Relatively new book: "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture" by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Lenona
Just so you know, it's NOT about how, as some like to claim, living
simply is wrong because it's "bad for the economy." Just that we need
to consider WHY something is cheap before we buy it.
From Publishers Weekly
Atlantic correspondent Shell (The Hungry Gene) tackles more than just
discount culture in this wide-ranging book that argues that the
American drive toward bargain-hunting and low-price goods has a hidden
cost in lower wages for workers and reduced quality of goods for
consumers. After a dry examination of the history of the American
retail industry, the author examines the current industrial and
political forces shaping how and what we buy. In the book's most
involving passages, Shell deftly analyzes the psychology of pricing
and demonstrates how retailers manipulate subconscious bargain
triggers that affect even the most knowing consumers. The author urges
shoppers to consider spending more and buying locally, but
acknowledges the inevitability of globalization and the continuation
of trends toward efficient, cost-effective production. The optimistic
call to action that concludes the book feels hollow, given the
evidence that precedes it. If Shell illuminates with sharp
intelligence and a colloquial style the downside of buying Chinese
garlic or farm-raised shrimp, nothing demonstrates how consumers, on a
mass scale, could seek out an alternative or why they would choose to
do so. (July)
Review
"That cycle of consumption seems harmless enough, particularly since
we live in a country where there are plenty of cheap goods to go
around. But in her lively and terrifying book "Cheap: The High Cost of
Discount Culture," Ellen Ruppel Shell pulls back the shimmery,
seductive curtain of low-priced goods to reveal their insidious hidden
costs. Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have
come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've
been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated
migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam. The made-in-China
toy train you bought your kid a few Christmases ago may have been
sprayed with lead paint -- and the spraying itself may have been done
by a child laborer, without the benefit of a protective mask.
"Cheap" is hardly a finger-waggling book. This isn't a screed designed
to make us feel guilty for unknowingly benefiting from the hardships
of workers in other parts of the world. And Shell -- who writes
regularly for the Atlantic -- isn't talking about the shallowness of
consumerism here; she makes it clear that she, like most of us, enjoys
the hunt for a good deal. "Cheap" really is about us, meaning not just
Americans, but citizens of the world, and about what we stand to lose
in a global economic environment that threatens the very nature of
meaningful work, work we can take pride in and build a career on -- or
even at which we can just make a living.
-Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com
Lenona.