The Customer Is Always Right.

History was being made all throughout the University of Minnesota on October 23rd, 2010, when President Obama came to speak on campus. Rather than reading historical representations found in the U of M Field House or in various national publications that covered the event, I was drawn to the reactions of local business establishments.

Now, we have three layers of representation here, because I'm not so interested in the way that eateries and trinket shops perceived and represented President Obama's speech; rather, the observations that drew me in were regarding the reaction and adaptation of neighborhood businesses to the people's representation of the event. What makes this all the more interesting is the fact that the big, anticipated event hadn't even taken place during the observation period on which this entry is based.

So to break it all down, business establishments were responding to and representing the people's representation of -- wait for it -- the various advertisements for the speech, which were in turn combined representations of past speeches that Obama had given, and of positions on the upcoming speech that advertisers were aiming to impose on their viewers.

I was working at Bruegger's in Dinktown from 9:00am - 2:00pm on this date, and I got to thinking: everyone that has been and will be coming into the store to buy food before Obama's speech is outrageously excited to witness this moment in history. But, although unified through equal anticipation, many of these people had taken different and largely conflicting positions on the event; the speech-goers all had such passion for their varying political convictions. But how does a business establishment react to the situation? By telling people what they want to hear. A business, regardless of the ideologies of individual employees, aims to make the largest possible profit, and this is encouraged through the application of the classic phrase: the customer is always right (better known as kissing ass). Part-time employees at Bruegger's were equally motivated by this public service rule-of-thumb due to the presence of a tip jar in front of the registers.

So what does this mean? Although similar to the concept of history being forever represented in the way that most benefits those representing it, there is a blaring difference between the ways that a textbook and a business establishment act on the parallel motivation: at Bruegger's, history regularly changed. Depending on who was being served, the event was inspirational, laughable, or any degree in-between. To add another dimension, the event was often represented as obnoxious or annoying, mirroring the opinions of those who didn't care about the speech, and were only concerned with the unusual increase in pedestrians and/or drivers.

In a way, this is a big metaphor representing how people treat history on a large scale. It doesn't seem like it due to the apparent permanence of physically recording history, but the way we choose to represent history drastically changes depending on popular cultural ideologies. This means that history changes through both time and space, representing the societal values of each individual period and geographical location.

I feel like there's a lot to branch off to from here, but I think this is getting a bit too all-inclusive for a blog entry.