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Writer says 'Cheap' ends up costing big
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Published: July 5, 2009
"Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," by Ellen Ruppel Shell (Penguin Press, $26)
Ellen Ruppel Shell, an Atlantic magazine contributor and Boston University faculty member, explains in "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture" that the balance of power that once existed between buyer and seller has been lost - to the advantage of the seller.
She writes, "In the Age of Cheap we are all tourists" in a modern world bazaar, "blindly reliant on the seller to wring out the best price."
The author concedes the impulse toward lower prices is basically good; department-store pioneer John Wanamaker showed that lower prices could improve the lives of ordinary people.
But it was a more widely acclaimed retail pioneer, Frank W. Woolworth, who first understood what today's discounters know in their bones: Price trumps quality. The corollary to that, in Woolworth's blunt words, is, "We must have cheap labor or we cannot have cheap goods."
At the end of the 19th century, critics of cheap raised the alarm, but their voices were drowned out by the new century's clamor for ever-lower prices in the emerging consumer culture.
A series of seismic changes came about, though they did not necessarily register on any meters at the time. One of the biggest was the shift in focus from the object to the deal. Retailers, always preferring to sell you what they have rather than what you want, were able to convince buyers that if the deal was good, the object under consideration was less critical to the transaction.
Another big change was the gradual disassociation of the consumer from the worker/citizen, as if they were not one and the same. A kind of cognitive dissonance lets us accept what we know is absurd: that prices can continually be cut without also necessitating cuts in quality, safety, variety, environmental responsibility, human dignity - or our own wages.
Not surprisingly, Shell frequently uses Wal-Mart as an example. After a Wal-Mart store opens in an area, University of California research shows, wages and benefits fall in other industries throughout the area. She is equally critical of Ikea, which "succeeds the way all discounters do: by passing much of its costs on to us."
Economic arguments aside, "Cheap" is interesting simply as social and commercial history. You will be amazed at the ingenious ways corporations have come up with to bamboozle and deceive you - or to let you deceive yourself.
Some observers may take Shell's book as an elitist rant, when it is not. She does not really have a solution to the problem, other than a not-very-realistic call to consumer action, but that there is a serious socioeconomic problem involving declining standards of living, beleaguered communities, rising debt and poisoned environment she leaves no doubt.
Roger K. Miller is a novelist ("Invisible Hero") and freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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