Word: cheaping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Surprisingly, it is provincial cities like Xi'an that are leading this transition. In China's heartland, you won't find many factories churning out cheap toys or clothing for overseas markets, the kind of industrial activity that underpinned China's economic miracle and made Shanghai and Shenzhen wealthy. Total international trade represents a mere 18% of Xi'an's GDP, compared with 160% in Shanghai. Xi'an is being built instead on the burgeoning spending power of its own consumers, and on the expansion of Chinese companies churning out products for Chinese. "The domestic market will be the leading...
...Crazy talk, I know. Where is this coming from? Well, it began with some reading I've been doing about the trade-offs we make for ultra-cheap goods-the child workers in Bangladesh who sew our clothes and brush their teeth with ash since they can't afford toothpaste, the oceanic dead zones that come with $5 factory-farmed salmon filets. They're the sorts of stories that make a person think that buying carts full of cheap stuff-ensuring the production of even more cheap stuff-shouldn't be the social goal we've made...
...also realize that part of what got us here was overspending, and that that overspending was fostered by a shopping culture that uses cheap goods to hook people on feeling like they're winning at something. As a country, we held nearly $1 trillion in credit-card debt this time last year-about the same as the value of all the goods and services produced in South Korea annually. We've bought so much stuff that we've struggled to find places to fit it all. The U.S. went from having 300 million square feet of self-storage space...
...lure of cheap goods, though, is incredibly strong, even once we've reached the point of substantial creature comfort. In her book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, writer Ellen Ruppel Shell devotes the better part of two chapters to how inexpensive goods mess with our minds. She describes one experiment in which researchers used brain scans to show that the joy of a discounted item comes before it's bought; by the time a person is at home with his new thing, the luster is gone. On Black Friday, I watched shoppers on TV proudly state how much...
...long they expected any of their stuff to last. For that's the other big trade-off we make for low-priced goods-often cheap simply means cheap. Shell likes to tell the story of how she once bought three blenders in quick succession; the flimsy blades were no match for the ice that goes into smoothies. When "low cost" is the marketing trope we most respond to, quality easily falls by the wayside. And that state of affairs, Shell concludes based on the response to her book, bothers no one as much as the less affluent people who inexpensive...