Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture Ellen Ruppel Shell,
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN: 159420215X
DDC: 381.1490973
Edition: Hardcover; 2009-07-02
Summary:
An Atlantic correspondent uncovers the true cost—in economic,
political, and psychic terms—of our penchant for making and buying
things as cheaply as possibleFrom 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.
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