There's a painfully funny line early in Beetlejuice, from Jeffrey Jones, that immediately establishes the movie's whitebread suburban 1980s milieu: he says he's gonna clip coupons. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/3cd6dca7-a8de-4a86-ab24-bca60eec75ab
Frisk and I, who both lived through the 1980s, were compelled to become altogether too familiar with the coupon-clipping pastime. It hasn't stopped; you can still get paper coupons even though these days everyone's moved over to online deals and forcing people to install smartphone apps in order to get trivial savings on consumer products. And you can even still find propaganda stories of the "local mom saves enough for her daughter's tooth extraction by clipping coupons!!" sort. But my sibling and I tend to think of the coupon-clipping phenomenon as a Reaganite phenomenon. It was one of the most obvious manifestations of what Reaganite austerity did to people: they were taught that if they were poor, it was their fault, and anyone could save pennies and become rich thereby if they really wanted to. And who doesn't want to feel like they're getting a deal?
Coupon-clipping ended up feeling like some kind of grotesque parody of an entertaining board game. Instead of shuffling cards to get you through a fantasy dungeon you were shuffling bits of paper, cut out from newspapers and print advertisements and other sources, in an attempt to navigate the treacherous lands of 1980s Reaganite "personal responsibility". There must surely have been some deep and malevolent marketing calculus involved in deciding what store items got to have coupons printed for them—did anyone who zealously clipped coupons (like our RL mother) ever wonder just why a corporation dedicated to bleeding its customers dry would ever deign to take pity on them, even to the extent of trimming a few cents off the price of a can of beans? The coupon-clipping game feels a bit like some canny corporate accountants figured out how to outsource part of their store-pricing algorithms to "the consumers", who dutifully spent hours a week sorting through colorful coupons and doing intricate arithmetic on behalf of supermarket chains, while trying to pretend that it was both a fun thing to do, and that it was socially responsible.
The 1980s were big on "consumer's rights" as a kind of phoney-baloney substitute or proxy for the civil rights activism that the Reaganite Republicans were determined to pretend had "gone too far". The new official line, enforced in terms of what kind of news stories got the most play in the press, was roughly: if you're unhappy, it's because you need to buy better products. And if you feel like you can't buy good products, then agitate for better ones! Frisk and I kinda fell for this "consumer's rights" stuff for a while. We were children being brought up in whıte suburban America; it was easy for us to be duped into thinking that we were going to improve people's lives by going after false advertising and agitating for better washing machines and so forth. "Consumer's rights" engendered the kind of fussy, excessive concern about consumer products and "comparison shopping" that also fed into preoccupation with coupon-clipping. We were "consumers", Frisk and I, and therefore it was our duty to be educated and knowledgeable about the products we were being sold.
And now I feel like maybe we should have been heaving bricks through shop windows, instead.
~Chara