must understand how to make the novel seem familiar.
The last time I spoke to Andrew Pole, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant with our second child. Pole himself has children, and so we talked a bit about kids. My wife and I shop at Target on occasion, I said, and about a year earlier we had given the company our address, so we could start getting coupons in the mail. Recently, as my wife’s pregnancy had progressed, I’d been noticing a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers, lotions, and baby clothes arriving at our house.
I was planning on using some of those coupons that very weekend, I told him. I was also thinking of buying a crib, and some drapes for the nursery, and maybe some Bob the Builder toys for my toddler. It was really helpful that Target was sending me exactly the right coupons for what I needed to buy.
“Just wait till the baby comes,” Pole said. “We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”
1The reporting in this chapter is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former Target employees, many of them conducted on a not-for-attribution basis because sources feared dismissal from the company or other retribution. Target was provided with an opportunity to review and respond to the reporting in this chapter, and was asked to make executives involved in the Guest Analytics department available for on-the- record interviews. The company declined to do so and declined to respond to fact-checking questions except in two emails. The first said: “At Target, our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and an exceptional guest experience by consistently fulfilling our ‘Expect More. Pay Less.’ brand promise. Because we are so intently focused on this mission, we have made considerable investments in understanding our guests’ preferences. To assist in this effort, we’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population. We use data derived from these tools to inform our store layouts, product selection, promotions and coupons. This analysis allows Target to provide the most relevant shopping experience to our guests. For example, during an in-store transaction, our research tool can predict relevant offers for an individual guest based on their purchases, which can be delivered along with their receipt. Further, opt-in programs such as our baby registry help Target understand how guests’ needs evolve over time, enabling us to provide new mothers with money-saving coupons. We believe these efforts directly benefit our guests by providing more of what they need and want at Target-and have benefited Target by building stronger guest loyalty, driving greater shopping frequency and delivering increased sales and profitability.” A second email read: “Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point. Target takes its legal obligations seriously and is in compliance with all applicable federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information.”
Part Three. The Habits of Societies
8
SADDLEBACK CHURCH AND THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT
I.
The 6 P.M. Cleveland Avenue bus pulled to the curb and the petite forty-two-year-old African American woman in rimless glasses and a conservative brown jacket climbed on board, reached into her purse, and dropped a ten-cent fare into the till. [219]
It was Thursday, December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, and she had just finished a long day at Montgomery Fair, the department store where she worked as a seamstress. The bus was crowded and, by law, the first four rows were reserved for white passengers. The area where blacks were allowed to sit, in the back, was already full and so the woman-Rosa Parks-sat in a center row, right behind the white section, where either race could claim a seat.
As the bus continued on its route, more people boarded. Soon, all the rows were filled and some-including a white passenger-were standing in the aisle, holding on to an overhead bar. The bus driver, James F. Blake, seeing the white man on his feet, shouted at the black passengers in Parks’s area to give up their seats, but no one moved. It was noisy. They might not have heard. Blake pulled over to a bus stop in front of the Empire Theater on Montgomery Street and walked back.
“Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” he said. Three of the black passengers got up and moved to the rear, but Parks stayed put. She wasn’t
“If you don’t stand up,” Blake said, “I’m going to call the police and have you arrested.”
“You may do that,” Parks said. [220]
The driver left and found two policemen.
“Why don’t you stand up?” one of them asked Parks after they boarded.
“Why do you push us around?” she said.
“I don’t know,” the officer answered. “But the law is the law and you’re under arrest.” [221]
At that moment, though no one on that bus knew it, the civil rights movement pivoted. That small refusal was the first in a series of actions that shifted the battle over race relations from a struggle fought by activists in courts and legislatures into a contest that would draw its strength from entire communities and mass protests. Over the next year, Montgomery’s black population would rise up and boycott the city’s buses, ending their strike only once the law segregating races on public transportation was stricken from the books. The boycott would financially cripple the bus line, draw tens of thousands of protesters to rallies, introduce the country to a charismatic young leader named Martin Luther King, Jr., and spark a movement that would spread to Little Rock, Greensboro, Raleigh, Birmingham, and, eventually, to Congress. Parks would become a hero, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a shining example of how a single act of defiance can change the world.
But that isn’t the whole story. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott became the epicenter of the civil rights campaign not only because of an individual act of defiance, but also because of social patterns. Parks’s experiences offer a lesson in the power of social habits-the behaviors that occur, unthinkingly, across dozens or hundreds or thousands of people which are often hard to see as they emerge, but which contain a power that can change the world. Social habits are what fill streets with protesters who may not know one another, who might be marching for different reasons, but who are all moving in the same direction. Social habits are why some initiatives become world-changing movements, while others fail to ignite. And the reason why social habits have such influence is because at the root of many movements-be they large-scale revolutions or simple
