Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture Book

Read it only if you can get a discount. Ellen Ruppel Shell's cultural studies examination of the fixation on low cost doesn't really get going until long after you have likely lost interest. Late in the book she finally gets to what she sees as the major downsides of modern global society's pursuit of low cost at any cost: no $ for R&D, the promotion of waste and the dumbing-down of work. This final section reveals some passion and a point-of-view which are largely missing from its predecessor chapters. In short, read the last section and you basically get the point.

If you have time to kill, the early chapters cover widely varying topics which only loosely relate to the central thesis. They start with a prolonged history of discount retailing and despite its length the section is surprisingly shallow. We learn a lot of facts about F.W. Woolworth and his discounter brethren but not so much about why were customers so eager to buy the poorly made and mostly useless trinkets they peddled. Shell repeatedly lets the consumer off the hook by saying they had no other options and would buy quality if it were available to them. One can understand Shell not wanting to offend the reading public but surely Woolworth and Walton didn't just foist cheap crap on an unsuspecting consumer base but rather found a lucrative consumer desire for cheap crap and exploited it. However, the major problem with this section is that a comprehensive history of discount retailing just isn't all that engaging.

Another section focuses in on one discount retailer to be excoriated as a bane to the environment and society. This company is responsible for deforestation, the growth of subsistence-wage work, a culture of consumer good transience ultimately filling the world's landfills and the decline of good taste. Of course, she is talking about…IKEA. To come across these charges leveled at a company that is not Walmart is sort of startling although the Bentonville Behemouth takes a beating in other sections. The problem here is that IKEA's avoidance of taxes, gluttony of the world's dwindling resources and pushing of manufacturing to the lowest cost Southeast Asian countries are all legal, common and basically make up the strategic business plan of most organizations. Hate the game, Ellen, not the Swedish playa.

Later on the book takes on cheap food railing against shrimp farming in particular but hitting all of in-vogue local and organic touchstones. The analysis is fine here but the discussion is covered in much better elsewhere by Michael Pollan. Here Shell tentatively puts some blame on the eating public but only in the context of sort of suggesting that the $15.95 all you can possibly eat shrimp feast at Red Lobster is maybe a little responsible for vast tracks of Thai rice paddies being transformed into stinking, briny shrimp farms.

In the late going she does start to find her voice and to fully suggest that consumers bear the burden of changing their gluttonous, hoarding ways before the whole world becomes one big Easter Island.