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Cheap, July 2009
Hardcover
The High Cost of Discount Culture
Penguin Press
July 2009
On Sale: July 2, 2009
320 pages ISBN: 159420215X EAN: 9781594202155 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
An Atlantic correspondent uncovers the true cost—in
economic, political, and psychic terms—of our penchant for
making and buying things as cheaply as possible From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the
look-alike strip malls of the sun belt—and almost everywhere
in between—America has been transformed by its relentless
fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little examined
obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating
market force of our time—the engine of globalization,
outsourcing, planned obsolescence, and economic instability
in an increasingly unsettled world. Low price is so alluring that we may have forgotten how
thoroughly we once distrusted it. Ellen Ruppel Shell traces
the birth of the bargain as we know it from the Industrial
Revolution to the assembly line and beyond, homing in on a
number of colorful characters, such as Gene Verkauf (his
name is Yiddish for “to sellâ€), founder of E. J. Korvette,
the discount chain that helped wean customers off
traditional notions of value. The rise of the chain store in
post–Depression America led to the extolling of convenience
over quality, and big-box retailers completed the
reeducation of the American consumer by making them prize
low price in the way they once prized durability and
craftsmanship. The effects of this insidious perceptual shift are vast: a
blighted landscape, escalating debt (both personal and
national), stagnating incomes, fraying communities, and a
host of other socioeconomic ills. That’s a long list of
charges, and it runs counter to orthodox economics which
argues that low price powers productivity by stimulating a
brisk free market. But Shell marshals evidence from a wide
range of fields—history, sociology, marketing, psychology,
even economics itself—to upend the conventional wisdom.
Cheap also unveils the fascinating and unsettling illogic
that underpins our bargain-hunting reflex and explains how
our deep-rooted need for bargains colors every aspect of our
psyches and social lives. In this myth-shattering, closely
reasoned, and exhaustively reported investigation, Shell
exposes the astronomically high cost of cheap.
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