Looking Ahead: A Preview of Inconspicuous Consumption

Here’s a taste of what this Substack will be like going forward.

As you probably know by now, my Uni Watch career will be coming to an end this Sunday, May 26 (which is the 25th anniversary of the very first Uni Watch column being published). The daily Uni Watch blog will continue operating after that date, but longtime Uni Watch deputy editor Phil Hecken will be running things. I will retain ownership of the site but will no longer be involved in its day-to-day editorial operations.

As for this Substack: After this post, I will take a break for at least a month and will then resume publishing here at some point in the summer. When I return from that break, the Substack’s URL will remain the same (paullukas.substack.com), but the page will no longer be called Uni Watch. Instead, it will be called Inconspicuous Consumption and will have a new design, a new logo, new everything. I hate the term “rebranding,” but it does seem appropriate here.

Inconspicuous consumption is a concept I came up with in the early 1990s. It served as the title of my 1997 book, Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, From the Everyday to the Obscure. That subtitle is a good starting point for what this Substack will be about going forward — noticing the nuances that are all around us. I also plan to include a lot of object-based storytelling, personal storytelling, and hopefully a few things I haven’t thought of yet. I expect the tone to be mostly upbeat, and for the entire enterprise to serve as a vehicle for expressing curiosity, enthusiasm, and delight.

I’ve decided to use this final Uni Watch Substack post to give you a little taste of what Inconspicuous Consumption will be like. Here are some of the things — or at least some of the types of things — you can expect to see:

1. Inconspicuous Observations

For most of my life, canine-warning signs said, “Beware of Dog.” But at some point — I don’t recall exactly when — I began seeing signs that said, “Beware of the Dog.” The two phrasings now coexist in what appears to be rough parity. (Home Depot sells both versions.)

Obviously, the two versions are extremely similar, but I find the original “the”-free construction to be vastly superior — not so much for any grammatical reason, but because most signs and messages of this sort tend toward a blunt minimalism: “Help Wanted” (not “Help Is Wanted”), “Return to Sender” (not “Return to the Sender”), and so on. Adding the definite article somehow dilutes the purity of the message. When did it start appearing in dog-warning signs, and whose idea was it?

I can think of only one other similar situation:

Again, I prefer the more concise admonition, although I’m a bit more “the”-tolerant in this instance.

Meanwhile: It’s hard to overstate how much a bar code detracts from the aesthetics of this type of sign. Why don’t they put it on the back, or just use a sticker? Because those options would cost more, that’s why. Grrrrr.

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So that’s an example of an inconspicuous detail that I’ve noticed in the wild. I’ll be doing a lot of that going forward. Some of the treatments might be longer or shorter than the example I’ve used here.

Another thing I’ll be doing will be…

2. Detailed Breakdowns of Cool Vintage Items

A good 20 years or so ago, a friend gave me this kit of food portion sample cups, produced by the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation, probably in the 1940s. It offers all sorts of very satisfying details. Let’s have a look, shall we?

We can start with the box. Here's a closer look at the front:

Nice, right? But the real treat is the bottom panel, which lists all the foods that can be served in these cups. Check this out:

How awesome is that? I love how they arranged the words in descending order of length. Genius!

Another panel describes the advantages of portion control:

All this, and we still haven’t even opened the box yet! So let’s do that now:

I like how the cups all nest into each other. As many other people have noted over the years, there’s something extremely satisfying about things fitting perfectly into other things.

But wait — there's more! The bottom of each cup is imprinted with the cup’s size, catalog number, and previous catalog number, along with the appropriate foods for serving in each cup (some of which, like “spiced prunes” and “bisque tortoni,” are just too perfect). Here they are in descending size order:

All of that feels Just Right — well, except for those two cups that inexplicably have just their catalog number but none of the other info. Lily-Tulip, you were so close to perfection! Why did you insist on messing it up?

Despite that slight flaw, this little box still delivers a lot of satisfaction. And it has the potential for even more because, as you probably know, pleated cups like these are engineered so that they lay flat if you undo the pleats. I love doing that when I encounter this type of cup in the wild — there’s a nice ka-chunk! sensation as each pleat gives way, and it’s super-pleasing to see how the whole thing lies flat — but of course I can't do it with these cups because that would ruin the sample set. Still, it's tempting!

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So that’s another type of content that you might find on Inconspicuous Consumption. Here’s another:

3. Little Stories

I plan to run a series of small, personal stories, mostly from my childhood. I realize it may seem self-indulgent to talk about myself so much, but I’ve learned over the years that I seem to retain certain memories in a way that other people find interesting and entertaining, so I’m going to roll with it. I was also inspired by Caveh Zahedi’s excellent 2021 podcast, 365 Things I Want to Tell You Before We Both Die (recommended!), which was a year-long daily recitation of small tales from his life. I can’t match his daily output (or his lengthy project name), but I hope to make Little Stories a semi-regular feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. Here’s a simple example:

When I was in second or third grade, we learned about the difference between even numbers and odd numbers. We also learned that you got an even number whenever you added two even numbers together and whenever you added two odd numbers together, while the only way to get an odd number was to add an even and an odd.

I immediately noticed something and raised my hand. When the teacher called on me, I said, “So there are TWO ways to get an even number, and two is an even number. And there’s ONE way to get an odd number, and one is an odd number. So it all fits!”

Everyone kind of looked at me, including the teacher, who made a face that roughly indicated, “Okay, moving on…”

I didn’t understand. The symmetry I’d noticed was so pleasing, so satisfying — weren’t we supposed to have noticed it? Wasn’t that the whole point, or at least one of the points, of why they’d just taught us this stuff? It was like the prize at the bottom of the cereal box. But nobody else seemed to view it that way.

So aside from learning about even and odd numbers that day, I also learned that what seemed obvious and interesting to me didn’t necessarily seem that way to everybody else. It probably wasn’t the first time I learned that lesson, and it definitely wouldn’t be the last.

So that’s a Little Story. Some of them will be longer than that, some might be a bit shorter.

Another semi-regular feature of Inconspicuous Consumption will be…

4. Favorite Thing

As you may have seen, I recently put out a call for people to participate in a recurring feature about people’s favorite possessions and the stories behind them. You can get the full scoop here.

A noteworthy detail here: The object in question doesn’t have to be the favorite thing; it can be just a favorite thing. The most important aspect is that there’s a good story attached to it.

I’ll give you a great example: When I was in Minneapolis a few days ago for a Uni Watch event, I was talking to longtime reader Jimmy Lonetti, who told me that when he was in college, he made $10,000 by winning a very unusual contest. Like, very unusual. I asked what he did with the money, and he said, “Paul, I was still in college, so my parents made me put it toward my tuition. Oh, but this was in the 1980s, and everyone was getting boomboxes, so my father let me go buy a boombox. I still play cassettes on it today.” As I told him, that would be a perfect item for Favorite Thing, because it has a great backstory and he cares about it so much that he’s held onto it for 40 years.

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That’s a pretty good survey of the variety of content you can expect to see here going forward. There will likely be other things not covered in this post, but they’ll all have the connecting throughline of the inconspicuous.

You may have some questions, so let’s shift into Q&A mode:

Will all of these different types of content — Little Stories, Favorite Thing, vintage items, etc. — appear together in a single big post, like you’ve done here with this sneak preview?

Probably not. I might put two items together in a single post, but for now I’m leaning toward making Inconspicuous Consumption more of an à la carte enterprise. We’ll see how things develop, though.

Is that graphic at the top of the page with the foot-measurer thingie going to be your new logo?

It’s just a placeholder. The typography will change, although the Brannock Device (that’s the foot-measurer thingie) will definitely be part of the finished logo.

Why will the Brannock Device be part of the logo? What does it have to do with all of this?

The Brannock Device is a universal touchstone in our culture — there’s literally nobody whose foot hasn’t been in a Brannock Device at some point. Everybody knows what it is, but almost nobody knows what’s called. So it’s simultaneously ubiquitous and anonymous — a very powerful combination, at least for me. Plus it’s a really attractive piece of industrial design. Add it all together and you have an item that’s prototypically inconspicuous. It’s been my North Star for decades now. I even have a tattoo of it!

What will Inconspicuous Consumption’s publishing schedule be?

My plan is to avoid having a set schedule or a set number of posts per month. I’d rather just write and publish as the mood strikes me, so I might do three posts in one week and no posts the next week. Some posts might be short, others lengthy. Maybe I’ll develop a steady rhythm, or maybe not. We’ll see.

The one thing I’m sure of is that there’ll be plenty of content, so people with paid subscriptions will get their money’s worth — promise! My hope is that the unpredictable schedule will make each post feel like a nice surprise.

So Inconspicuous Consumption will be paywalled?

After the relaunch, I’ll make the first three or four weeks of content available to everyone, so you can get a better sense of what I’ll be doing. After that, I’ll restore the paywall. For now, I’m expecting to keep the subscription price at its current level — $35 for one year, or $5 per month. (For what it’s worth, that’s significantly less than most Substack writers charge.)

I have a paid subscription. What will happen to it while you take your pre-rebranding break?

I will pause all of the paid subscriptions after this week and then restart them when I relaunch the Substack as Inconspicuous Consumption, so you won’t be paying for dead air. If you currently have, say, five months remaining on your sub, you’ll still have that when I resume publishing.

What if I have a paid subscription and don’t like the new content?

If you don’t like the Inconspicuous Consumption content, you can cancel your subscription so that it doesn’t renew. Here’s how to do that:

1. At the top-right corner of this page, click on your personal Substack avatar, which should produce a drop-down menu.

2. Click on “Manage subscription.”

That should bring you to a page that shows when your subscription is due to renew. It also includes a “Cancel Subscription” button. If you click on that, your subscription will continue until its current term is completed and will then run out.

My paid subscription runs through November. If I don’t like the new content and I cancel in July (or August, or whenever you come back from your break), I’ll still be paying for several months of non-uni content that I don’t care about. Can’t I get a partial refund for the unused portion?

I’m going to ask all paid subscribers to try the first month or so of non-uni content, just to give it a chance. After that, you can contact me and ask to cancel with a pro-rated refund, and I’ll arrange that for you. So if your paid subscription still has, say, three months remaining at that point, your refund would be a little less than $9; if you have two months remaining, the refund would be a little less than $6; and so on.

I have a free subscription. What will I see when you come back from your break?

Like I said, the first few weeks of new content will not be paywalled, so you’ll recieve those posts by email and be able to read them in their entirety. After I restore the paywall, you’ll still receive an emailed version of each post, but you’ll only be able to read the first paragraph or two before the paywall kicks in.

I’ve really enjoyed the “Ask Me Anything” segments on your Substack. Will you keep doing those?

I’m not sure. Between the Little Stories and some other things, I expect that my own voice will be even more prominent in Inconspicuous Consumption than it was in Uni Watch. So adding “Ask Me Anything” to the mix might be, well, too much Paul. But we’ll see — that’s something we can all discuss going forward.

Will you do any uni-related posts after this?

Nope. Sorry!

Will the archived uni-related Substack posts still be accessible?

Yes. If you have a paid subscription, you will still be able to read all of the past articles on this Substack.

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Okay, I think that’s it for now. If you have any additional questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to respond.

I want to thank everyone who’s read my content here on Substack. Your support and enthusiasm keep me going! And while my Uni Watch chapter is closing, I’m looking forward to what lies ahead. You’ll be hearing from me soon. Peace. — Paul

Paul Lukas is about to stop writing about uniforms after 25 years, but you can still get daily uniform coverage on the Uni Watch Blog, where Phil Hecken will be taking over after Memorial Day.