Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell Read Free Book Online

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    In 1930 more Americans lacked a car, a radio, and a washing machine than owned one, but it seemed that nearly every American believed that he or she had a claim to ownership. A growing national media and advertising industry made popular the idea that purchasing goods of all kinds was not a privilege but a right, even a patriotic duty. An advertisement for General Motors that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1936, for instance, argued against government controls on business, reasoning that America “outstripped the nations of the world because the energy and enterprise of our people were free to multiply wealth, to go forward instead of ‘stabilize,’ to succeed in the productive task of making more things at lower prices for more people. . . . Today in America more people want and need better things than ever before! In the satisfying of these wants is America’s opportunity to serve progress.” As historian Charles McGovern wrote, “Market replaced polis in a new communal public life characterized not by geography, religion, or politics, but by spending.”
    There was something thrilling, even patriotic, about the Sears catalog making available to Americans from Texas to Maine the same brand of blanket or sewing machine or overalls at the very same low price. Mass production had led to such a proliferation of affordable consumer goods that the challenge became not making things but convincing consumers to buy them. “The key to economic prosperity,” General Motors researcher and inventor Charles Kettering declared in 1929, just days before the stock market crash, “is the organized creation of dissatisfaction.” Dissatisfaction was well within reach, although not the sort Kettering envisioned. The tidal wave of unemployment and fiscal misery brought by the Great Depression reshaped the nation’s economic landscape and dimmed its optimism. Wanamaker’s claims notwithstanding, the presumed link between godliness and unfettered capitalism came under fire. There was a growing and understandable distrust of large corporations, and the government strove to rally economically weak groups to balance out more powerful interests. With unemployment peaking at over 20 percent, prices were fixed to prevent large retailers from forcing smaller ones out of business. As part of the New Deal, the National Industrial Recovery Act set codes of conduct for business, including guidelines for hours worked, wages paid, and fair-trade practices. Low prices, it was feared, would force a dip in wages and profits, pushing more businesses into bankruptcy. To help minimize this, Congress passed the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, one of several fair-trade laws designed to forestall predatory price cutting by prohibiting chain stores from entering into exclusive contracts with manufacturers. A year later Congress passed the Miller-Tydings Act to exempt fair-trade laws from antitrust legislation. Under this law, manufacturers could set minimum retail prices for products that carried their brand name, thus setting a legal floor that not even huge conglomerates could undercut. Although not consistently enforced, the law offered some protection against escalating price competition and downward spiraling prices.
    That year a General Motors promotional film, From Dawn to Sunset, featured scenes of happy assembly line workers in coveralls building Chevrolets, picking up their paychecks, and all but dancing off with their families to unleash their “fresh buying power” in a thriving downtown marketplace. To a stirring soundtrack the narrator trumpeted “the tens of thousands of men on one single payroll . . . [having] the pleasure of buying, the spreading of money, and the enjoyment of all the things that paychecks can buy.” The film depicts worker-consumers in symbiotic synch with the company, one big happy family on an inexorable march to prosperity. Bargains were most decidedly not part of that triumphant picture, as workers