The knot that tied all his observations together was booze. “The correlation between education and alcohol consumption is about as perfect as one can find in marketing,” he tells me. And so hard liquor, the ultimate high-price-per-cubic-inch product, becomes a cornerstone for his store.* From booze and travel, it was just a small leap to tiki. All around Joe, men and women were meeting for drinks, pink-and-white leis slung around their necks like frothy Elizabethan collars, their plastic coconuts of flaming rum threading a weird cultural needle between escape and irony, refuge and sincerity.
