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Loading... Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture (original 2009; edition 2009)by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Work InformationCheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell (2009)
  
None No current Talk conversations about this book.   Den85 | Jan 3, 2024 |   ) jeneralinterest | Dec 11, 2021 |  ) Chica3000 | Dec 11, 2020 | It wasn't as hard to read as I'd expected. Certainly it is written well and the clear style alone makes the pages fly by. It is thoroughly researched but the references are at the end. As I do with many other nonfiction works, I will be keeping this one in my permanent collection for the references especially, but also for the many tidbits I gleaned while reading. I did not know, for example, that most of today's shrimp comes from Thailand, where it is farm-raised. Farm-raising wipes out the mangrove forests and pollutes the land and water so that it cannot be used to grow rice again. Shrimp has edged out the rice that used to be the main export of Thailand and rice has become more expensive for those who can least afford it. The shrimp is fed a nutrient mix, antibiotics, and chemicals. All this so that Red Lobster can offer all-you-can-eat shrimp. I did not know that Ikea lives under the umbrella of a Dutch nonprofit! It isn't a Swedish company at all, even though its buildings are there. The nonprofit ruse allows it to skip paying taxes, of course. Ikea prides itself on insisting on sustainable lumber from its suppliers yet its inspectors do not begin to be able to inspect all of the locations - because it would be too expensive to hire more inspectors. Further, the furniture is so cheaply made that it can hardly be used for anything else and when parts break there is little recourse than to recycle. Buying new is not the way to sustainability. Ikea has been called the producer (although it does not produce most of its products itself; instead it encourages suppliers to undercut the prices of others...) of the least sustainable furniture in the world. The lack of worker protections worldwide, Shell notes, threatens workers at home here in the U.S. What happens in China doesn't, in fact, stay in China. It emigrates here. Thus workers are let go when their wages get too high, and new people with no skills come in the door. Thus went Circuit City and see how much good it did them? All across the board, the insistence on price as the most important attribute means we are cheating ourselves of variety, quality, and craftsmanship that was available not much more than 50 years ago. We are getting inferior goods, from our food to our furniture to our clothing. Only if we start to see our way toward supporting a fair price for a good product will we be able to make our way back. ( ) slojudy | Sep 8, 2020 | ) Humberto.Ferre | Sep 28, 2016 |
 A first-rate job of reporting and analysis. A harrowing document of the pursuit of profit at the expense of our basic humanity.
Business.
Nonfiction.
HTML: From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt---and almost everywhere in between---America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time---the engine of globalization, outsourcing, planned obsolescence, and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world. Low price is so alluring that we may have forgotten how thoroughly we once distrusted it. Ellen Ruppel Shell traces the birth of the bargain as we know it from the Industrial Revolution to the assembly line and beyond, homing in on a number of colorful characters, such as Gene Verkauf (his name is Yiddish for "to sell"), founder of E. J. Korvette, the discount chain that helped wean customers off traditional notions of value. The rise of the chain store in post-Depression America led to the extolling of convenience over quality, and big-box retailers completed the reeducation of the American consumer by making them prize low price in the way they once prized durability and craftsmanship. The effects of this insidious perceptual shift are vast: a blighted landscape, escalating debt (both personal and national), stagnating incomes, fraying communities, and a host of other socioeconomic ills. That's a long list of charges, and it runs counter to orthodox economics, which argues that low price powers productivity by stimulating a brisk free market. But Shell marshals evidence from a wide range of fields---history, sociology, marketing, psychology, even economics itself---to upend the conventional wisdom. Cheap also unveils the fascinating and unsettling illogic that underpins our bargain-hunting reflex and explains how our deep-rooted need for bargains colors every aspect of our psyches and social lives. In this myth-shattering, closely reasoned, and exhaustively reported investigation, Shell exposes the astronomically high cost of cheap. .No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)381.1490973Social sciences Commerce, communications & transportation Commerce (Trade) Marketing channelsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.55)
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