There’s a video at a site called The Story of Stuff which everyone should watch. It’ll consume 20 minutes of your precious time but do it anyway. To quote the introductory paragraph on the site, “It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.”
Watch This Video Before Your Next Shopping Trip
Thanks for sharing, great film.
I work for one of these companies who build plastic crap in China to sell in CostCo so that people can use them for a year or two until they break. I’m afraid to ask what the China factories are like, but when I have they’ve assured me that they’re very fair. Most of our stuff is made in an established factory that changes products every day or two. They crank out 20,000 radios, then move on to some other company’s 20,000 cell phones or some other electronics. The kind of factory who won’t return your phone call unless you’re ordering by the container load.
The thing is, from a manufacturer’s standpoint, what is the alternative? The customer is always right. If they decide that your competitor’s product is just as good for 1/4 the price, you’re out of business. How do you convince people at the WalWart in Ft Wayne Indiana to care about this stuff? More importantly, care ENOUGH to spend 4x more for a product made “the right way?” I think China would have to do something incredibly stupid, like nuking Florida, before people changed their buying habits.
But hey, I’m using cloth bags at the supermarket. Usually. Well, I’ve been slacking lately, I always forget and leave them in the car. But the Manhattan-sized island of floating plastic in the North Pacific really bums me out. Not to mention that every piece of plastic EVER MADE still exists. The little bracelet you wore when you were born, the trash bag it was placed in, the plastic fork you ate your first birthday cake with, the clear plastic that displayed your first Star Wars action figure. Really freaking depressing.
Actually I don’t think the stuff your company sells can be found at Costco, although I suppose products made by your company’s parent company might be. (Yes, I’m not naming any names because they’re not particularly relevant. I have a fairly high opinion of the products produced by Jeff’s employer.)
Anyway, I completely agree with your point viz the issue from the manufacturer’s standpoint, and this leads me to a related rant of my own, which is this: A large number of problems that this country faces right now are a result of our collective decision (conscious or otherwise) that price is the most important factor in a purchase. Once that decision was made–and by my recollection it happened some time in the mid1980s or so–all sorts of things followed, including overseas manufacturing, outsourcing jobs to India, the radical decline in customer service, the decline in quality of manufactured goods, the reduction in wages and benefits for employees in the retail sector, etc. All of these things arose in part because Joe and Jane Blow think that paying less for something is the overriding consideration when buying that something. So yes, a manufacturer has little choice but to slash their production costs to the bone, even if that means building plastic crap in China rather than building good crap in, say, Detroit. It boils down to pretty basic economics–supply and demand, market competition, that sort of stuff. But then I guess the four semesters of Econ that I took in college make me an expert in economics, relatively speaking. (I’m really not meaning to put on airs here, but seriously, what percentage of adults in the U.S. have studied the equivalent of four university semesters of Economics? And that’s part of the problem, folks…)
So yes, until all of those people shopping at Wal-Mart can be convinced to care enough about the implications of their shopping habits to alter them, we’re all kind of stuck. In all honesty, I’m not terribly optimistic about the ability of our species to figure out how badly we’re screwing up our own future until it’s way too late. But that’s exactly why I blogged that video. Maybe a hundred or so people will watch it because of my mention of it. Maybe a few of those people will actually change some aspect of their consumption because of it. Maybe that will make a difference. If so, it was certainly worth my time to post the entry.
But if you believe all of the video (money stays with the top 1%), the working class doesn’t have the scratch to choose anything but CostCo.
Yes and no. The working class may not have a choice but to seek out the lowest prices for something. On the other hand, the working class does have a choice on what they buy. Costco (just one example) sells a large number of items which are discretionary purchases, rather than staples and necessities. When I was a kid, if you couldn’t afford a discretionary purchase, you didn’t buy it (or you saved up until you could afford it). Nowadays it seems to be perceived as entirely acceptable to simply go into debt to make discretionary purchases. Consumer debt in this country has risen dramatically over the last few decades–far faster than inflation.
If Costco is where you go to save money, why is the first thing you see when you walk in a display of huge televisions?