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man would be caught dead in a Frye boots outlet? Think again, hombre.) Mail order found its sweet spot in the era between the Sears Wish Book and the Internet. We received catalogs in our mailbox by the rubber-banded bundle: Lands’ End, Sharper Image, Renovator’s Supply, Best Products, and on and on.
    K-Mart, meanwhile, as the proletarian standard-bearer, was deepening its sensitivity to its own micro-demographics and would soon, depending on the locale, evolve into Super K, Big K, K-Mart Super Center.
    The first two K-Mart Super Centers were built in suburbs of Akron. We were the national test market, and we embraced that like an honor. In the same way that Ohio seems invisible and irrelevant to the rest of the country until it comes time to elect a president, so too is it the kind of place whose clientele might seem nondescript until it comes time to put a mainstream, middle-class, mass-market shopping concept through its paces. Then a little eureka-bulb lights up.
    Ohio!
    As a rookie small-town newspaper reporter in 1991, I covered the opening of the very first K-Mart Super Center in the suburban town of Medina, Ohio. It was a huge event locally, with a ribbon cutting and throngs of curiosity seekers, and it also drew national media coverage. The news of the day included a woman’s wandering through the parking lot, crying and lost, unable to find her car in the vast acreage of automobiles. The police finally got involved, and after an extensive search the two were reunited.
    My dad, a civil engineer, designed the parking lot for the second location, and I’d like to think that my Sunday-dinner consultations with him helped stave off another such misfortune.
    I’m sure the K-Mart corporation chose industrial Ohio to launch this concept based on the area’s public perception as quintessentially working class . But in places such as Akron and Cleveland and Detroit and Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, we understood that term with a different nuance than its usual usage, in which working class implies the next tier down from middle class , and probably a couple of tiers down from white collar . Here, the working class had for decades been the most stable, most prosperous, most highly regarded local demographic. In Akron, tire builders referred to themselves as the “kings” of the rubber industry, without irony. They were highly paid, backed by an extraordinarily powerful labor union, and thanks to years and years of hard-nosed contract negotiations, they enjoyed exceptional job security and benefits. In Akron, the working-class families were the ones with the Cadillacs and the vacation homes and the high-end kitchen makeovers. My dad had a college degree and was a partner in a small engineering firm. Yet people like him—small-business owners, nonunion professionals—were far more susceptible to the swings of the economy and didn’t have the same clout as the factory workers. My dad wore a suit to work, but he’d never owned a new car.
    Before K-Mart’s cultural revolution, smaller regional chains were more likely to cater to that middle class of consumers with a sort of midsize mom-and-pop style. In the region around Ohio, the Gold Circle discount stores established themselves as a dominant consumer force in the 1970s and ’80s. Gold Circle could be compared to K-Mart on something like a three-quarters scale, but it carried itself with the distinctly bourgeois personality that comes from marketing mass culture to a willing middle class, an up/downscale suggestion that quality is necessary, but only so much and then it becomes a liability; this same philosophy was employed to great effect by Timex watches and the Steve Miller Band.
    Gold Circle was the first chain of stores to use bar codes on all its merchandise, a mark of facelessness in the name of efficiency that seemed particularly well tuned to people who worked on assembly lines. It seems no coincidence that the very