Michael Weiss the zip code wizard - 14 June 1991

There once lived in New York City, two brothers whose name has passed into the folk memory but into no book that I know of as a pseudonym for truly monstrous untidiness. Their name was Collyer. I believe, as I say there's no way of looking them up, I believe that they did not become famous until they died when the landlord or the police, they appeared to have no friends hacked their way into the brothers' apartment and found them there up to their collarbones in books, dishes, newspapers, letters, rags, clothes. An apartment turned into a garbage dump by two men who were quite comfortably off, but at some point had decided to become recluses. They went, never went out, apparently food was ordered and sent in and so were books and newspapers but never was ever thrown out for years and years.

Well, my own filing system used to be rudely compared by those nearest and dearest to me to that of the Collyer brothers, but since the brothers departed this life, it must be 40 maybe more years ago, there are now only one or two dear ones left to insult me by recalling their name and fame. I can claim only one benefit of this appalling system or non-system of clutter. From time to time I plunge into this closet, this built-in cupboard, and while diving through dust-choked layers of rubbish, brown newspapers, theatre ticket stubs, stacks of 10-inch shellac records, dusters, single shoes and so on. From time to time, I come on little jewels, mostly notes or cuttings about some odd or fascinating slice of life in this country that I had squirrelled away as something I must talk about sometime soon.

We're now looking the other day for I forget what, I disturbed a dusty pile and a full page newspaper clipping fluttered to my feet, it's all about an engaging young man with a compact head of black hair, a trimmed beard, who has developed a fascinating one-man occupation, he has compiled his own huge data or data bank about life in these United States and his findings cut through and dispense with many very earnest books of sociology and whole loads of PhD theses.

The man's name is Michael Weiss; he's 36 he lives in Washington DC. He describes himself as a freelance journalist and all he does, he says, is "I look into my crystal ball and tell people what their lifestyles are like. People love this stuff, they think I'm some kind of swami." His crystal ball is a computer into which he has fed all 23,000 of the American zip codes, the figures after your address that signify your postal district. The American system compared with the British and the Canadian systems, 6ND 5LX and 3YT 7QR, the American system is child's play, most places simply add digits of 1 to 99 to a base number like 100, 200, 300. Here in Manhattan, the base is 100, one-zero-zero. And I know that a friend with a one-zero-zero-one-nine lives on the West Side in the in the 50s that on-zero-zero-two-one, a very posh indicator, signifies somebody wealthy enough to live on the East Side in the 70s.

My zip is one-zero-zero-two-eight, which it at once tells the socially conscious inquirer that I'm way up on the East Side on the fringe of Puerto Rico and not very far from Harlem. All right, so I and any other long-time residents of Manhattan can tell from the zip code number where people live whether they are likely to be rich, not so rich, getting by. That's about as far as we go.

But this Michael Weiss is an outrageous seer, a wizard you call him or you write to him tell him your zip code, anyone of the 36,000 from the Florida Keys to the Pacific north-west, and he will tell you what you eat for breakfast, the make of your car, what you watch on television, your approximate income. Weiss didn't invent this detective tool. At some point he ran into the work of a man named Robbin, Jonathan Robbin, who so long ago as 1974 founded a consulting firm, which advised manufacturers where to advertise their product and where to sell it. "Where" sounds very vague, this man Robbin had made the original study of the zip codes and the sort of people who inhabit the districts that they signify, so he would for instance tell which neighbourhood of a city you should sell paperbacks in, where you might circulate one sort of clothes catalogue but not another, where you ought to start a Mexican restaurant, where not to try and market imported beer.

Michael Weiss was hypnotised by this zip code theory and eventually he conceived the grand design of collecting in his computer all American zip codes and connecting them with habits, tastes, ways of life. He spent two years travelling round the United States to check his, check his data in 75 communities. The social conclusion that has come out of all this pretty much explodes most theories of the American melting pot. "It's my contention," he says "that the melting-pot theory is a myth. America is really a patchwork quilt society of 40 different lifestyles without much overlap." He calls these 40 communities "lifestyle clusters".

I don't think there's any doubt at all the people who inhabit these 36,000 communities or neighbourhoods are quite convinced, if you ask them, that they have a way of life that's all their own or that is a variation on a style that belongs to their city or their state. Alas for state pride, local patriotism and the delusions that are shared by sociologists, geographers and tourists. Michael Weiss says, "we're no longer a country of 50 states but of 40 lifestyle clusters".

You can go to sleep in Palo Alto, California, and wake up in Princeton, New Jersey, and nothing has changed except the trees – the lifestyles are the same. Perrier is fizzing in the fridge and people are playing tennis at three times the national average, but he says "if you went to sleep in Palo Alto and woke up a mile or two away in East Palo Alto, things have changed indeed". So distance, it seems, has little to do with your characteristic way of life, the determining factors appear to be rather income, size of family, ethnic background, age. The zip code marketing practice anyway is based on the theory that people tend to live among people who have the same mixture of these elements.

I must say it's a theory which in some big cities could stand some careful scrutiny. In my apartment building on my side where there are two apartments to each of 14 floors. There are five or six couples I know that I'd lay bets don't read the same books, watch the same television programmes, drink the same drinks. And from the evidence of the garbage bags they put outside during a recent employees strike, they also vary remarkably in such tastes as the cereals and the breads they buy. I think I shall have to propose to Mr Weiss next useful project, a data bank of the variations of lifestyle existing under the same zip code.

However, I've given you only a minimum of Mr Weiss indicators of a lifestyle; he has himself broken down any given neighbourhood into many categories numerous enough to produce as you see as many as 40 varying lifestyles. Some of these labels he distinguishes and mixes together are money and brains, Bohemian mix, young influentials, emergent minorities, single city blues, public assistance, urban gold coast, new melting pot, black enterprise. And an impressive proof of the accuracy of his method, his observation I guess would be better is the fact that he recently published a breakdown of eight compact but widely separated districts, neighbourhoods in San Francisco. And though Mr Weiss never visited the bay area, the natives found his social descriptions spookily accurate. His report cards on all eight record the percentages of the different elements that make up each compound, thus for instance, in the district known as North Beach he puts down money and brains 7.1, young influentials 13.9, Bohemian mix 21.9, new beginnings .77, new melting pot 29.3, heavy industry 4.24, public assistance 15.25, single city blues people living alone 3.44. Across the bay at Berkeley, which is of course the home of a large branch of the University of California, he finds 66.6% single city blues.

Mr Weiss is not complacent about his method; he thinks we could face a frightening prospect. Right now he says, "marketeers are trying to match your lifestyle, your cluster with whatever their trying to sell you, pretty soon Big Brother will know what's going on in your household, its only a matter of time before businesses get into the black box of what's inside a consumers head."

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