Book review: Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture'
By Stephanie Rogers - Miami Herald

There it is, right in front of you on the shelf at a local shop: the gadget you've been eyeing for months. But, you lament, it's marked at full price. Maybe it would be smarter to go home and do some comparison shopping online - a discounter might have it for considerably less. After all, who among us can resist the flush of achievement, the heady excitement that is getting a great deal?

But there's more to our infatuation with low-cost goods than frugality or a sense of competitiveness. We're psychologically hard-wired to seek out bargains, and retailers use this fact to manipulate us into buying all the cheap trinkets we can fit into our homes.

In her book "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," author Ellen Ruppel Shell shines what may be an uncomfortably bright light on the many ways in which we engage in a dangerous game of chicken with the businesses that sell us our stuff.

For example, how many of us regularly ask ourselves questions like this: With consumers paying as little as possible for all manner of goods, from shrimp to Scandinavian furniture, who's really picking up the tab? The cost, says Ruppel Shell, ultimately falls not just on the distant Third-World laborers who create these products at rock-bottom wages but also retail employees right here in America who are among the lowest-paid workers in the nation. When we demand $5 T-shirts and 99-cent picture frames, retailers respond by cutting their own costs and passing the problem on to somebody else.

Furthermore, we're not always getting the great deals for which we so proudly pat ourselves on the back. Retailers have learned that they can either sell a few sweaters at full price for $49, or sell loads of them on "clearance" for $99, marked down from an imaginary "original price" of $199.

Even the bountiful, disorganized shelves of America's beloved outlet malls aren't what they seem: Ruppel Shell reveals that many of these goods are simply lower-quality versions of the products sold at a brand's full-priced stores.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/01/1902422/book-review-cheap-the-high-cost.html#ixzz149CReZhe