I’ve recently been reading the book “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry”, and this is now the second time I’ve bumped up against the history of food oligopolies, in which policy changes in the 1970s are often summarized as “get big or get out”, which led to the elimination of many family-owned farms and businesses. What I hadn’t known until now was the motivation for this, namely that the consumer was king, and anything that threatened prices for consumers would be removed. Whether these policies actually lowered prices is a different story, but supposedly this was the philosophy that allowed for quite a number of companies to become absolutely massive, involving a dismantling of anti-trust laws by a whole lot of assholes on the conservative side of things (although, they probably thought that what they were doing was good).
The issue, of course, is that favoring consumers over workers ignores the fact that most people are both. Consumer goods have never been cheaper, but nobody is particularly happy. Garages, attics, and closets are stuffed to overflowing with goods, but wages are stagnant and sometimes decreasing. Housing has almost never been more expensive, but a cul-de-sac not too far from me may as well be a parking lot, since the people who live there have so many goddamn cars.
As I grow older, I align more with workers than consumers. I don’t know a single person who isn’t willing to work, but I’ve known more than a few people who are trapped by low wages. Cheap shit from Amazon and Temu abound, but few people feel they can get ahead in life. Is that personal responsibility, or is that systemic violence? Yes, no, and both, I suspect. It’s all very complicated and situation-dependent. But I do know that probably quite a few under-paid agricultural workers put in 10 hour days so I can spend a measly $5 for a package of blueberries, just to let it rot in the fridge.
Cheap stuff is great when you have no money. It’s not so great when it enables you to abdicate any sort of self-restraint, discipline, or fucking sense, at the expense of workers. But for consumers, though, there is no limit to the maw, no satisfaction with price. Aftermarket axles were $100 ten years, and they are $100 today, and they got that way through cheap Chinese labor and increasingly lower quality parts.
I’m a strong believer in paying for quality over quantity, but this is largely only a luxury for those with adequate disposable income. If I want the high-quality consumer grain mill from India, I pay $300. If I want the high-quality consumer grain mill from the USA, I pay $800. If you believe in workers’ rights and fair pay, do you put your money where your mouth is?
There’s no right answer. Sometimes we’re at the mercy of policy, democrat vs republican, for better or worse, and no doubt there is evidence to support both sides and any number between, above, and below. But I really don’t think we are better off with unmitigated access to cheap things. Rather than buying high-quality necessities, I think most people make up for the privilege by buying enormous amounts of low-grade crap. But that’s just my opinion.