Cafe Hayek: It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken

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December 25, 2005

It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken

Don Boudreaux

Soon after the Berlin wall crashed down on November 9, 1989, Pepsi Cola ran a television ad celebrating the wall's fall -- an ad, I believe, showing celebrants at the wall drinking Pepsi. I recall that some American pundits were horrified, asking -- rhetorically, in their minds -- if eastern Europeans wanted freedom merely to drink Pepsi. (I can find no link to this ad, but this interview mentions it.)

My reaction to this question was and remains "Well, yes, in large part. People want freedom not just to do great and momentous things. Mostly, they want freedom to pursue their everyday pleasures and dreams and interests as they wish without interference from others. Access to more and better soft-drinks, in itself, is a small thing -- but it's certainly part of the reason why people want to be free. And celebrating these quotidian freedoms, even in a Pepsi commercial, is appropriate."

For some reason I recalled that Pepsi-commericial brouhaha today when I read in today's New York Times Magazine this interesting recollection of Frank Perdue, the Marylander who became wealthy growing, slaughtering, and selling chickens.

Too many people -- such as those who were offended by Pepsi-Cola, Inc., associating freedom with joyously drinking soft-drinks -- disdain everyday freedoms as well as everyday commercial and industrial activities made possible by these freedoms and that, in turn, make these freedoms more valuable to each of us.

I hope I'm wrong (I really do), but I fear that too many people who read the following about Frank Perdue will regard such efforts as contemptible, low, mean, almost comical, unworthy of being ranked as great. In fact, such efforts are precisely the sort that makes our prosperity so vast and deep.

But what was its [a Perdue chicken's] unique selling proposition? To hear Perdue himself tell it, his chickens were just plain better than anybody else's. His son, Jim, says that when his father decided in the late 1960's to cut out the middleman and sell his chickens directly to grocery stores, he spent six months on the road, talking to butchers about what qualities they liked to see in their chickens. "He identified 25 items on a chicken that they cared about," Jim Perdue said. They wanted yellow chickens, so Frank Perdue fed his poultry grain that gave the meat a golden hue. They didn't like little hairs left over on the wings after plucking, so Perdue had his engineers develop a torch that would singe the hairs off. They wanted more white meat, so he mated a meaty-breasted Cornish male with a White Plymouth Rock female to create the Perdue pedigree. They didn't want bruised meat, so Perdue set strict protocols for handling live chickens. He was obsessive about knowing everything there was to know about chickens - and about maintaining what heviewed as the superior quality of Perdue Farms' birds.

Looking at a reel of old Perdue ads, this obsession is striking.

In the earliest commercial, he talks about how well his chickens are fed - including "pure well water to drink." In another, he complains that his competitors freeze their meat. To drive the point home, he hammers a nail into a piece of wood with a frozen chicken. He talks about how he had to develop his own breed because no other chicken in the world was good enough for Perdue Farms. And he constantly needles the federal government, claiming he inspects chickens better than it does.

Ain't it great that someone -- someone who is a stranger to almost all of America's chicken eaters -- spent his valuable time traveling around asking butchers what features make a good chicken? Ain't it great that Frank Perdue cared about the water his chickens drank? Ain't it great that he bred a new breed of chicken? Sure, he did all this to make money for himself. But so what? His means of making money inspired him to care deeply about what the typical chicken eater likes and dislikes about chicken.

Why is it that so many people admire the likes of FDR and LBJ who uttered fine phrases but whose ideas of helping people never went beyond stealing from some, showering part of the booty on others, and bureaucratically regulating everyone?

Frank Perdue alone has contributed more to our quality of life than has any politician you care to name.

This claim of mine will strike many as over the top. But I mean it literally. Perdue persuaded people to buy his chickens. Politicians force people to do their bidding. Those in the force business are inherently less likely to care deeply about people -- about real, flesh-and-blood people in all of our diversity -- than are those, like Frank Perdue, whose success depends critically upon persuading millions of people to buy, and keep buying, their products.

Update: Muck and Mystery gently plucks my feathers by arguing that (1) there's nothing really special about Frank Perdue, for the production and distribution practices that Perdue followed are standard practice in the poultry industry, so (2) Perdue's real genius lay in advertising to promote himself and his firm, and (3) that insofar as Perdue and other poultry producers do contribute to our well-being, it's the system that encourages such wealth-creating efforts.

I'm happy, although not suprised, to learn that Perdue's best-practices are industry standard. My point was not so much to praise Frank Perdue personally (although I do regard him as praiseworthy). My point was to celebrate the fact that we have an economic system that prompts Perdue, and Tyson's, and you-name-the-entrepreneur each to spend enormous amounts of creativity and effort doing things that we consumers never become consciously aware of -- but things that we nevertheless value and benefit from. So, indeed, the system is of paramount importance -- but this fact doesn't mean that we can't admire the many instances of creative human productive efforts that it unleashes.

On the merits of advertising, I'll just recommend one of my favorite books on the topic.

Posted by Don Boudreaux in Standard of Living | Permalink

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Comments

Great post, there is no greater counterintuitive proposition than the fact that the market enhances the public good while government tears it to pieces pitting everyone against each other through the context of interest group politics.

Posted by: John Pertz | Dec 25, 2005 6:27:05 PM

I live in Romania and most of your thoughts are right-on. Unfortunatelly, many people have the "eat your cake and still have it" attitude, i.e. they want everything the western mode of production and law has to offer but would still pay lip-service to the same "ideals" of Socialism, much like the people who made that rhetorically comment.

50 years of communism didn't turn the population of central and eastern europe into die hard capitalists... not a bit. This very much illustrated the points Hayek made about reason, world-views and morality.

Many people, here and I suppose everywhere else, want the fruits of private property but without private property, they want the fruits of free market but without free markets, they want freedom in their bedroom but not in the bedroom of people next door. They are unwilling to pay the price, if they must see it as a price.

... and I'm all out of idea!!!

Posted by: Gabriel Mihalache | Dec 25, 2005 6:39:11 PM

Great stuff Gabriel. As it's been said by Walter Williams and others, you don;t get rich doing what you want, you get rich my giving others what they want and making them happy. And we're all better off for it.

Posted by: Chris Meisenzahl | Dec 26, 2005 2:58:19 AM

The paragraph of the Pepsi commercial reminded me of an article by Charles Paul Freund in Reason magazine called In Praise of Vulgarity, which makes the point that the commercial culture despised by "social critics" is actually beneficial and liberating.

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