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Cheap: The High Cost Of Discount Culture (2009)

by Ellen Ruppel Shell(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

159420215X (ISBN13: 9781594202155)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Penguin Press HC, The

review 1: Kind of contradictory in parts, which was frustrating. And the author really lost me in the IKEA section. I grant that IKEA's wood-management practices are not the greatest and that their furniture really does, sometimes, fall apart, but a lot of her argument seemed to be "But it's ugly! And I don't like putting it together myself!"I also, honestly, just don't buy the argument that discounting is reducing consumer choices. Right now from where I sit I can order 61,000 coffee makers, 179,000 different board games, and over a million T-shirts--and that's just on Amazon (and yes, I'm sure a huge chunk of those items are duplicates). I have more choices available to me, expensive or not, than ever before. Perhaps major retailers are trending toward homogeneity and perhaps the... morey're being pushed there through discounting, but that doesn't mean that higher-end or more unique items are no longer available or somehow are harder to find.I don't know what I was expecting from this book but I am not sure I got it.
review 2: I found it very hard to get into this book. I could not finish it as my tag shows. I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but this was not it. I got to the middle of chapter 4 (I think) and started flipping through looking for something that wasn't super dry history of how Woolworth or Sears Roebuck etc. started and continued to make money. I get that part of the problem with "the high cost of discount culture" has to do with how and why people started creating these discount stores. I was hoping for more of a discussion on why people choose cheap and maybe that was coming up in another chapter but I wasn't having a good time climbing through the dreary history of early corporate America. tl;drPeople want money and do anything they can to keep money. The end. less

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