A Year Of Controversial Products

December 24, 2013

Posted by Vauhini Vara

We have arrived at that time of year when publications, including this one, come up with lists of the best things of the past twelve months: books, video games, music, and so on. Reading them can make you feel as if the consumer experience must have been nothing short of transcendent in the past year: one long game of Super Mario 3D World, played to a soundtrack of Kanye and capped off with a chapter of Rachel Kushner. In 2013, this was not, of course, the case. The year featured no shortage of controversies in the consumer world. Here are six of the most distinctly controversial products of the year, in alphabetical order:

Citi Bike: New York’s bike-sharing service got off to a bad start: a year of delays before it opened, and then an early bike theft. “Just Buy a Bike!” the New York Observer hectored readers, via an editorial, noting that bikes can be cheap. (True, maybe, for the wealthy New Yorkers who also “have enough room to store one in your townhouse,” Gawker noted.) In the end, though, Citi Bike turned out to be a success, with more than four million rides taken as of this fall. Larry Buchanan, Michael Guerriero, and Nick Traverse mapped some of them in July.

Google Glass: In January, Ryan Lawler wrote on TechCrunch about a wave of sightings of people wearing Google Glass, the tiny, head-mounted computers developed by Google. “Maybe you’ve seen these people around San Francisco or Mountain View, inevitably staring off into space while swiping the sides of their glasses during conversation, ignoring those around them while surfing the web or scrolling through images they’ve captured with the device,” he wrote. “I like to call them ‘Glassholes.’” (Gary Shteyngart repeated the term in his dystopian-sounding account of his travels, and travails, as a so-called Google Glass Explorer. The photographer Emiliano Granado documented some of Shteyngart’s exploits.) In November, a Seattle restaurant said that it had kicked out a “rude customer” for wearing Google Glass, and reiterated its anti-Glass policy, which includes this: “And if we ask you to leave, for God’s sake, don’t start yelling about your ‘rights.’ Just shut up and get out before you make things worse.”

Jay Z’s collection at Barneys: This fall, two black students from Brooklyn said that after they made purchases at the upscale retailer Barneys, cops stopped them and suggested that they might have stolen the items. This came weeks after Barneys had announced a special collection named partly after Jay Z, the hip-hop artist, who has been vocal about race issues in the past; a portion of sales would go to his education non-profit. Jay Z went ahead with the partnership, and wrote on his blog, “Making a decision prematurely to pull out of this project, wouldn’t hurt Barneys or Shawn Carter, but all the people that stand a chance at higher education.” Some fans, unimpressed, called for a boycott of Barneys, and the Jay Z collection with it. One of them is selling T-shirts that read “Barneys New Slaves” and circulating an online petition urging Jay Z to cancel the partnership.

Paula Deen’s cookbook: Deen, the celebrity chef, admitted this summer to having used the N-word, among other unpleasant revelations. Afterward, pre-sales of her planned cookbook, “Paula Deen’s New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up,” made it a top seller on Amazon.comâ€"that is, until Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, announced that it was cancelling the book’s October publication. Walmart, Target, J.C. Penney, and others also cut their ties with Deen. “I’m gonna be really, really happy to see 2013 gone,” she recently told a crowd in Savannah, Georgia. “There may be something in that number 13.”

Pot: Colorado and Washington have been hard at work setting up marketplaces for marijuana, after both states legalized the sale of the drug. “What the state is doing, in actuality, is issuing licenses to commit a felony,” Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at U.C.L.A. and a drug-policy analyst, told Patrick Radden Keefe for “Buzzkill,” a piece that ran in this magazine in November. While the laws had strong support in both states, their implementation has not been without its controversies. “Earlier this year,” Keefe writes, “the liquor-control board unveiled a logo for Washington State marijuana, with a cannabis leaf superimposed on a map of the state. After an outcry that the state was ‘promoting’ pot, the design was abandoned.”

Tesla Model S: The Tesla Model S sedan had earned almost universally positive reviews when, in February, a Times reviewer described a test drive that was plagued by battery problems. Elon Musk, Tesla’s C.E.O., wrote in a blog post that the reviewer’s take was inaccurate. After some more back-and-forth, including a response from the Times public editor, the episode blew over. Then a Model S caught fire, in October, in Washingtonâ€"followed by another fire in Mexico and a third in Tennessee. Now, federal safety investigators are scrutinizing the car. “Why does a Tesla fire w no injury get more media headlines than 100,000 gas car fires that kill 100s of people per year?” Musk tweeted in November.

Photograph by Emiliano Granado.