Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

by Ellen Ruppel Shell

Overview

A myth-shattering investigation of the true cost of America's passion for finding a better bargain

From the shuttered factories of the Rust Belt to the 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 with bargains is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time, having fueled an excess of consumerism that blights our land-scapes, escalates personal debt, lowers our standard of living, and even skews of our concept of time.

Spotlighting the peculiar forces that drove Americans away from quality, durability, and craftsmanship and towards quantity, quantity, and more quantity, Ellen Ruppel Shell traces the rise of the bargain through our current big-box profusion to expose the astronomically high cost of cheap.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143117636
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/29/2010
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ellen Ruppel Shell is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Time, Discover, Seed, and dozens of other national publications. She is the author, most recently, of The Hungry Gene, which was published in six languages, and is Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism at Boston University.

Editorial Reviews

According to Atlantic correspondent Ellen Ruppel Shell, our culture's obsession with convenience and the lowest possible price has led to shoddy goods, economic instability, planned obsolescence, and environmental mayhem. Cheap particularizes the domino cascade of economic, political, and psychological ramifications of our low-cost fixation. A cutting-edge view of cut-rate practices.

Ruppel Shell doesn't conclude with any grand ideas for reshaping the world's economy…But she doesn't need to formulate grand ideas here. She's delivered something much more valuable: a first-rate job of reporting and analysis. Pay full price for this book, if you can stand to. It's worth it.
—The New York Times

Laura Shapiro

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)

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Publishers Weekly

Just in time for the current economic recession, Shell (The Hungry Gene: The Insider Story of the Obesity Industry) investigates America's fixation with discount retail prices. Historically, consumers have believed that "buying cheap" was "buying smart," but Shell assembles convincing evidence that our appetite for cheap products has led to an explosion of "shoddy clothes, unreliable electronics, wobbly furniture and questionable food." She points out that the rise of the Industrial Revolution in this country saw the simultaneous rise of mass production, which fostered the aims of early retail pioneers such as John Wanamaker and F.W. Woolworth. Now, with its cheap labor force producing cheap goods for the American market, China is largely responsible for much of the discount boom prevalent today. Ironically, Americans have significantly curtailed their buying, thus impacting retailers and in turn causing enormous problems for the Chinese economy. Shell rightly concludes that "technology, globalization and deregulation have made competition a death march," forcing companies to eliminate jobs, lower quality standards, and depress wages, all with the purpose of creating cheaper goods, resulting in a kind of unending vicious cycle. VERDICT This highly intelligent and disturbing book provides invaluable insight into our consumer culture and should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to figure out our current financial mess. As Shell proves, the hunt for cheap products has hurt us all. Highly recommended for smart readers. —Richard Drezen, formerly with the Washington Post/New York City Bureau

—Richard Drezen

Library Journal

Or, supersaturate me with enough junk to clog the arteries of the good life. Those who remember the early 1970s, writes Atlantic contributor Shell (Fat Wars: The Inside Story of the Obesity Industry, 2004, etc.), may be surprised to learn that, even for all the decline in relative wages and buying power, most of the necessities of life are cheaper today. We pay about a third less for clothing, about a fifth less for food and a quarter less for cars. This lowering of cost, Shell warns, comes at a hidden price, and there lies the heart of her argument, which is as much aesthetic as financial. One of the costs of cheap goods is obvious: Manufacturers chase cheap labor across the planet in order to produce them, which in turn lowers the labor value of American workers. Another of the costs is less obvious: Inexpensive goods devalue the notion of craft. "The ennoblement of Cheap," writes Shell, "marks a particularly radical departure in American culture and a titanic shift in our national priorities." The author traces that departure across a trajectory of opinion in which, a century ago, the purchase of mass-produced, inexpensive goods was considered a lapse of taste. This view was largely undone by pioneering merchants such as John Wanamaker (of Philadelphia department-store fame) and Eugene Ferkauf (of Korvette's), as well as the post-World War II emergence of a particularly acquisitive consumer culture that, as John Kenneth Galbraith grumbled, nursed a battery of "wants that previously did not exist." Shell's pronouncements on economics get a bit fuzzy, but her Silent Spring-like moralizing about the effects of superabundant, indifferently made goods will find an eager audienceamong acolytes of the uncluttered, simple, debt-free life. Diligent, useful cultural criticism, akin to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2004) and Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (2008).

Kirkus Reviews