How much do we pay, really, for cheap stuff? ... author suggests that they exploit workers ...

[lindisfarne]

Cheap products at discount stores may feel like irresistible bargains. But the author suggests that they exploit workers and cheat buyers out of high-quality goods.
====
It is, at bottom, a disturbing book in which we see reflections of ourselves: ignorant of how prices are set, unsure what constitutes a deal, chumps for anything selling cheap, and puppets of the Wizards of Marketing.

Shell introduces us to a few of these guys who have persuaded us that rock-bottom prices will reward us with a better life, especially if we buy lots more than we need. "Their goal," she writes, "is to distract customers from thinking hard about a purchase or, for that matter, thinking hard about anything at all."
...
Now, we not only don't know the people we buy our beef from, but we don't know who produces the beef, or where. We can't imagine the faces of the women who sew our $8.99 shirts, or the people who press the wood chips that become the boards of the $29.99 bookcase we buy from Ikea -- a design-on-a-discount enterprise that takes quite a lashing from Shell.

And our hearts no longer beat fast at a well-crafted hand-made sweater that might last a lifetime so much as at one whose price has been cut in half at Wal-Mart. That Wal-Mart sweater is like so much of what the author herself admits to having bought, cheap stuff that ends up in the back of a closet, "a bargain-hunter's pile of shame."
...
This book is not bedtime reading. It demands focus and attention -- it has 40 pages of footnotes! -- and may call into question every purchasing decision you've ever made. Your mattress, for one. Stores, she writes, "typically rotate discount offers through a number of mattress brands. ... In reality, no mattress is significantly discounted; rather, the brands not on sale carry inflated prices."

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/yourmoney/51525252.html?elr=KArks7PYDiaK7DUdcOy_nc:DKUiacyKUUr
CHEAP
By: Ellen Ruppel Shell.

[Donnachaidh]

1. link? n/t

Do you have a review link?

[lindisfarne]

4. Sorry, now in OP. n/t

[daleanime]

2. Title...

and author?

[hippywife]

3. Sounds like my kind of read.

This is one of the things we've been consciously trying to avoid. We buy our meat and some other products from our local food coop, getting to know the farmers, and avoid WalMart and the dollar type stores except for maybe toilet paper.

We collectively all support the fact that people, here and all over the world, should earn a living wage and then so many don't put that desire into action very often.

Thanks for posting it. :hi: