commissioner.org
| Source | Jim Devine |
| Date | 09/07/30/14:01 |
| The New York Times
Letter from America Why 'Cheap' May Really Be Expensive By RICHARD BERNSTEIN NEW YORK — The other day, Ellen Ruppel Shell was listening on the radio to the chief executive of a Boston advertising company talk about how the economic downturn had forced him to impose pay cuts throughout the company he ran, including on himself. “He talked about how he and his wife had looked over the family budget and figured they could manage a 10 percent pay cut, by rethinking some of their purchases and making a few adjustments, like delaying a vacation,” Ms. Ruppel Shell said. “This is in marked contrast with what the C.E.O. of an advertising company would have said a few years ago.” Ms. Ruppel Shell was agreeing with a comment that I’d made, which is that it’s become acceptable, even fashionable, in the wake of the economic crisis, to go for a bit of conspicuous economizing, rather than conspicuous consumption. “I think that people are now a little embarrassed to lead the high life, at least publicly,” Ms. Ruppel Shell said. Ms. Ruppel Shell, a correspondent for The Atlantic and an occasional contributor to The New York Times, has written a book about what she calls “America’s dangerous liaison with Cheap,” and her timing, during the worst financial crisis in living memory, couldn’t be better. But this is not a book that will tell you how to get by or to save money. Her book, “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture,” carries what might seem at first glance to be a counterintuitive message: Far from making economic sense, the American obsession with cheap goods — the craze for bargains, discounts, factory outlets and Wal-Mart — is actually bad both for the planet and the individual shopper. “Cheap fuel, cheap loans, cheap consumer goods do not pave the road to salvation,” Ms. Ruppel Shell writes in her opening chapter. “The economics of Cheap cramps innovation, contributes to the decline of once flourishing industries, and threatens our proud heritage of craftsmanship.” It has, in Ms. Ruppel Shell’s view, spiritual and moral consequences as well: “The ennoblement of Cheap marks a radical departure in American culture and a titanic shift in our national priorities,” she writes. Cheap used to be associated with shoddiness and stinginess, an absence of style and craftsmanship. Now buying cheap is fashionable and even gives a sense of power. Factory outlets, she says, are America’s No.1 tourist destination. We buy without needing to because some things seem cheap. It’s a way, Ms. Ruppel Shell writes, “to wrestle control from the baffling mystery that is retail.” Moreover, Ms. Ruppel Shell argues, there’s a pervasive social effect of Cheap, though one that’s generally invisible to the consumer, whose interest is making ends meet. The money saved has to come from somewhere or somebody: from cheap labor, materials procured without regard for the environment, or just the lower quality of the product itself. Nothing, in this sense, is really cheap. Somebody is paying somehow. Needless to say, not everybody agrees with this. Indeed, Ms. Ruppel Shell’s ideas run directly contrary to the powerful, even dominant opposing idea, which is that globalization, economies of scale, and factories in China make many goods affordable for people who wouldn’t be able to afford them otherwise. Anyway, you can’t stop the engine of economic change, which now goes by the name globalization, any more than you could have stopped the automobile from replacing the horse and buggy a hundred years ago. Still, clearly, if the frequency of Ms. Ruppel Shell’s appearances on talk radio and elsewhere are any indication, she has struck a nerve. “I thought I would get a lot of anger,” she said. “I feared that the book might get misrepresented as an elitist argument that people should buy only high-end, expensive stuff, but that’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m arguing that the discount culture has created a false dichotomy between quality and price that has made quality goods unnecessarily expensive.” There are several arguments here: for one, the discount marketers have developed an arsenal of techniques to make you buy what you think is cheap but might not actually be cheap. People don’t know the prices of most things, so they assume they’re getting bargains in stores like Wal-Mart, but sometimes they’re not. Then there are the various psychological marketing ploys, the creation, for example, of what Ms. Ruppel Shell calls “cheap chic,” the concept that made the furniture retailer Ikea, about which Ms. Ruppel Shell is very critical, a global brand, with stores in 52 countries. Wal-Mart “can’t escape its downscale connotations,” she writes, but through clever image-making, Ikea succeeded in making itself appear to be the place where “value and good values coexist.” In fact, according to Ms. Ruppel Shell, who visited Ikea’s headquarters In Sweden, Ikea relies on cheap labor and illegal forestry practices in Eastern Europe and Russia to keep its prices down, and keeping prices down is everything. Objections can be raised to this as well. Probably, people in 52 countries haven’t been buying Ikea only because of its “sly, ironic commercials, its conspicuously progressive outlook,” but because they’ve found it to be a reasonable combination of style and price. Ms. Ruppel Shell complains about Billy bookcases, one of Ikea’s signature products, on the ground that you have to keep your heavy books on the ends of the shelves to keep them from sagging, but I’ve had Billy bookcases for years, and they were affordable and mine haven’t sagged. (On the other hand, lots of Ikea stuff is, let’s face it, cheap and flimsy.) Ms. Ruppel Shell has also been criticized in some reviews for having unconvincing solutions to the problem she so effectively describes. Her reply: “I don’t offer a policy solution because I don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t see price controls and/or tariffs as part of our future, nor do I think they should be. I believe in free trade — but to me, free trade does not necessarily have to entail stalking the globe for cheap resources and cheap labor made possible by the absence or near-absence of the rule of law. I believe in the power of knowledge to change behavior.” E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho