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Good Deals Can Be a Bad Thing

America was not always obsessed with low prices, writes Atlantic Monthly correspondent Ellen Ruppel Shell, but over the past century our thirst for bargains has transformed the world’s economy – and not necessarily for the better.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture explores the effects of our focus on low price. The idea sprang from a trip to a shoe store. After being shown a pricey pair of Italian leather boots, Shell opted for Chinese imports at one-fourth the price. The boots, not surprisingly uncomfortable, were soon thrown in the closet “where they landed in a heap of other unwearable ‘good deals’… a bargain hunter’s pile of shame.”

The lust for low prices has its roots in the late 19th century, when Wanamaker, Woolworth and Sears began offering goods at much lower prices than smaller merchants. The focus on low prices often meant that quality was less important.

“This pushed hard against the American tradition of frugality, where price was only one consideration,” Shell writes. “Historically, Americans sought durable long-lasting goods that they could pass among themselves and down to their children.” Where re-heeling shoes and darning socks were once common, cheap goods became more disposable, allowing the common man to buy a new pair of shoes when the old ones wore out.

Although critics derided low-quality goods, discount shopping soon lost its stigma and became the norm. In the 1960s, Shell writes, the discount format took over American retailing.

“The focus switched from the object to the deal: If the deal was good, the object under consideration became less critical to the transaction.”

Ads from the 1960s trumpeted low prices of goods from radios to dolls to fruitcakes, without a clue about the brand. Craftsmanship was falling prey not only to price, but to convenience as well.

In 1956, carpenter Gillis Lundgren was hired to build and deliver a table to a local furniture dealer. Unable to fit the table in his car, Lundgren pulled the legs off. The idea struck the furniture dealer, Ingvar Kamprad, who went on to found Ikea. The furniture retailer has grown by adopting cost-cutting ideas such as “flat packing,” which transferred the time and effort of delivery and assembly from the craftsman to the customer.

Shell calls it “one of the great marketing gambits of the 20th century: the discreet transfer of costs from seller to buyer.”

With furniture designed to sell at low prices, the idea of furniture as heirlooms is becoming obsolete. Of course, design is not the same as craftsmanship. “When these objects break, we don’t ask for sympathy,” Shell writes. “We expected it to happen.”

Some economists and politicians have argued that discount goods benefit America’s poor. Shell disagrees. Prices on necessities are rarely lowered much, she says. Second, low prices at stores such as Walmart depend on paying low wages to workers, who in turn can’t afford to shop anywhere else. “The poor benefit the discounting industry far more than the discounting industry benefits the poor,” she writes.

As for food, a focus on low prices over quality can mean Gulf of Mexico shrimp are pushed from the market by frozen Asian fare. And the stress on low prices can result in a lack of concern for food safety, as evidenced by e. coli-ridden factory farms and the more than 1,900 Chinese food shipments rejected by the Food and Drug Administration from July 2006 through June 2007.

The book is an engaging exploration of the ways cheapness is making our lives worse. What’s more, it conveys how difficult it would be for Americans to abandon their focus on low prices. Reading this book, however, might be a good first step.

Seth Brown is author of Rhode Island Curiosities.

Ellen Ruppel Shell

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

Penguin Press

296 pages. $25.95 © Copyright 2009 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. <http://www.gannett.com>

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