Ellen Ruppel Shell

About a year and a half after acquiring this book I finally read it! The reason for my reluctance was that I feared learning too much about some of my favorite retailers, especially Ikea. I had heard an interview with the author on the radio and decided I should read the book, which is why I put it on my wish list. But I kept remembering the author's comments and thinking that I am like so many today - wanting to pay the least amount I can get away with. KNOWING that there are reasons this show more is not a good thing, but not yet ready to face those reasons. Finally the day came.

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. show less

If prices are so damn low, why are we all just scraping by?
Shell writes an in-depth exploration of the current state of affairs, ie. globalization, beautifully explained. The consumer has a greater variety of items to choose from than ever before: but each of the choices is identically 'cheap'. Each item is manufactured by what amounts to slave labor; each is built to fall apart again. The only difference is price. - But Shell is far from taking the easy way and squaring the blame on show more Wal-Mart. We are all culpable - but some are more guilty than others. The average consumer hasn't the time or the knowledge (or, let's face it, the drive) to sort through the sheer amount of information that making one well-informed choice would require: and the retailers are working to make sure the consumer stays ignorant.
But if the retailers are wicked, the consumers been willing to be fooled. And now we're paying the price.

I'm predicting it: this book will be The Jungle for the 21st century. (The chapters on labor conditions in China won't bother most Americans nearly as much as those on the food we eat - or the lead-coated Thomas The Tank Engine trains for their children. No matter that thousands of Chinese workers are inhaling lead paint fumes day after day after day in much higher concentrations than most American children will ever come across; no matter that women in Mexico are doing piecework for a pittance, attaching sleeves to 1200 shirts each day, so that we can have buy it at a deep discount. No matter that a 30% increase in their wages would cost the consumer 24 cents more at checkout. No matter. Keep those prices low, boys!)

My one quibble is that, although it's primarily about current events and current stores (and touches on the current recession), Shell writes in such a way as to make "October, 2008" seem soooo long ago, and "researchers predict that by 2010" seems impossibly distant. At times I actually had to remind myself of the date (July of 2009). Yikes.

And now I never want to buy anything ever again. show less

Well, after reading this book you'll never shop at Target, Whole Foods, Walmart, Ikea, or eat shrimp or pork ever again. Shell offers some compelling insights in the psychology of why we as consumers are attracted to the 'deal' as well as chronicling the rise of our modern shopping experience. The author shows some occasional bias (bio-diesel is a 'fad', the two Ikea chapters are quite venomous) throughout, but it doesn't take away from the impact of her analysis of how manipulated we are by show more corporations. Certainly an eye-opening and even unsettling book. show less

Cheap is an intriguing expose on the modern American desire for bargains fed by discount stores and discount ideology in more areas of commerce than one would realize. Ruppel Shell offers a fascinating history of discount stores from the late 19th-century to present. Interestingly, many of the originators went under by the 1980s to be absorbed by the more ruthless corporations of today. The hidden costs of inexpensive purchases are then detailed from environmental destruction, human rights show more violations of the employees who manufacture, distribute, and sell the products, the dangers of poor quality goods to the consumer, the erosion of the middle class, and the fact that a lot of this cheap stuff isn't even worth what we pay for it. Ruppel Shell makes the interesting point that we now live in a world where there are high-end goods and discount goods, but no reliable in-between. IKEA, Wal-Mart, and outlet malls are singled out as some actors in the discount culture, but the closing "hope-for-the-future" chapter also details companies like Wegmans and Costco that are thriving despite adopting strategies that go against the grain of discount culture. While the essence of this book is not likely to be surprising to most readers, it is still eye-opening in its details. show less