Heidi DeGroat

“Craftsmanship cements a relationship of trust between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not.”
― Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

“Western medical practitioners, except for a few enlightened exceptions, still regard the human body as a car and discuss problems and solutions in mechanical terms. If the human being is not working properly, for example, the solution is to find and change the defective part or in some way modify it.”
― Jan Benham, Creamy Craft of Cosmetic Making With Essential Oils and Their Friends

“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

“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