O*Don’t buy the conventional pleasures of the American shopping experience more than necessary when you say you are very effective. Beans in 12-packs; two, bottles of oil tied to the collar of the bone; I once bought high-end electronics like a multipack of Philips Sonicare electric toothbrushes for $300. $300! Where are those toothbrushes now? No idea. I did this for years in the name of economy, until suddenly I didn’t.
Times change, our awareness as consumers grows and finally, if we are lucky, it begins to dawn on us that shopping in stores not only turns our rooms into closets, but the experience creates more waste than efficiency. As epiphanies go, it’s there when you realize you don’t have to say yes when someone offers you their kids’ cast offs—a moment captured in Emily Mester’s brilliant and brilliant new book, American Bulk: Essays on Excess. Mester, who chronicled his childhood at Costco in the Midwest suburbs, spent shopping for shekels, looks not only at the rise of ever-more-available goods, but at the relationship that consumers have with them.
In particular, it focuses on the psychological effect of the fact that now the tablets invite reviews of all the transactions we make. Mester, who used to post this way, has been gathering online reviews for years from the very beginning, such as his New York book review. notes“Scratchy pillows, bad tonsils, a dirty history teacher, until the restaurant owner responded to explain the human struggle behind the burrito offense.” The sheer absurdity of this enterprise – Master’s own alienation as if fighting, is in the mind as much as societies and services push us to act. “Mester writing, “trying to reduce the frictions between me and certain things”, “I multiplied the frictions that always remain. If I believed that body wash was the best, I would fear the worst.”
In other words, “abundance” in any business is not what is offered by the seller, but much more valuable, which is the time of the consumer. And what a titanic waste it is. Giving minutes or hours of thought to decisions that don’t warrant even 30 seconds of internal discussion; by pushing all human experience through the lens of recognition, evaluation and complaint; encourages shoppers to partner excess with perfection and “winning.” The quantity of the purchase is more a reaction than a practical necessity; we know this. But it is quite another thing to be opposed.
The publication of the American giant and the debate that coincided with an auspicious moment in the shopping habits of the West, after a month of Amazon launched Haut, a new sub-issue that aims to entice users to load their carts higher and higher by making everything under $20, and most of the goods under $10. (The term “pull itself” refers to the trend on TikTok in which influencers and their copycats arrange each item of clothing in the environment, try them on for the camera, and return the ones that don’t work.) These trends, such as a. Chinese fashion behemoths like Temu and Shein – now worth $10bn and releasing an extraordinary 7,000-10,000 new products per day – have resulted in a huge surge in revenue, most of which is going straight to the landfill.
Fasting problems are different from the worries that come with ordering more beans than you reasonably have space for. But both of these ideas revolve around repulsive value. Most of us do some sort of funny mental math to justify spending too much – using the solid “cost per coat” rationale, I recently bought a winter coat that, if I’m good, I’ll wear every day until I’m gone. die for math work In the market, my new product is my self-reward for resisting the siren call of buying in bulk by going over-the-top on each item, resulting in a lot of chef-grade barrels in my cupboard that probably aren’t worth the money.
However, it is better than the other. When I’m tempted to go back to buying too much, I remind a friend who used to buy 64 eggs at a time from Costco, because it worked out cheaper to throw away half of them than to buy fewer; more expensive eggs and complete the package. Groceries are expensive now, but even so, that price is not the most we want to pay.