Sunday’s New York Times called Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture an “important” book; it’s also a darned good read, thanks in part to author Ellen Ruppel Shell’s background as a magazine writer. Her glib, breezy style guides readers through a fascinating thicket of retail history, economic statistics and the human consequences of our collective thirst for a deal.
Ruppel Shell is a woman after my own heart; a self-confessed “bargain hunter” who can’t resist a steep discount. It was her burgeoning awareness of the gulf between price and value that inspired her to embark on the three years of research and travel that have resulted in Cheap.
One of the most vivid scenes the author paints is of a Chinese migrant worker standing “knee deep in vats of hot toxic dye, seven days a week, twelve hours a day, at his job in the Overseas Fur Factory for a salary of $15 a month. Deng said many workers lost their footing or passed out from the fumes, but that did not deter him from persuading his 17-year old son to sign on.”
So what’s this got to do with real Canadians decorating? Quite a lot if you’re shopping for a chair, a sofa or a dining set, which, if it’s new, was likely built by underpaid workers in China. Ruppel Shell’s chapter about “the China price” is one of her most damning although in an interview yesterday, the author stressed that “China has good quality manufacturers, as well as bad.”
Cheap is essentially a chronicle of the dumbing down of our quality standards over the course of the last century. While reporting in China, Ruppel Shell’s translator tells her, “No one worries about things lasting a long time. Labour is so cheap that if something falls apart, we just make another one.”
It’s a theme the author comes back to again and again. In her illuminating exposé of IKEA (much of whose furniture is actually made in China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Philippines), Ruppel Shell suggests that the company’s famously cheap Billy bookcase “is not a bookcase but a subspecies of bookcase: a cheap bookcase. The same might be said for much of IKEA’s merchandise: it is not a great chair, it is a great cheap chair. It is not a great chest of drawers, it is a great cheap chest of drawers. When these objects break or buckle or otherwise disappoint, we don’t ask for sympathy. We expected it to happen.”
In Cheap, Ruppel Shell gradually pulls all her threads together to demonstrate the real costs of all those low-priced goods — environmental degradation, human rights abuses, ever lower wages, unemployment, recession. “The genie of globalism has escaped the bottle and it will never squeeze back in,” concludes the author. “But globalism means more than the system of mutual exploitation it has become. Preying on the developing world’s vulnerabilities to feed our penchant for Cheap is neither defensible nor sustainable.”
When I ask Ruppel Shell how writing the book has changed her own consumer behaviour she confesses that she still falls prey to “the siren call of the bargain” and occasionally comes home with three boxes of cereal instead of one “because they were on sale.”
“But I consider my purchases much more carefully now to determine whether a thing is what I need and what I want, I try not to buy things just because they’re cheap. I’m sitting here wearing a cheap pair of pants that I bought five years ago and haven’t been able to wear outside the house for a long time because they’re stained and they’re made of a synthetic that just cannot be cleaned. So they’ve become pajamas, essentially. I’ll never buy pants like that again, I don’t need anymore pajamas.”
July 21st, 2009 at 10:44 am
Excellent article. Seems to me, good quality ‘costs more’ but at least it’s up front and rarely thought about after the purchase. ‘Poor quality’ seems to cost forever, in both wallet and emotions. Thanks Chris.