The Building Materials For Middle Class

Tue., March 30, 1999

By Paul Turner srpaulturner@gmail.com

A certain booth caught the eye of a woman wearing a denim Planet Hollywood-Seattle jacket.

“Wait a second,” she said to the man with her. “I want to see this grout.”

So that’s what they did. They worked their way through the crowd toward the Grout Master booth.

Here’s a theory.

The middle class isn’t really disappearing. It’s just that on the day pollsters went looking, everyone was at the Spokane Home and Garden Show.

At least that’s the way it seemed Sunday at the Spokane Convention Center/Ag Trade Center.

A herd of real-live consumers had plunked down $5 apiece and been issued white plastic Total News 4 bags for toting brochures and business cards.

They checked out what seemed like 100,000 displays showcasing beds, rugs, cabinets, sliding doors, fences, furnaces, hot tubs, stoves, sod, wallpaper, patio furniture, miracle mops, power tools, fireplaces and tons of other stuff.

Every time you turned a corner, there was some sort of raffle or drawing.

If you are one of the six or seven Spokane-area residents who would regard attending such an event as a descent into lifestyle hell, here’s the deal. Going to the Home and Garden Show is like being in a three-dimensional version of a cable TV lineup consisting of nothing but home-shopping networks. To change the channel, you just keep walking.

“Folks, if you have a question or you’d like to place an order, this is the time to do it,” said one of the countless headset-microphone creatures at the show.

Hey, we’re all selling something. Nothing wrong with that.

But the thing about a product-demonstration show is that you can sometimes feel the people at the booth watching you. You suspect they’re thinking “If that guy makes eye contact with me, I’m going to have him walking out of here with an armload of cookware.”

Early Sunday afternoon, when the crowd was thick, there was a remarkable degree of courtesy exercised by the people wandering the packed aisles.

“Excuse me.”

And judging from facial expressions, a lot of showgoers were having a reasonably good time.

Over at the SpokAnimal display, an attractive blond woman wearing a black sweater was cuddling an orange kitten. She cooed as she smushed the cat against her chest.

A thirtysomething guy wearing a ballcap watched this with an undisguised look of delight.

Maybe he was thinking about grout.

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