Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell Read Free Book Online Page B

Cultural historian Christopher Lasch noted, “The tired worker, instead of attempting to change the conditions of his work, seeks renewal in brightening his immediate surroundings with new goods and services.”
    To meet the needs of this growing consumer class, discounting was quietly on the rise. By this time many manufacturers had stopped even trying to set minimum retail prices, since the fair-trade laws were difficult to enforce and critics accused them of being discriminatory and anti-American, and worse. A decade earlier, in 1937, Harvard Business School Professor Malcolm P. McNair had railed against the laws in the pages of a Duke University Law School journal: “The sentiment which furthered the Robinson-Patman Act and its various blood relatives has in it more that is reminiscent of the beginnings of the Nazi movement in Germany, where the same zeal was displayed to protect the small business owner from large corporations. Ultimately, perhaps both may lead to a totalitarian state.” McNair did not explain how enforcing manufacturers’ minimum prices would lead America down the totalitarian path, but by the early 1950s the public had lost its stomach for price minimums.
    New technologies—television in particular—radically altered America’s relationship with the material world. In 1948, only 350,000 homes had television sets. Five years later, in 1953, television ownership had exploded reaching 25 million homes. Suddenly, half of all American households had a hulking brown cube in their living rooms through which merchants cycled a steady stream of promotional messages. A wave of lively and sometimes aggressive advertising rolled over the country and spurred record levels of consumption. Advertising expenditures soared, prompting progressive economist John Kenneth Galbraith to decry the creation of “desires . . . to bring into being wants that previously did not exist.” Television advertising was particularly vital for the low-service discount chains that, with no experienced salesforce to push product, relied on the customer to come to their stores pre-loaded with wants.
    The postwar boom of the late 1940s and 1950s found the working and middle classes actively seeking better homes, better furniture, more and better medical care, fancier cars, and more exotic travel. As war shortages faded into memory, the challenges of industry remained not in the production of goods but in the selling of them. There was more than enough stuff to go around; the challenge was unloading it at a profit. As the 1950s bled into the 1960s, further increased efficiencies cleared the way for still more products to be made, sparking still more price competition. Computers, although laughably primitive by today’s standards, were in the early 1960s nothing short of miracles. The room-sized card-fed IBM behemoth stored more information and processed more data than could small armies of humans. Described as a “wondrous combination of the traveling salesman, mathematical genius, and the Sears, Roebuck catalogue,” the computer vastly streamlined distribution, giving retailers still more power. Thanks to the new technology, store owners no longer had to wait five days or more for their merchandise; they could demand next-day delivery and get it. And because of this remarkable “just-in-time” distribution capability, suppliers were no longer free to dump piles of goods into a customer’s warehouse with the understanding that the retailer would eventually find the market. It was now up to the manufacturer, not the retailer, to manage inventory and to pay the price if supply got out of sync with demand. The trick was to hold inventories to a minimum without getting caught short. If a manufacturer couldn’t provide the right item at the right price, the retailer simply went elsewhere. Manufacturers felt great pressure to keep their own inventories well stocked—at significant cost to themselves—while at the same time offering