Ellen Ruppel Shell > Quotes

“The typical capitalists are lovers of power rather than sensual indulgence, but they have the same tendency to crush and to take tribute that the cruder types of sensualism possess. The discipline of the capitalist is the same as that of the frugalist. He differs from the latter in that he has no regard for the objects through which productive power is acquired. HE does not hesitate to exploit natural resources, lands, dumb animals and even his fellowman. Capital to such a man is an abstract fund, made up of perishable elements which are quickly replaced… The frugalist…stands in marked contrast to the attitude of the capitalist. The frugalist takes a vital interest in his tools, in his land, and in the goods he produces. He has a definite attachment to each. He dislikes to see an old coat wear out, an old wagon break down, or an old horse go lame. He always thinks of concrete things, wants them and nothing else. He desires not land, but a given farm, not horses or cattle and machines, but particular breeds and implements; not shelter, but a home…. He rejects as unworthy what is below standard and despises as luxurious what is above or outside of it. Dominated by activities, he thinks of capital as a means to an end.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Cheap objects resist involvement. We tend to invest less in their purchase, care, and maintenance, and that's part of what makes them so attractive. Cheap clothing lines—sold at discounters such as Target and H & M—are like IKEA emblems of the "cheap chic" where styles fills in for whatever quality goes lacking. There is nothing sinister in this, no deliberate planned obsolescence. These objects are not designed to fall apart, nor are they crafted not to fall apart. In many cases we know this and accept it, and have entered into a sort of compact. Perhaps we don't even want the object to last forever. Such voluntary obsolescence makes craftsmanship beside the point. We have grown to expect and even relish the easy birth and early death of objects.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“If enough dishonest merchants water their milk, more and more customers will forget what normal milk tastes like and buy only the cheaper - watered down - variety.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Andrew Young, a former U.S. Congressman and U.N. ambassador turned Wal-Mart spokesman, seemed to offer an explanation: “Poverty in America,” he said, “is market potential unrealized.” It seems that the poor benefit the discounting industry far more than the discounting industry benefits the poor.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Americans pay less for food than do citizens of any other developed nation.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“But the question to ask is this: How can it possibly be cheaper to buy garlic from China rather than local garlic from California? What are the economic structures that have made that happen? Issues of land use, labor, subsidies—all this needs to be addressed. We have to get beyond the food to what’s behind it.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“...mass market consumption offers the facade of social equality without forcing society to go through the hard work of redistributing wealth. Low prices lead consumers to think they can get what they want without necessarily giving them what they want - or need. The ancient Roman phrase for this is panem et circenses, bread and circuses, the art of plying citizens with pleasures to distract them from pain.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“neuroscientists have discovered that the very anticipation of a “bargain” sets our neural networks aquiver. The manipulation of price can confuse us, block the thinking part of our brain and ignite the impulsive, primitive side,”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“In the early days of outlets, manufacturers ripped labels from items because they were reluctant to link their brand with the cut-rate price. But today many discounters do just the opposite, trumpeting goods under brand names to give the impression of quality while not necessarily backing that claim in a meaningful way.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“At discount chains, customers paid with their time. Sales assistants were sometimes ignorant or absent. Cash registers were clumped at the exits, supermarket style, and in some cases customers were herded through a labyrinth of roped-off “squeeze shoots,” like so many cattle. Purchases were not wrapped and certainly not carried to the customer’s car. Still, many consumers—particularly younger ones—preferred this. They had confidence in their ability to make their own purchasing decisions, a confidence boosted by advertising. They knew—or thought they knew—what they wanted and enjoyed foraging on their own without having to cope with a hovering sales staff.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“MIT-trained urban development expert Wig Zamore said: “IKEA is the least sustainable retailer on the planet.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“The next consumer revolution will be bloodless, requiring neither bullets nor even bullhorns. We have the power to enact change and to chart a pragmatic course. That power resides not only in the voting booth but in our wallets. Bargain hunting is a national pastime and a pleasure that I, for one, will not relinquish. But knowing that our purchases have consequences, we can begin to enact change. We can set our own standard for quality and stick to it. We can demand to know the true costs of what we buy, and refuse to allow them to be externalized. We can enforce sustainability, minimize disposability, and insist on transparency. We can rekindle our acquaintance with craftsmanship. We can choose to buy or not, choose to bargain or not, and choose to follow our hearts or not, unencumbered by the anxiety that someone somewhere is getting a “better deal.” No longer slaves to the low-price imperative, we are free to make our own choices. As individuals and as a nation we can turn our attention to what matters, secure in the knowledge that what matters has never been and will never be cheap.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“since wage and benefit savings are not the main part of the cost advantage for the company it could (conceivably) “continue to pass on most of these savings while paying higher wages and benefits.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Simple but clever inventions like the shopping cart and the bar code abetted the shift from full service to self-service, further reducing the need for skilled staff and offloading more responsibility onto consumers. Over time, choice became restricted by price—what could not be sold cheaply, like the Chinese boots, became a de facto luxury, like the Italian boots.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“In the “distribution upheaval” of the early 1960s, hundreds of merchants were put out of business by the looming discount behemoths. By the late 1970s, discounting had infiltrated every market segment, and the emergence of “category killers” in hardware, toys, and furniture had killed off more than half of existing retail chains. Millions of jobs were shipped overseas as discounters leaped at every opportunity to buy from foreign suppliers. Prices crashed, consumer debt soared, and Americans put their futures on the installment plan.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“companies such as Grand Union, Allied Stores, and S. S. Kresge either acquired or created their own discount chains. (Kresge’s bargain division was, of course, Kmart.) Dayton Hudson opened Target stores, and J. C. Penney christened its Treasure Island stores.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“In the 1970s and 1980s, the climate changed. One after another, department stores merged into one another, as did pharmacies, toy stores, and hardware stores. As each of these conglomerates grew in size, they also grew in clout. Vendors and manufacturers could no longer afford to make demands, because losing even one conglomerate meant losing big. Even iconic designers like Ralph Lauren began cutting deals with retailers, promising to pick up the slack if and when sales went south. From”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Joseph A. Schumpeter, the Harvard economist who in 1943 published the iconic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The seventh chapter of that work, entitled “The Process of Creative Destruction,” is for many academics a sacred text. “The process of creative destruction,” Schumpeter writes, “is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.” Creative destruction is an elegantly simple idea describing the industrial mutation of old structures into new ones. The department store evolves from and “creatively destructs” the country store; the auto industry evolves from and replaces the horse and buggy business, automation makes many factory and farm jobs obsolete but creates new jobs in information technology, engineering, healthcare, and biotech.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Department stores in particular had difficulty surviving the onslaught of low-price competitors. Their inability to adapt to changing consumer tastes and the emergence of new retail channels that targeted specific market segments—the so-called category killers in hardware, toys, and furniture—deeply eroded their market share. While in the 1960s and 1970s most clothing was sold in full-service department stores, by 1990 such stores accounted for only 29 percent of sales.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“these women and men were able to sustain work “outside of the employment context,” to cobble together not only a better living but a more meaningful life.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change

“There was rationing of rubber, sugar, gasoline, heating oil, milk, coffee, soap, nylon stockings, and even used cars. The merrily dancing worker/spender bees were gone; thrift, not the “spreading of money,” became the desired norm. The “Consumer’s Pledge,” sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” urged Americans to eschew canned goods in favor of “fresh fruits and vegetables [to] save tons of tin” and to “take the best care of your wearables, and mend them when they tear.” Waste was reviled, and recycling elevated to a patriotic duty.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Mexico has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to China. U.S. Department of Commerce data reveal that from 2002 to 2003 Mexico lost market share in thirteen of its top twenty export industries, nearly always to China. With fewer jobs at home, Mexicans are finding it all the more compelling to cross the border into the United States in search of work. No fence is high enough to bar workers desperate to feed their families.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Consider shirts, for example. Macy’s boasted 129 different men’s styles, priced from $1.99 to $14.09. Korvette, by contrast, stocked only 35 styles of men’s shirts, priced from $1.49 to $6.99. While it was difficult to pin down precise numbers, Korvette’s “bargain” prices were at least in part a reflection of its relatively paltry selection. Neither the $1.99 shirt from Macy’s nor the $1.49 shirt from Korvette was likely to be of the highest quality, and it was impossible to know which of the two offered the best value. But Macy’s customers had the opportunity to compare a $1.99 shirt with a $14.09 shirt, while Korvette shoppers were limited to the low end of the category. For Korvette this had the advantage of shielding customers from top-of-the-line goods that by comparison may have made their largely low-end lines appear shabby. For Korvette customers to make truly informed buying decisions was nearly impossible.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Because chains did away with the local proprietor, funneled money away from the local community, and traded skilled employees for stock boys and “order takers,” they were seen as waging a direct assault on the American way of life. Anti-chain protesters in the 1920s represented close to three hundred local and national organizations, comprising roughly 7 percent of the country’s population. Editorialists railed against the chains, as did many trade organizations. The National Association of Retail Druggists decried chain store owners as “privilege-seeking tycoons [and] would-be dictators.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“We Americans once reveled in our reputation for self-sufficiency. We were tinkerers, fixers of things. Yet while many of us can recall our parents wrestling into compliance a recalcitrant toaster or washing machine, few of us today would attempt the same with a malfunctioning microwave oven, digital camera, or anything built up from a computer chip. Appliances, electronics, and automobiles are black boxes, impervious to probing and resistant to repair. Getting into the guts of things is difficult, and if we dare trespass in the innards of what we thought belonged to us, we do so at the risk of the guarantee. Even seasoned professionals are losing heart. In less than two decades, the Professional Service Association lost three-quarters of its small appliance and consumer electronics shop members. During that same period the number of electronics repair shops plummeted from twenty thousand to five thousand. Repair people of all stripes have fallen into obscurity. Sesame Street closed its “Fix-it Shop” in 1996, stating as its reason that young viewers were unlikely to encounter one.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Without knowing it, Lundgren had laid the groundwork for one of the great marketing gambits of the twentieth century: the discreet transfer of costs from seller to buyer. Flat packing and all that went with it not only saved money, it liberated tables and chairs and bookshelves from historical reference. Rather than being passed down from generation to generation, accumulating nostalgic heft, furniture was cut loose from its history. For scores of millions of IKEA customers the world over, heirlooms gradually became obsolete. Why settle for dusty hand-me-downs when the stylish and new cost a pittance? Half”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Compared with the early 1970s, in 2007 we spent 32 percent less on clothes, 18 percent less on food, 52 percent less on appliances, and 24 percent less on owning and maintaining a car.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“At a national level, the study found that thanks to Wal-Mart the total earnings of retail workers declined by $4.5 billion, with most of these losses concentrated in metropolitan areas.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Discounters gave the common man and woman the opportunity to eschew the cobbler and the darning needle, to break in a brand-new pair of shoes or socks when their toes poked through the old ones. Discounters made ordinary folks feel rich by putting a wide selection of goods within easy reach of all but the most meager budgets. Someone had to pay, of course, but that someone need not be the customer.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“the culture of mass consumption sharply influenced the variety and quality of goods. “Ninety percent of Americans buy clothing from a limited array of mass marketers, and spend a smaller percentage of their income on clothing than consumers in most other developed countries,” he”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture