Overview

"From shuttered factories to look-alike high streets and shopping centres, the Western world has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low prices. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of today - the engine of globalisation, outsourcing, planned obsolescence and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world. In this myth-shattering, closely reasoned and exhaustively reported investigation, Shell exposes the astronomically high cost of living ""cheap""."

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9781594202155

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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. <br> -- USA Today <br> .. ..a first-rate job of reporting and analysis. Pay full price for this book, if you can stand to. It's worth it. <br> -Laura Shapiro, The Sunday New York Times Book Review <br> That cycle of consumption seems harmless enough, particularly since we live in a country where there are plenty of cheap goods to go around. But in her lively and terrifying book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell pulls back the shimmery, seductive curtain of low-priced goods to reveal their insidious hidden costs. Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated m

Or, supersaturate me with enough junk to clog the arteries of the good life.Those who remember the early 1970s, writes Atlantic contributor Shell (Fat Wars: The Inside Story of the Obesity Industry, 2004, etc.), may be surprised to learn that, even for all the decline in relative wages and buying power, most of the necessities of life are cheaper today. We pay about a third less for clothing, about a fifth less for food and a quarter less for cars. This lowering of cost, Shell warns, comes at a hidden price, and there lies the heart of her argument, which is as much aesthetic as financial. One of the costs of cheap goods is obvious: Manufacturers chase cheap labor across the planet in order to produce them, which in turn lowers the labor value of American workers. Another of the costs is less obvious: Inexpensive goods devalue the notion of craft. The ennoblement of Cheap, writes Shell, marks a particularly radical departure in American culture and a titanic shift in our national priorities. The author traces that departure across a trajectory of opinion in which, a century ago, the purchase of mass-produced, inexpensive goods was considered a lapse of taste. This view was largely undone by pioneering merchants such as John Wanamaker (of Philadelphia department-store fame) and Eugene Ferkauf (of Korvette's), as well as the post - World War II emergence of a particularly acquisitive consumer culture that, as John Kenneth Galbraith grumbled, nursed a battery of wants that previously did not exist. Shell's pronouncements on economics get a bit fuzzy, but her Silent Spring - like moralizing about the effects of superabundant, indifferently made goods will find an eager audience among acolytes of the uncluttered, simple, debt-free life.Diligent, useful cultural criticism, akin to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2004) and Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (2008). (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

"Ellen Ruppel Shell is a correspondent for the ""Atlantic Monthly,"" and has written for ""The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Time, Discover, Seed,"" and dozens of other national publications. She is the author, most recently, of ""The Hungry Gene,"" which was published in six languages, and is Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism at Boston University."

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