican spices are checked daily and are safe, although a separate study found high levels of salmonella contamination in some Mexican vegetables.
“We have a constant, daily scheme of verification” of food products, said Álvaro Pérez Vega, sanitary operations commissioner at Mexico’s Federal Commission for the Protection Against Sanitary Risk. “We don’t have reports of spices or condiments being out of norm,” he added.
In India, the world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of spices, government officials are taking Washington’s concerns seriously.
“The world wants safe spices, and we are committed to making that happen,” said Dr. A. Jayathilak, chairman of the Spices Board of India, a government agency that regulates and promotes spices.
F.D.A. tests found that contaminated spices tend to have many more salmonella types than is typically found on contaminated meat. The agency, which visually inspects less than 1 percent of all imported foods and performs lab tests on a tiny fraction, rejects imports with any signs of salmonella contamination because as few as 10 cells have been shown to cause serious illness.
Illnesses caused by spices are hard to trace. When asked what might have made them sick, people rarely think to mention adding pepper to a salad. Spices sit on kitchen shelves indefinitely, so linking illnesses that can occur years apart is often impossible.
But sophisticated DNA sequencing of salmonella types is finally allowing food officials to pinpoint spices as a cause of repeated outbreaks, including one in 2010 involving black and red pepper that sickened more than 250 people in 44 states. After a 2009 outbreak linked to white pepper, an inspection found that salmonella had colonized much of the Union City, Calif., spice processing facility at the heart of the outbreak.
The United States is one of the world’s largest spice importers, bringing in 326 metric tons in 2012 valued at $1.1 billion, according to the Department of Agriculture. Of those imports, which account for more than 80 percent of the total United States spice supply, 19 percent were from India and 5 percent from Mexico.
The F.D.A. now has offices in New Delhi and Mumbai, and its commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, intends to visit soon.
New agency rules governing imported foods have given the agency the power to restrict imports based solely on suspicion that foods may be unsafe, a powerful cudgel to demand changes.
On a tour through a tropical landscape teeming with pepper and cardamom farms, rubber plantations, tea estates and wild elephants, Indian spice officials showed some voluntary changes they are pushing.
The first stop was Noble Joseph’s 10-acre pepper farm, about a four-hour drive from the southwestern port city of Kochi, in the state of Kerala, up several thousand feet of twisting mountain roads.
Mr. Joseph’s hilly farm is dominated by slim silver oaks and erythrina trees planted every eight feet; each tree is encircled by four or five pepper vines.
During harvest season, starting in February, 15 workers cram into a small farmhouse for nearly two months and use long, single-rail bamboo ladders to pluck the pepper seeds from the vines as high as 40 feet.
Not so long ago, pepper farmers almost universally dried the seeds on bamboo mats or dirt floors and then gathered them for manual threshing. Dirt, dung and salmonella were simply part of the harvest, so much so that in 1987, the F.D.A. blocked shipments of black pepper from India. The ban was lifted two years later, after the Indian government began a testing program.
Now, the Josephs boil their harvest in water to clean the kernels, speed drying and encourage a uniform color. They are then placed on tarps spread over a concrete slab with nets above to catch bird droppings. Ovens would be even more sanitary, but ovens and electricity are expensive “and sunlight is free,” Mr. Joseph said.
The spices board underwrites a third of the cost of concrete slabs, tarps and mechanical threshers, and since most farms are smaller than an acre, it has organized growers’ cooperatives to pool facilities. Board officials recently attended F.D.A. training seminars in Maryland.
Salmonella can survive indefinitely on dried spices, and killing the bacterium on the craggy surface of dried peppercorns without ruining their taste is especially challenging.
Government officials in India emphasized in interviews that spices slated for export are often treated to kill any bacteria. Such treatments include steam-heating, irradiation or ethylene oxide gas. But F.D.A. inspectors have found high levels of salmonella contamination in shipments said to have received such treatments, documents show. Much of the contaminated pepper in the 2010 outbreak had been treated with steam and ethylene oxide and had been certified as tested and safe, officials said.
At another spice farm, in the village of Chemmanar, Bipin Sebastian is in the midst of a four-year transition to organic farming in hope of earning a premium price for his pepper, cloves, cardamom, turmeric and coffee. Mr. Sebastian says he has used government subsidies to buy tarps, netting and a machine thresher.
“We used to put our pepper directly on the ground,” Mr. Sebastian said. “Now, we put down tarps and netting over it to protect it from the birds. And I’ve been getting a higher price. It’s been great.”
Nudged to the Produce Aisle by a Look in the Mirror
http://tinyurl.com/p6wqa23
EL PASO — Samuel Pulido walked into his local grocery store on a sweltering day, greeted by cool air and the fantasy-world ambience of the modern supermarket.
Soft music drifted. Neon-bright colors turned his head this way and that. “WOW!!!” gasped the posters hanging from entranceway racks, heralding the sugary drinks, wavy chips and Berry Colossal Crunch being thrust his way.
Then he looked down at his grocery cart and felt quite a different tug. Inside the front of the buggy, hooked onto its red steel frame, was a mirror. It stretched nearly a foot across, and as Mr. Pulido gripped the cart a little more tightly, it filled with the reflection of his startled face.
The sight was meant to be a splash of reality in the otherwise anonymous la-la land of food shopping, a reminder of who he was, how he looked and perhaps what he had come in for. And if the spell cast by the store wasn’t entirely broken, it seemed to have lost at least some of its grip.
“I’m looking at myself, and thinking, ‘O.K., now what?’ ” he said.
The mirror is part of an effort to get Americans to change their eating habits, by two social scientists outmaneuvering the processed-food giants on their own turf, using their own tricks: the distracting little nudges and cues that confront a supermarket shopper at every turn. The researchers, like many government agencies and healthy-food advocates these days, are out to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables. But instead of preaching about diabetes or slapping taxes on junk food, they gently prod shoppers — so gently, in fact, that it’s hard to believe the results.
In one early test at a store in Virginia, grocery carts carried a strip of yellow duct tape that divided the baskets neatly in half; a flier instructed shoppers to put their fruits and vegetables in the front half of the cart. Average produce sales per customer jumped to $8.85 from $3.99.
Here in El Paso a few months ago, the researchers focused on the floor, laying down large plastic mats bearing huge green arrows that pointed shoppers to the produce aisle. The outcome surprised no one more than the grocer.
“In retail, the customer tends to go to the right,” said Tim Taylor, the produce director for Lowe’s, Pay and Save, a regional grocery chain that let the scientists in to experiment with their arrows and mirrors. “But I watched when the arrows were down, pointing left, and that’s where people went: left, 9 out of 10.”
With those same guinea-pig customers, the scientists tinkered again with the cart, creating a glossy placard that hung inside the baskets like the mirrors. In English and Spanish, the signs told shoppers how much produce the average customer was buying (five items a visit), and which fruits and vegetables were the biggest sellers (bananas, limes and avocados) — information that, in scientific parlance, conveys social norms, or acceptable behavior.
By the second week, produce sales had jumped 10 percent, with a whopping 91 percent rise for those participating in the government nutrition program called Women, Infants and Children. Lowe’s was so excited that it now plans to put the placards in every cart at its 22 stores in El Paso and nearby Las Cruces, N.M., and perhaps later at all 146 of its stores.
For grocers, there is one potential glitch: While produce sales climbed in these trials, the store’s total sales remained mostly the same. That meant shoppers spent less on nonproduce items. “They’re moving preference from one side of the store to the other, which is wonderful,” said Michael Kelly, a senior program officer at the Paso Del Norte Health Foundation, which is financing the research. “People still stay on their budgets, get more nutrients and less of the processed — well, let’s just say bad — stuff.”
But the owners of Lowe’s are smiling, too, because along with the meat counter, the produce aisle is one of the most profitable parts of a grocery store, with large volumes and higher-than-average markups from the wholesale cost. So even if sales of frozen pizza and potato chips dip, the grocer’s net profit will rise if zucchini gains.
Finding a profit motive in social policy fits well with the politically conservative views of the researchers engaged in this supermarket manipulation: two Republican-leaning academics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
One, Collin R. Payne, a 38-year-old associate professor, graduated from Brigham Young University and then worked on a string of groundbreaking studies at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University that affirmed a concept known as mindful eating: the notion that if you put food on a smaller plate, you’ll probably eat less.
The same idea, he says, extends to shopping. “The more mindless you are when you shop, the more you are going to be poked and prodded to buy the manufacturer’s products,” Mr. Payne said. “We’re trying to give consumers the same power the companies have.”
His colleague, a Romanian émigré named Mihai Niculescu, 37, came up with the mirror idea by marrying his own specialty in business marketing, known as behavioral choice, with research done by others on self-image. Over a fully loaded Mexican meal at the famed L & J Cafe here, he said his own sizable belly gave him an insider’s edge when studying the marketing cues that lead to overconsumption. “Eating this, I don’t realize I’m overweight, until I look at myself,” he said.
A paper the two men wrote last year for The Agricultural and Resource Economics Review said the conventional methods promoted in Washington and elsewhere to encourage Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables have either failed, or require taxpayer money at a time when food stamps are at political risk. These efforts include ads and store display signs promoting produce as healthful, and reducing its cost through tools like additional vouchers for low-income women.
By contrast, Mr. Payne and Mr. Niculescu are pursuing a strategy that behavioral scientists call nudge marketing, an idea popularized by the 2008 book “Nudge,” by the former Obama administration regulatory affairs administrator Cass R. Sunstein and the University of Chicago professor Richard H. Thaler.
Nudge marketing calls for applying just the right amount of pressure to persuade: not too little, not too much. In the El Paso grocery trials, using both the green arrows on the floor with the green placards in the carts caused produce sales to fall.
“It nudged too hard,” Mr. Payne said.
By several measures, El Paso is one tough testing ground for these studies. Thirty-two percent of the city’s adults are obese, and 12.2 percent have diabetes, exceeding the statewide average, according to Texas health department estimates. The fast-growing Hispanic population has become a favorite marketing target for processed-food manufacturers.
Much of that was evident at the Lowe’s store where Mr. Pulido and other shoppers encountered the mirrors. Many of its customers are significantly overweight, and gravitate toward the chip and soda aisles. As in many supermarkets, the store’s produce section, while decently stocked with eye-pleasing displays, gets only about 10 percent of the total space and none of the prime real estate that drives the most sales: the front-of-the-store display towers, which companies rent from the store, and spots by the checkout lanes.
“That’s Frito-Lay, that’s Frito-Lay, that’s Frito-Lay,” said the manager, Gloria Narro, spinning around in the center of the store to point out all the displays for that company’s snacks. “We’re all trying to eat healthier, but there’s so much competition for us,” she said. “Right next door is a store known for its fresh meat. Walmart is down the street. Walgreens and CVS just opened up, carrying whatever you need in food.”
The scientists have other tricks up their sleeves. They recently gave Lowe’s a research paper with 56 ideas for increasing produce sales, like putting a rack of onions near the meat counter, for making fajitas.
But it’s their retooling of shopping carts that is drawing the interest of marketing and obesity experts alike.
“I think what they’re doing is very innovative and clever,” said Michael R. Lowe, a Drexel University psychology professor and longtime researcher on weight control. “If you put up some cues that remind people of their weight or healthy eating, without hitting them over the head, they will go and choose healthier items. The mirror might do that, but the question will be, ‘What kind of memory association will their body elicit?’ And that is hard to know beforehand. For those who are overweight, it might elicit the sense of, ‘Oh, I need to lose weight.’ Or, ‘I don’t like to see myself because I’m so big,’ which might lead to choosing healthier food.”
Mr. Payne and Mr. Niculescu acknowledge that the mirror is still an unproven tool and hope to conduct a formal trial later this year.
They started by placing a full-length mirror just inside the store’s entrance, which shoppers either ignored or used for some impromptu primping. The mirrored cart was more arresting, as Kathy Saenz, one of the store’s customer service representatives, noticed when she tried the cart out. “My hair looks that bad?” she asked.
Mr. Pulido, who was surprised to see his face in the mirror, didn’t comment on his physique, which is fairly trim. But noting the general condition of his fellow customers, he offered researchers a suggestion.
“You should hang it a little lower,” he said, “so you show people’s bellies.”
(Buy Me!)
Scientists are beginning to study ways to get shoppers to buy more produce, but grocers and their suppliers have already spent years perfecting strategies to sell processed foods. Here’s a sampling of tactics:
THE SWEETEST ITEMS are sold at eye level, midway along aisles, where shoppers’ attention lingers longest.
THE ENDS OF AISLES are huge revenue generators, especially for soda, which makes 45 percent of its sales through racks there, according to the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council.
IMPULSE PURCHASES (60 percent of purchases are unplanned) can be encouraged by placing items next to checkouts.
FREE-STANDING DISPLAYS are also effective toward the rear of the supermarket and on the left side of aisles. Research cited by the Coca-Cola council shows that shoppers move through the store counterclockwise, from the back to the front; in the aisles, they buy items mostly from shelves to their left.
SPRINKLING THE SAME PRODUCT throughout the store, rather than grouping it in one spot, will boost sales through repetitive exposure.
GROUPING THE INGREDIENTS for a meal in one spot can attract home cooks pressed for time.
POSTING HEALTH-RELATED INFORMATION — online, and on kiosks and shelf tags — can link groceries to good health in shoppers’ minds, even though only 23 percent of them say they always look for nutritional information on labels.
http://tinyurl.com/pe2kxcv
LEITH, N.D. — The bearded man with thinning, gray-and-bleach-blond hair flapping down his neck first appeared in this tiny agricultural town last year, quietly and inconspicuously roaming the crackly dirt roads.
Nettie Ketterling thought nothing of it when he came into her bar to charge his cellphone in an outlet beneath the mounted head of a mule deer. To Kenneth Zimmerman, the man was just another customer, bringing his blue Dodge Durango in for repairs. Bobby Harper did not blink when the man appeared in front of his house and asked him if he had any land to sell. And the mayor, Ryan Schock, was simply extending a civic courtesy when he swung by the man’s house to introduce himself.
Their new neighbor, they thought, was just another person looking to get closer to the lucrative oil fields in western North Dakota known as the Bakken.
But all that changed last week.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and The Bismarck Tribune revealed that the man, Paul Craig Cobb, 61, has been buying up property in this town of 24 people in an effort to transform it into a colony for white supremacists.
In the past two years, Mr. Cobb, a longtime proselytizer for white supremacy who is wanted in Canada on charges of promoting hatred, has bought a dozen plots of land in Leith (pronounced Leeth) and has sold or transferred ownership of some of them to a couple of like-minded white nationalists.
He is using Craigslist and white power message boards to entice others in the movement to take refuge in Leith, about two hours southwest of Bismarck. On one board, he detailed his vision for the community — an enclave where residents fly “racialist” banners, where they are able to import enough “responsible hard core” white nationalists to take control of the town government, where “leftist journalists or antis” who “come and try to make trouble” will face arrest.
The revelations have riveted this community and the surrounding area, drawing a range of reactions from disgust to disbelief to curiosity.
“If that man wanted to live in Leith and be a good neighbor and be decent and not push his thoughts on the people, then he could live there,” said Arlene Wells, 82, a farmer and local historian. “But to come in and want to change everything and be the big dog — no. I don’t like bulldogs.”
It is all people are talking about, in bars and in their homes, at funerals and at church. They are poking around on the Web to read Mr. Cobb’s positions for themselves. A stream of cars creep through the streets where horses occasionally trot, their passengers hoping to catch a glimpse of some action or take a peek at Mr. Cobb’s peeling, two-story clapboard home. Sheriff’s cars, too, are making more rounds.
This is not how residents wanted Leith to get back on the map. Founded in 1909, the town bustled in the middle of the century, a regional center for festivals, movies and skating. The population began slipping after peaking at 174 in 1930, but the death knell was the closing of the railroad some 30 years ago. Though the 2010 census said the population is 16, Mr. Schock puts it at 24, and the Leith Bar is the only one of the five remaining buildings on Main Street still open. Most lots are empty and overgrown, laden with high-flying grasshoppers, in this town that sits in a bowl surrounded by wheat and sunflower fields.
Mr. Cobb happened upon the community, he said, through an ad for the home he eventually bought on Craigslist. He paid a total of about $8,600 for the house and 12 plots, he said, making his first purchases in 2011. He moved here in May 2012, he said, after fleeing Canada in 2010 to avoid the criminal charges. He spent some time in Montana, before coming to North Dakota to find work in the oil patch. He said he lost his construction job last week after the story broke.
People have knocked on Mr. Cobb’s red door to offer to buy back his land and to preach the Gospel. The City Council is looking into potential ordinance or health code violations (his home has no septic tank or running water). There is a doomsday plan in place, Mr. Schock explained: If enough of Mr. Cobb’s friends move in to gain a majority that could vote out the current government, the Council would immediately dissolve the town.
Mr. Harper, Leith’s only black resident, said a lot of people approached him at his mother-in-law’s funeral on Monday to tell him they had his back.
“People told me to leave town for the weekend and they’d take care of everything,” he said.
But he and his wife, Sherrill — who found herself referred to as a “filthy race-mixing white woman” in one of Mr. Cobb’s online posts — said they were not going anywhere.
Mr. Cobb, meanwhile, seems to be soaking in the publicity and mocking it.
“Just want to let you know I’m not going to cause any trouble,” he said to Don Hauge, 61, who rolled up in a red Chevy pickup truck to where Mr. Cobb was sitting on a bench, peering through smudged rectangular glasses that slid down the bridge of his nose. Mr. Cobb is a lanky figure, dressed neatly in a button-down shirt tucked into slender black slacks he says he bought from someone who had stolen them, and rubber sandals.
In rapid-fire speech, Mr. Cobb cuts through a vast trove of facts and thoughts in his head, inevitably veering toward racial slurs. But he maintained a soft, calm tone, and was friendly when chatting with a black reporter who knocked on his door this week. He said he admired Louis Farrakhan because “he organizes people and they’re for themselves.”
But in that interview he also said that he hoped his plans in Leith would “excite” white people and “give them confidence because we’re being deracinated in our own country. We’ve been very, very tolerant about these major sociological changes.”
His beliefs began developing at an early age, he said — he read Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” when he was 11. To hear him tell it, he has had a colorful, nomadic life that has brought him face to face with James (Whitey) Bulger (the mob boss piloted the tugboat he rode to boarding school in Boston) and Barack Obama (he claims to have driven the future president in his taxi in Hawaii in the early 1980s).
It is difficult to tell whether Mr. Cobb wants or expects his vision for Leith to succeed.
Although he said that four fellow white nationalists have bought or acquired some of his plots, he said he did not know if or when they would be moving to the town, nor would he push the issue on them.
He gave the community’s run-down former meat locker and creamery to the National Socialist Movement. Jeff Schoep, the movement’s leader, said he was unsure how easy it would be for people, in a tough economy, to pack up and head to Leith. But he said he thought it was a fantastic idea to establish a community for white nationalists so they could have a safe place to land in a crisis — say, a civil war.
“I would like to see it prosper and move forward,” Mr. Schoep said. “People should move there and get the process going. It gives us a base of support for elections and things like that.”
But as Ms. Ketterling has been hearing from her bar patrons all week, residents would rather see the venture fail.
“They’re not happy,” she said. “We don’t like that kind of stuff.”
Gay Marriages Get Recognition From the I.R.S.
http://tinyurl.com/nqmgldf
WASHINGTON — All same-sex couples who are legally married will be recognized as such for federal tax purposes, even if the state where they live does not recognize their union, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday.
It is the broadest federal rule change to come out of the landmark Supreme Court decision in June that struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and a sign of how quickly the government is moving to treat gay couples in the same way that it does straight couples.
The June decision found that same-sex couples were entitled to federal benefits, but left open the question of how Washington would actually administer them. The Treasury Department answered some of those questions on Thursday. As of the 2013 tax year, same-sex spouses who are legally married will not be able to file federal tax returns as if either were single. Instead, they must file together as “married filing jointly” or individually as “married filing separately.”
Their address or the location of their wedding does not matter, as long as the marriage is legal: a same-sex couple who marry in Albany, N.Y., and move to Alabama are treated the same as a same-sex couple who marry and live in Massachusetts.
“Today’s ruling provides certainty and clear, coherent tax-filing guidance for all legally married same-sex couples nationwide,” Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said. “This ruling also assures legally married same-sex couples that they can move freely throughout the country knowing that their federal filing status will not change.”
Gay and civil rights groups praised the ruling. “Committed and loving gay and lesbian married couples will now be treated equally under our nation’s federal tax laws, regardless of what state they call home,” said Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign. “These families finally have access to crucial tax benefits and protections previously denied to them under the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act.”
But the Treasury decision could have ramifications for many gay couples’ tax liabilities, said Roberton Williams of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington. Couples with similar incomes often pay the “marriage penalty,” with their tax liability as a couple being much higher than it would be if they were single.
At the same time, same-sex couples will also be able to file amended returns for certain prior tax years, meaning that many couples might be eligible for refunds. Couples do not have to file amended returns if they do not want to, a senior Treasury official said, meaning that couples who might pay the marriage penalty would not owe back taxes.
But the ruling creates complications for same-sex couples who live in any of the 37 states that do not recognize their marriages. Previously, such couples filed federal and state tax returns as individuals. Now, they will have to file their federal returns as other married couples do, but may be required to file their state returns as individuals.
“There’s going to be a cumbersome workaround,” said Nanette Lee Miller of Marcum L.L.P., a public accounting firm. She sees it as a paperwork bother more than a financial issue.
States might also respond to the federal ruling with changes of their own. “Most state income tax regimes begin with federal taxable income as the starting point,” Marvin Kirsner, a tax lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, said in an e-mail. “These state taxing authorities will have to figure out how to deal with a same-sex married couple who file a joint income tax return for federal tax purposes.” He added,
“We will need to see guidance from each nonrecognition state to see how this will be handled.”
The rule change is likely to provide a small increase for federal revenue, as more same-sex couples pay the marriage penalty, Mr. Williams said, describing it as a “rounding error.” But it would be partly offset by new federal spending on benefits for same-sex spouses.
The ruling applies to all legal marriages made in the United States or foreign countries. But it does not extend to civil unions, registered domestic partnerships or other legal relationships, the Treasury said.
The Treasury ruling is one of many that are starting to emerge from all corners of the federal government as Washington changes regulations to conform with the Supreme Court decision.
Separately, the Health and Human Services Department said Thursday that Medicare would extend certain key benefits to same-sex spouses, “clarifying that all beneficiaries in private Medicare plans have access to equal coverage when it comes to care in a nursing home where their spouse lives.”
But federal agencies are not moving in lock step. Instead, they are creating a patchwork of regulations affecting gay and lesbian couples — and may be raising questions about discrimination and fairness in the way that federal benefits are distributed.
Medicare and Treasury officials have said they would use a “place of celebration” standard for determining whether gay couples are eligible for benefits. That means same-sex couples would receive benefits as long as they are legally married, regardless of where they live.
But the Social Security Administration is now using a “place of residence” standard in determining spousal benefits, and a gay couple in Alabama might not receive the same benefits as a gay couple in New York until final determinations are made or Congress acts. The Obama administration has pushed federal agencies to ensure the Supreme Court’s ruling is carried out quickly and smoothly.
“It would be nice if they were consistent,” Ms. Miller said. Creating federal regulations is a process and could change, she said.
Salmonella in Spices Prompts Changes in Farming
http://tinyurl.com/pedzfvk
IDUKKI, India — Spices grown in the mist-shrouded Western Ghats here have fueled wars, fortunes and even the discovery of continents, and for thousands of years farmers harvested them in the same traditional ways. Until now.
Science has revealed what ancient kings and sultans never knew: instead of improving health, spices sometimes make people very sick, so Indian government officials are quietly pushing some of the most far-reaching changes ever in the way farmers here pick, dry and thresh their rich bounty.
The United States Food and Drug Administration will soon release a comprehensive analysis that pinpoints imported spices, found in just about every kitchen in the Western world, as a surprisingly potent source of salmonella poisoning.
In a study of more than 20,000 food shipments, the food agency found that nearly 7 percent of spice lots were contaminated with salmonella, twice the average of all other imported foods. Some 15 percent of coriander and 12 percent of oregano and basil shipments were contaminated, with high contamination levels also found in sesame seeds, curry powder and cumin. Four percent of black pepper shipments were contaminated.
Each year, 1.2 million people in the United States become sick from salmonella, one of the most common causes of food-borne illness. More than 23,000 are hospitalized and 450 die. Symptoms include diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps that begin 12 to 36 hours after infection and can last three to five days. Death can result when infection spreads from the intestines to the bloodstream and affects vital organs. Infants and older people are most at risk.
Mexico and India had the highest share of contaminated spices. About 14 percent of the samples from Mexico contained salmonella, the study found, a result Mexican officials disputed.
India’s exports were the second-most contaminated, at approximately 9 percent, but India ships nearly four times the amount of spices to the United States that Mexico does, so its contamination problems are particularly worrisome, officials said. Nearly one-quarter of the spices, oils and food colorings used in the United States comes from India.
The findings, the result of a three-year study that F.D.A. officials have on occasion discussed publicly and recently published in the journal Food Microbiology, form an important part of the spice analysis that will be made public “soon,” agency officials said.
“Salmonella is a widespread problem with respect to imported spices,” Michael Taylor, deputy F.D.A. commissioner for food, said in an interview. “We have decided that spices are one of the significant issues we need to be addressing right now.”
Westerners are particularly vulnerable to contaminated spices because pepper and other spices are added at the table, so bacterial hitchhikers are consumed live and unharmed. Bacteria do not survive high temperatures, so contaminated spices present fewer problems when added during cooking, as is typical in the cuisine of India and most other Asian countries.
Mexico’s chief of food safety inspections insisted that Mexican spices are checked daily and are safe, although a separate study found high levels of salmonella contamination in some Mexican vegetables.
“We have a constant, daily scheme of verification” of food products, said Álvaro Pérez Vega, sanitary operations commissioner at Mexico’s Federal Commission for the Protection Against Sanitary Risk. “We don’t have reports of spices or condiments being out of norm,” he added.
In India, the world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of spices, government officials are taking Washington’s concerns seriously.
“The world wants safe spices, and we are committed to making that happen,” said Dr. A. Jayathilak, chairman of the Spices Board of India, a government agency that regulates and promotes spices.
F.D.A. tests found that contaminated spices tend to have many more salmonella types than is typically found on contaminated meat. The agency, which visually inspects less than 1 percent of all imported foods and performs lab tests on a tiny fraction, rejects imports with any signs of salmonella contamination because as few as 10 cells have been shown to cause serious illness.
Illnesses caused by spices are hard to trace. When asked what might have made them sick, people rarely think to mention adding pepper to a salad. Spices sit on kitchen shelves indefinitely, so linking illnesses that can occur years apart is often impossible.
But sophisticated DNA sequencing of salmonella types is finally allowing food officials to pinpoint spices as a cause of repeated outbreaks, including one in 2010 involving black and red pepper that sickened more than 250 people in 44 states. After a 2009 outbreak linked to white pepper, an inspection found that salmonella had colonized much of the Union City, Calif., spice processing facility at the heart of the outbreak.
The United States is one of the world’s largest spice importers, bringing in 326 metric tons in 2012 valued at $1.1 billion, according to the Department of Agriculture. Of those imports, which account for more than 80 percent of the total United States spice supply, 19 percent were from India and 5 percent from Mexico.
The F.D.A. now has offices in New Delhi and Mumbai, and its commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, intends to visit soon.
New agency rules governing imported foods have given the agency the power to restrict imports based solely on suspicion that foods may be unsafe, a powerful cudgel to demand changes.
On a tour through a tropical landscape teeming with pepper and cardamom farms, rubber plantations, tea estates and wild elephants, Indian spice officials showed some voluntary changes they are pushing.
The first stop was Noble Joseph’s 10-acre pepper farm, about a four-hour drive from the southwestern port city of Kochi, in the state of Kerala, up several thousand feet of twisting mountain roads.
Mr. Joseph’s hilly farm is dominated by slim silver oaks and erythrina trees planted every eight feet; each tree is encircled by four or five pepper vines.
During harvest season, starting in February, 15 workers cram into a small farmhouse for nearly two months and use long, single-rail bamboo ladders to pluck the pepper seeds from the vines as high as 40 feet.
Not so long ago, pepper farmers almost universally dried the seeds on bamboo mats or dirt floors and then gathered them for manual threshing. Dirt, dung and salmonella were simply part of the harvest, so much so that in 1987, the F.D.A. blocked shipments of black pepper from India. The ban was lifted two years later, after the Indian government began a testing program.
Now, the Josephs boil their harvest in water to clean the kernels, speed drying and encourage a uniform color. They are then placed on tarps spread over a concrete slab with nets above to catch bird droppings. Ovens would be even more sanitary, but ovens and electricity are expensive “and sunlight is free,” Mr. Joseph said.
The spices board underwrites a third of the cost of concrete slabs, tarps and mechanical threshers, and since most farms are smaller than an acre, it has organized growers’ cooperatives to pool facilities. Board officials recently attended F.D.A. training seminars in Maryland.
Salmonella can survive indefinitely on dried spices, and killing the bacterium on the craggy surface of dried peppercorns without ruining their taste is especially challenging.
Government officials in India emphasized in interviews that spices slated for export are often treated to kill any bacteria. Such treatments include steam-heating, irradiation or ethylene oxide gas. But F.D.A. inspectors have found high levels of salmonella contamination in shipments said to have received such treatments, documents show. Much of the contaminated pepper in the 2010 outbreak had been treated with steam and ethylene oxide and had been certified as tested and safe, officials said.
At another spice farm, in the village of Chemmanar, Bipin Sebastian is in the midst of a four-year transition to organic farming in hope of earning a premium price for his pepper, cloves, cardamom, turmeric and coffee. Mr. Sebastian says he has used government subsidies to buy tarps, netting and a machine thresher.
“We used to put our pepper directly on the ground,” Mr. Sebastian said. “Now, we put down tarps and netting over it to protect it from the birds. And I’ve been getting a higher price. It’s been great.”
Nudged to the Produce Aisle by a Look in the Mirror
http://tinyurl.com/p6wqa23
EL PASO — Samuel Pulido walked into his local grocery store on a sweltering day, greeted by cool air and the fantasy-world ambience of the modern supermarket.
Soft music drifted. Neon-bright colors turned his head this way and that. “WOW!!!” gasped the posters hanging from entranceway racks, heralding the sugary drinks, wavy chips and Berry Colossal Crunch being thrust his way.
Then he looked down at his grocery cart and felt quite a different tug. Inside the front of the buggy, hooked onto its red steel frame, was a mirror. It stretched nearly a foot across, and as Mr. Pulido gripped the cart a little more tightly, it filled with the reflection of his startled face.
The sight was meant to be a splash of reality in the otherwise anonymous la-la land of food shopping, a reminder of who he was, how he looked and perhaps what he had come in for. And if the spell cast by the store wasn’t entirely broken, it seemed to have lost at least some of its grip.
“I’m looking at myself, and thinking, ‘O.K., now what?’ ” he said.
The mirror is part of an effort to get Americans to change their eating habits, by two social scientists outmaneuvering the processed-food giants on their own turf, using their own tricks: the distracting little nudges and cues that confront a supermarket shopper at every turn. The researchers, like many government agencies and healthy-food advocates these days, are out to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables. But instead of preaching about diabetes or slapping taxes on junk food, they gently prod shoppers — so gently, in fact, that it’s hard to believe the results.
In one early test at a store in Virginia, grocery carts carried a strip of yellow duct tape that divided the baskets neatly in half; a flier instructed shoppers to put their fruits and vegetables in the front half of the cart. Average produce sales per customer jumped to $8.85 from $3.99.
Here in El Paso a few months ago, the researchers focused on the floor, laying down large plastic mats bearing huge green arrows that pointed shoppers to the produce aisle. The outcome surprised no one more than the grocer.
“In retail, the customer tends to go to the right,” said Tim Taylor, the produce director for Lowe’s, Pay and Save, a regional grocery chain that let the scientists in to experiment with their arrows and mirrors. “But I watched when the arrows were down, pointing left, and that’s where people went: left, 9 out of 10.”
With those same guinea-pig customers, the scientists tinkered again with the cart, creating a glossy placard that hung inside the baskets like the mirrors. In English and Spanish, the signs told shoppers how much produce the average customer was buying (five items a visit), and which fruits and vegetables were the biggest sellers (bananas, limes and avocados) — information that, in scientific parlance, conveys social norms, or acceptable behavior.
By the second week, produce sales had jumped 10 percent, with a whopping 91 percent rise for those participating in the government nutrition program called Women, Infants and Children. Lowe’s was so excited that it now plans to put the placards in every cart at its 22 stores in El Paso and nearby Las Cruces, N.M., and perhaps later at all 146 of its stores.
For grocers, there is one potential glitch: While produce sales climbed in these trials, the store’s total sales remained mostly the same. That meant shoppers spent less on nonproduce items. “They’re moving preference from one side of the store to the other, which is wonderful,” said Michael Kelly, a senior program officer at the Paso Del Norte Health Foundation, which is financing the research. “People still stay on their budgets, get more nutrients and less of the processed — well, let’s just say bad — stuff.”
But the owners of Lowe’s are smiling, too, because along with the meat counter, the produce aisle is one of the most profitable parts of a grocery store, with large volumes and higher-than-average markups from the wholesale cost. So even if sales of frozen pizza and potato chips dip, the grocer’s net profit will rise if zucchini gains.
Finding a profit motive in social policy fits well with the politically conservative views of the researchers engaged in this supermarket manipulation: two Republican-leaning academics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
One, Collin R. Payne, a 38-year-old associate professor, graduated from Brigham Young University and then worked on a string of groundbreaking studies at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University that affirmed a concept known as mindful eating: the notion that if you put food on a smaller plate, you’ll probably eat less.
The same idea, he says, extends to shopping. “The more mindless you are when you shop, the more you are going to be poked and prodded to buy the manufacturer’s products,” Mr. Payne said. “We’re trying to give consumers the same power the companies have.”
His colleague, a Romanian émigré named Mihai Niculescu, 37, came up with the mirror idea by marrying his own specialty in business marketing, known as behavioral choice, with research done by others on self-image. Over a fully loaded Mexican meal at the famed L & J Cafe here, he said his own sizable belly gave him an insider’s edge when studying the marketing cues that lead to overconsumption. “Eating this, I don’t realize I’m overweight, until I look at myself,” he said.
A paper the two men wrote last year for The Agricultural and Resource Economics Review said the conventional methods promoted in Washington and elsewhere to encourage Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables have either failed, or require taxpayer money at a time when food stamps are at political risk. These efforts include ads and store display signs promoting produce as healthful, and reducing its cost through tools like additional vouchers for low-income women.
By contrast, Mr. Payne and Mr. Niculescu are pursuing a strategy that behavioral scientists call nudge marketing, an idea popularized by the 2008 book “Nudge,” by the former Obama administration regulatory affairs administrator Cass R. Sunstein and the University of Chicago professor Richard H. Thaler.
Nudge marketing calls for applying just the right amount of pressure to persuade: not too little, not too much. In the El Paso grocery trials, using both the green arrows on the floor with the green placards in the carts caused produce sales to fall.
“It nudged too hard,” Mr. Payne said.
By several measures, El Paso is one tough testing ground for these studies. Thirty-two percent of the city’s adults are obese, and 12.2 percent have diabetes, exceeding the statewide average, according to Texas health department estimates. The fast-growing Hispanic population has become a favorite marketing target for processed-food manufacturers.
Much of that was evident at the Lowe’s store where Mr. Pulido and other shoppers encountered the mirrors. Many of its customers are significantly overweight, and gravitate toward the chip and soda aisles. As in many supermarkets, the store’s produce section, while decently stocked with eye-pleasing displays, gets only about 10 percent of the total space and none of the prime real estate that drives the most sales: the front-of-the-store display towers, which companies rent from the store, and spots by the checkout lanes.
“That’s Frito-Lay, that’s Frito-Lay, that’s Frito-Lay,” said the manager, Gloria Narro, spinning around in the center of the store to point out all the displays for that company’s snacks. “We’re all trying to eat healthier, but there’s so much competition for us,” she said. “Right next door is a store known for its fresh meat. Walmart is down the street. Walgreens and CVS just opened up, carrying whatever you need in food.”
The scientists have other tricks up their sleeves. They recently gave Lowe’s a research paper with 56 ideas for increasing produce sales, like putting a rack of onions near the meat counter, for making fajitas.
But it’s their retooling of shopping carts that is drawing the interest of marketing and obesity experts alike.
“I think what they’re doing is very innovative and clever,” said Michael R. Lowe, a Drexel University psychology professor and longtime researcher on weight control. “If you put up some cues that remind people of their weight or healthy eating, without hitting them over the head, they will go and choose healthier items. The mirror might do that, but the question will be, ‘What kind of memory association will their body elicit?’ And that is hard to know beforehand. For those who are overweight, it might elicit the sense of, ‘Oh, I need to lose weight.’ Or, ‘I don’t like to see myself because I’m so big,’ which might lead to choosing healthier food.”
Mr. Payne and Mr. Niculescu acknowledge that the mirror is still an unproven tool and hope to conduct a formal trial later this year.
They started by placing a full-length mirror just inside the store’s entrance, which shoppers either ignored or used for some impromptu primping. The mirrored cart was more arresting, as Kathy Saenz, one of the store’s customer service representatives, noticed when she tried the cart out. “My hair looks that bad?” she asked.
Mr. Pulido, who was surprised to see his face in the mirror, didn’t comment on his physique, which is fairly trim. But noting the general condition of his fellow customers, he offered researchers a suggestion.
“You should hang it a little lower,” he said, “so you show people’s bellies.”
(Buy Me!)
Scientists are beginning to study ways to get shoppers to buy more produce, but grocers and their suppliers have already spent years perfecting strategies to sell processed foods. Here’s a sampling of tactics:
THE SWEETEST ITEMS are sold at eye level, midway along aisles, where shoppers’ attention lingers longest.
THE ENDS OF AISLES are huge revenue generators, especially for soda, which makes 45 percent of its sales through racks there, according to the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council.
IMPULSE PURCHASES (60 percent of purchases are unplanned) can be encouraged by placing items next to checkouts.
FREE-STANDING DISPLAYS are also effective toward the rear of the supermarket and on the left side of aisles. Research cited by the Coca-Cola council shows that shoppers move through the store counterclockwise, from the back to the front; in the aisles, they buy items mostly from shelves to their left.
SPRINKLING THE SAME PRODUCT throughout the store, rather than grouping it in one spot, will boost sales through repetitive exposure.
GROUPING THE INGREDIENTS for a meal in one spot can attract home cooks pressed for time.
POSTING HEALTH-RELATED INFORMATION — online, and on kiosks and shelf tags — can link groceries to good health in shoppers’ minds, even though only 23 percent of them say they always look for nutritional information on labels.
