Buying cheap stuff makes life worse. (Part 2)

A few days back I wrote about the book Cheap : the high cost of discount culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell. She said buying cheap is bad because it lowers income and surrounds us with crappy stuff.

I kept reading the book, hoping she would talk about what else was bad about buying cheap. Well, she said it "dilutes the brand" - which I don't really understand because she didn't explain it well.

She also says it makes consumers "confused" because prices change so much every day. This seems a bit weak to me.

Later she said that low food prices are bad because we become "compliant" and when food prices go up, it causes "social unrest". Um, again this sounds weak. She's not making a good case for not buying cheap stuff.

The last chapter is about China and its notorious sweatshops. Yes, they're bad. They do, however, provide income and hope to the people who live there. Would you rather work in a sweatshop for $1 a day or rummage through a garbage dump?

I imagine that most locals prefer sweatshops.

Buying cheap stuff makes life worse.

When I was younger I used to buy the cheapest possible stuff.

Now that I'm older, I like to think I'm immune from cheapness, but really I'm not. I'll often buy cheap crap and that's a problem according to Ellen Ruppel Shell in her book Cheap: the high cost of discount culture.

She says that when stores sell cheaper stuff with lower prices, it means other stores have to lower their prices to compete. This means they make less profit (because margins are smaller) and to counteract the losses they cut salaries.

So when everyone starts buying cheap stuff, salaries go down. It becomes a cycle because now people have lower salaries and they can only AFFORD cheap stuff.

In a better world everyone would buy the most expensive stuff. Salaries would start to go up.

High prices and high salaries would mean we'd probably be able to afford approximately the same amount of stuff. It's just that now all our stuff would be excellent, high quality stuff instead of crappy cheap shit made by child slaves in China.