Quantity

The thing about quantity is you can never have enough of it.

In addition to being the land of the free and home of the brave, America is the kingdom of quantity. Breakfast buffets, combo meal upgrades, the largest bookstores in the world. Old Country Buffet. Sam's Club. That "America the Beautiful" celebrates amber waves of grain and not an individual kernel of the finest, souped-up, genetically engineered grain is no accident.

Yet America's relationship with quantity is love-hate. For every "Glutton Bowl" or Beach Boys song celebrating "two girls for every boy" there are 10 managers in suits demanding their workers emphasize "quality over quantity."

Indeed, that mantra has become so imbedded in our society that a quick Google search on it yields 15,700 hits, while its cousin, "quality not quantity," picks up 23,800. Flipping the phrase around, "quantity over quality" produces but 3,920 while "quantity not quality" yields a measly 3,780.

"But it doesn't matter if 'quality over quantity' gets more hits," a devotee of quality might say of the above statistics. "What matters is the context in which the phrases are presented." (Quality mavens never end sentences with prepositions.)

Surprisingly, quantity and quality agree on this one. Nearly every Web site containing the phrase "quantity over quality" speaks of it as being something less than desirable.

"The key idea in using the Web is that you get quantity over quality," argues one site that urges researchers not to rely on the Web.

The illusion that quality is somehow preferable to quantity is causing millions of people to be duped every day. Think about it: In the world of commerce, quality always costs more money. At luxury car dealerships and frou-frou restaurants across the land, shifty entrepreneurs con hard-earned dollars out of clueless John Q. Public, trading him a fancy, minuscule little radio that "fills the room with sound" for a fistful of dollars when half that money could buy a tall stack of kick-ass speakers that fill the goddamn neighborhood with sound. Think of all the French fries you could buy with that extra money!

Could the entire capitalist system be a hoax, with consumers trading away the quantity of one thing (money) for the subjective quality of a host of widgets?

And so we have quantity the forgotten, quantity the underdog, a trait that means that — despite all middle-management's mantras — Americans can't help but bow at the temple of plentitude. Americans love an underdog, unless that underdog happens to be Vietnam or Grenada or Somali warlords or Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein or poor people.

You see, when the chips are down, the underdog mentality leads Americans to ditch quality, despite the lip service they pay to it. VHS beat out Betamax and PAL and laser discs. Cassette tapes spelled the beginning of the end for LPs, which are now relegated to being niche products for heads and acousto-geeks. Mickey D's wipes its plate with the place down the street.

The average American adult is highly conflicted over the quality/quantity duality, which is why, for example, most adults would rather sneak quickly through the drive-through window of a fast-food restaurant than actually go in and sit down where they might be seen. For an example of how this works in practice, one need look no further than a typical American family out shopping at that temple to quantity, Costco.

"It really is cheaper if you buy in bulk, honey," the average American adult will say, never owning up to thinking, deep down, that "Sixty-four gallons of ketchup sure will look cool in the fridge, and the container can double as a sofa when company comes over. Jesus. I could bathe in that shit if I wanted to."

Children, however, are more honest. Give a kid a choice between the 40-pound bag of Hershey's Kisses and a four-pack of Lindt bars and the kid is gonna pick the Kisses. Every. Damn. Time. Clearly, my younger sister was on to something when she was 5 and I was 9 and she traded little dimes for big nickels, straight up. It was only when she got older that she allowed adults to corrupt her.

Children know what they like, and they aren't afraid to ask. Any kid'll tell you that more make merrier, that two heads are better than one, that safety lies in numbers. Kids are the most honest, truthful folks around, and there's a reason that they all know supercalifragilisticexpialidocious yet scratch their heads upon hearing eft.

So what does this say about the high-falutin' devotees of quality?

In short, quantity's detractors are hypocrites who don't have a true handle on their emotions. They deride boy bands but buy albums by Ace of Base and tell their friends that the ideal restaurant is a decent Chinese buffet. So they take you to bad Chinese buffet after bad Chinese buffet, in hopes of finding one that's merely decent, so they can bloat their stomachs on obscene amounts of General Tso's Chicken.

And then there's lesbians. Your friend who loves quantity isn't satisfied with looking at one beautiful woman. Instead, he waxes poetic about lesbian sex, saying things like, "The reason men get excited about lesbian sex is because every man's dream is to have his entire field of vision filled with writhing, naked women. And lesbian sex is a step in that direction." And yes it does matter that said friend was drunk at the time. With drunkenness comes honesty, and at least one lover of quality out there is a closet quantity freak who never can win enough money in poker and just get out of the game and who scarfs McDonald's when he's not writing reviews of fancy restaurants and reading giant, packed-to-the-gills biographies of former presidents.

Clearly such a person is in need of some therapy, and possibly a little rest.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)