The High Cost of Discounts

I remember talking to someone once about some boots that they were wearing that were falling apart. He was complaining that "they don't make them like they used to", but when we chatted more about it, it turns out that they were Chinese-made boots that he bought at Wal-Mart.

I thought about him again as I read about Ellen Ruppel Shell's book "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture". Cheap consumer crap is killing America. Or, as Shell points out:

Cheap chicken, cheap shirts, cheap sneakers — they’re all being paid for by somebody, even if it’s not the person taking them home. More than a third of the working poor, Ruppel Shell notes, have jobs in retail, where the annual mean wage for a department store “associate” is $18,280. That’s one reason we pay so little for those shirts and sneakers. We’re also being subsidized by a distant labor force we never see, the Chinese and Mexicans and Vietnamese who work under well-­documented Dickensian conditions.