Britain is facing a WalMart-style glut of cheap consumer goods, but without the monster homes characteristic of the American suburbs. This Guardian article goes into fascinating detail about the lives of Britons who find themselves snapping up £3 t-shirts and having nowhere to put them in their teeny British homes. I live in one such home and virtually everything I own is in storage — and I have overflow storage lockers in Toronto and San Francisco to boot.
The article talks about what this is doing to charity shops — how cheap does a used tee have to be to undersell a £3 new one? — and even the used-clothing market in Africa. Not to mention the environmental consequences, the labor conditions in the countries whence these cheap goods come, and so on.
I often feel like I'm drowning in plenty. Everywhere I go, there are discounts if I buy more — it seems like everything in Britain is offered on a "3 for 2" basis — and everything just keeps getting cheaper (the article notes that, adjusted for power, the prices of computers have dropped by 93 percent in the past decade). At the same time, the cost of storing this stuff just keeps going up and up and up — my rents have been skyrocketing for a decade, no matter what city I land up in.
I'm stuck at home this morning waiting for delivery of a replacement dishwasher and washing machine: both appliances up and died in late February. I looked into getting them fixed, but between the cost of parts and the cost of labor (another thing that's not cheap in Britain), it was cheaper, much cheaper, to replace them. The company's even taking the old ones away for £10 each, a bargain way to get them out of my sight and off my conscience.
I love getting stuff delivered digitally. If I can download a movie on my hard-drive instead of a DVD, it's one thing less to try to cram onto the living-room's overflowing shelves. Now all I need is a bigger hard-drive.
You could see all this hoarding as a sign of a growing attachment to possessions. But Coombs sees it as the opposite. "What was in the living room this year will be in the bedroom next year and in the junk room the year after," he says. Kasriel says the chance to sell to eBay has boosted much we buy. "You can tell yourself you have a sensible financial route out."
Unashamedly "disposable" cheap goods, you could argue, are turning us into traders rather than curators of our possessions. It is another victory for capitalism: we have internalised the unsentimental stock control of the modern retailer. Juliet Schor, an American economist and leading critic of the bargain boom, thinks this new form of ownership is less pleasurable than the old one. "The psychologically satisfying process of personalisation that occurs when products are acquired and retained, is truncated," she writes in a recent essay. "Attachment is briefer and there is the constant pain of divestiture [getting rid of things]." What individual possessions represent to us is, she says, "more externally driven" – by marketing and advertising – and "less under the control of the individual consumer".
Shoppers at Primark in Oxford are cheerier about all this. "I was brought up with thrift," says an elderly man with a cravat and a perfect white moustache. "Brought up not to buy anything unless the old thing was worn out. But three T-shirts for a fiver …" He holds them up: "They look very good." His eyes sparkle: "This is incredible."
(via O'Reilly Radar)
