Noreen Malone on how the emerging bargain culture comes at a price:
Cheap is having a moment. Each day since the financial collapse brings a new story about the countercyclical discount sector. Dollar stores, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s — all are going great guns. But it’s not just acceptable to pinch a few pennies these days, it’s downright fashionable.
This new moderation might be bad news for the broader American economy, but it is perversely good news for Ellen Ruppel Shell, an Atlantic reporter who’s just released Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, an exploration of the ways we’ve been seduced by low prices into forgetting our best interests. The book treads some familiar ground for anyone acquainted with the anti–Wal-Mart movement, which criticizes the mass retailer as the apotheosis of exploitative labor practices and inferior goods. But Ruppel Shell’s aim is to synthesize those invectives into a larger argument, one that eventually builds to blame the economic meltdown on our “fixation on all things cheap.”
