You're Wrong About - Online Shopping with Amanda Mull

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Why is it so hard to find the one thing you need? The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull is here to tell us the story of shopping, from the Silk Road to SHEIN hauls, and the story that emerges is one of workers turned against each other, and industrial byproducts reinvented as trends. Here's where to find Amanda:The AtlanticTwitterSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBonus Episodes on Apple PodcastsDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.theatlantic.com/author/amanda-mull/https://twitter.com/amandamullhttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttp://apple.co/ywahttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttps://www.maintenancephase.com/Support the show

That was just adorable because my Amazon order is here, which I might actually have to sign for, so I'm just gonna go see if I have to do that. Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are learning about online shopping from Amanda Mall. Amanda is a staff writer at The Atlantic, she's someone who's writing I have loved and admired for years now and I was so excited to talk with her about shopping and specifically why today it feels like we're so awash in objects that it's harder than ever somehow to find the thing you actually need. This is a big conversation we started off by talking about the origins and evolutions of shopping as something that humans do and finished by trying to figure

out what does ethical behavior look like in 2022. If you want bonus episodes and other bonus content you can find that at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About or on Apple Plus subscriptions and later on this month we're going to be releasing some of the amazing, heart-stopping, gorgeously brave and open-hearted music that our producer, Carolyn Kendrick, graced us with during our live shows. Oh and hey, we had live shows, they went great, I hope you were there and if you weren't there, we're planning to come to your city at some point. There's no escape, don't worry, you can't get away. Thank you for coming if you were there, thank you for listening if you weren't and here is the episode. Welcome to You're Wrong

About, the podcast where we tell you why it takes 47 steps to buy a washcloth and with me today is Amanda Mall who is truly one of my favorite writers who has been explaining the present moment to me for years and you write about consumer culture and products and manufacturing and the economy and I feel like you were kind of the first reporter that I trusted on COVID. You and Seth Meyers man, without you guys I don't know what I would have done. Well thank you so much, yeah, I think that you've got my beat like exactly correct but essentially yeah, I think of it as writing about how people experience life which means how people experience consumer culture, how people experience the objects around them and the things that they do with their money

and how they form their sense of self through the things that are around them and how they spend their money. Yeah and I worked in fashion for a long time before that so I am have always been really intensely interested in why it is people spend money and that makes sense because you also have great personal style like I feel like you're covering the world of objects and you're not like against objects. Yeah, yeah, I grew up and still to this day really love stuff, really love shopping. A lot of my work I think is just sort of me trying to figure that out for myself and try to like figure out why I'm like this and why I do this stuff. I should also reveal that my investment in this topic is that when I was a tween my family lived in Honolulu and I remember this

like ongoing battle between me and my mom where like every weekend she'd be like let's go to the beach and swim and I'd be like let's go to Alamoana because that was a mall and I loved the mall like I loved the process of the mall like going to the mall like seeing the things touching the things the music the fountain the observing other teams I don't know it's what I imagine like the Agora the marketplace to be like yeah right okay so yeah let's get into it and so I want to try and do something similar to what we tried to do in the email episode which was to say how did something that we had such utopian dreams about end up like this one of the ways the internet was sold was that like you can have email hooray you can like check stocks on AOL that was one of its

main uses you can chat and you can buy underwear in your underwear like I feel like this was somebody slogan at the time there was this sort of you know techno utopian sense of like oh my god this is going to change everything and now the distance between us and the most useful object that we need right now is like as tiny as possible it's like Sam Neil folding that paper an event horizon to show how a wormhole works like that's what shopping is going to do for our lives like everything we need is at our fingertips and it's become instead everything is at your fingertips but you can't get what you need because everything is at your fingertips right and you're in a giant garbage dump and somewhere in the garbage dump is like the normal rug that you want but where could

it be yeah yeah there are failures in online shopping that are both like functional and like philosophical we just have a scale of stuff that the human mind cannot really easily content with there are so many options that are sort of packaged and repackaged in so many ways that we don't really know how to interact with that scale of options there seems to be no good way to tell google exactly what it is that i want in like a bookshelf or in a sofa or whatever that is going to make it function well for me past a certain point like google over time has become in my mind in my experience and in the experience of some other people who have read on this sort of like less useful because google is a search engine but it's also an advertising

company the incentives google and its search results are functioning on are different than the incentives that i have been functioning on it's also isn't it amazing to like note that we just accepted that sort of without really noticing that it was going on like as quietly google became it's like yeah it's a search engine it's how you find all available information and also we do run ads and we do shove stuff with ad dollars behind it in front of your face ahead of other more relevant stuff and we just do that and we're the most powerful version of that thing and we own everything and you just don't worry about it it's like and we kind of don't like that's incredible right i think we really are sort of frog spoiled slowly

that's what makes us so delicious yeah when it comes to this part of like the internet's infrastructure i think that google was really really smart about how slowly and methodically it got us to this point you can see sort of comparisons over the years of what google search results look like on the internet this sort of like screenshots of like what they looked like in like the 90s and like the early 2000s late 2000s and on oh boy what you really see is the expansion and the amount of real estate that ads have they used to have like a different color background to them they used to have larger flair next to them they have over time begun to look more and more like legitimate results and it also depends on the consumer evolving or being left behind right

like i always assume that the first like nine results are ads and also the bottom four probably if i'm like an old lady and i'm trying to google something and i'm served like 14 scams at the top of the page and i'm like this must be the most relevant then like i'm just gonna get scammed all the time right right this type of media literacy is difficult to establish in people it's difficult to cultivate you know google is at this point like basically a utility i don't know how you could live without it honestly it is the sort of organizing infrastructure of a lot of information that people need on a day-to-day basis it is a really important piece of of the internet's infrastructure that is for profit and not necessarily thinking about the best interests

of the people who use it and like a lot of the internet is that way so it's hard to get people to sort of walk back their expectations of google to the point where it's like oh maybe they shouldn't be showing me all these ads maybe this is why i don't know how they did it in the the most recent spider man but i remember in andrew garfield spider man when he like started turning into spider man he like goes online and he like bangs it calm down i'm banging whether i'm turning into spider man and at the time i was like this is the most awful egregious ad placement ever like never in 100 years would peter parker he's bang and now i'm like no peter parker would use bang because he knew how all this was was going he was like screw you guys

i'm using bang so yeah i mean this is an incredibly sinister dystopian thing and i must point out that we've already found a direct parallel satisfyingly to the email episode that we did not long ago with anaheill and peterson where a big part of how we ended up in the dystopia is that google did something real shady and none of us really noticed and then by the time we noticed we were like uh whatever like i said google has different incentives in showing me search results than i have when i go searching for something and that's true of basically every every company that that creates any part of the internet's infrastructure none of this is out of the kindness of their hearts so if you're looking for anything online whether it's like to buy something you need it like a

decent price or it's to find some information about like a health problem you're having or or something like that you have to wade through all of the layers of like profitable bullshit that exist between you and the actual thing or piece of information or help that you were looking for i'm picturing shelly winters in the Poseidon adventure just like swimming and swimming and just hold your breath just keep going you're gonna make it right the layers of that profitable bullshit never decrease they only increase so if you google something like best mattresses 2020 or 2022 what year is this who knows um not me best mattresses 1974 yeah you know you might get a carousel at the top that's like google shopping results that are all ads and you might look through

those some of them might be enticing the sort of like really pernicious thing about the way that google ad search results function is that a lot of times they do show you stuff that like it's like fairly relevant and like stuff that you're interested in but like it rubs me the wrong way that i am being shown that because somebody paid to have to have that like incepted into my consciousness yeah this gets to something that i feel like is like underlying a lot of this which is the kind of the theme of millennials as consumer and how like we get accused of killing all these industries and really we either opted out of something that didn't make sense didn't have the money for it the way that previous generations did or just like something

happened within an industry and we were just like blamed randomly as the people who are supposed to be buying the most stuff consumer history is very short consumerism as we understand it and as we experience it now is about a century century and a half old that is incredible shopping didn't exist before that people bought things but the system that we exist in to buy things now is completely different in scale in infrastructure in everything so if you're dealing with only like 100 to 150 years of history the assumption that the things that were popular or profitable or whatever when our parents were kids that those things would be profitable and popular forever right those businesses should be should exist in perpetuity

with no challenges or no change in consumer taste is just very weird right a lot of businesses that serve consumers are not really designed or intended or built to last more than like a generation or two and like i think that that's fine so since we have a fairly short history of shopping as we know it um could i have it all right now in a condensed version sure sure well shopping itself and consumerism itself is like pretty short but commerce has been with us as long as humans have had complex society i think a lot of people who who want to critique critique consumerism for like very good reasons tend to sort of idealize a past in which people didn't have to like buy things and that is a past that has like never existed the concept of like a

centralized marketplace goes back to prehistory and you can find archaeological evidence of them across the Mediterranean the Middle East Asia and then over time they become more and more centralized during antiquity they sort of become the early zoning laws basically sort of constrict commerce to particular places within these sort of like new city centers and this is something that this process of of creating a central marketplace as sort of a thing around which a city or an urban environment builds itself is something that repeats in America in consumer society and while definitely people in the past did more things for themselves than most people do now humans have always been reliant on each other people have always lived in cooperation

with each other and part of that just makes sense like once you get to a point in prehistory where people start making tools and doing more like complex skilled tasks it makes sense that not everybody would be a person who knows how to make pots and pans skill specialization and trade like that is a really natural and important part of human society and it has been for tens of thousands of years now and understandably we kind of link commerce with feeling distanced from each other most of the stuff in this room comes from target I don't have kind of a sense of like meaning behind the objects or a feeling of like I made this or somebody I know made this or like them relating to some kind of lived part of my life or my community and so it feels like

the story of commerce first exists is something where people are in community with each other and then it's become something that makes us feel extremely alienated from each other I think that that is like precisely the narrative arc of human consumption over time the vast majority of human history people provided certain things for themselves like before the advent of you know garment factories the women in families generally were spinners and weavers and people who could make you know raw materials into cloth and then into clothing a lot of things were done by hand in a way that doesn't really exist in any appreciable scale now so I don't want to discount the fact that those processes were largely more domestic and less

commercial right but you still get to the point where you have you know think about like the silk road this is thousands and thousands of years ago where people were you know going out and finding things that were unavailable to people where they lived and acquiring those things and then reselling them to people in in places where those things didn't occur naturally and this has been a process the sort of like globalized trade has always been an element of human life it's just the scale to which that determines the objects that in people that you interact with has changed a lot people in the middle ages probably bought more stuff than we realized they did there's evidence that people you know went to bakers and bought bread and went to you know bought meat from other

people and went to baths humans in complex society basically can't live with without commerce is like an important way to understand why consumerism is so central to life now because it really does play on this sort of like very essential cooperative way of living that people have had for a really long time and it just sort of like takes the cooperation out of it wow yeah and I mean of course it makes perfect sense to think that like really throughout history when we have been able we have outsourced things to other people in our community depending on how you use that term because there's just only so many things that a human being a can be good at and b has time for so it's like either you imagine that people in history were just like just fundamentally very

different from us like less frivolous less interested in stuff way more capable way more rugged you know like to to think about people going to like a nice sort of spa bath in the middle ages conflicts with the idea that people in the middle ages were like entirely busy dying of the bubonic plague right or like writing in a manuscript in humans inherent in humans is this real desire for for pleasure and for beauty and for leisure and for all of these things that people act like were invented in 1975 right and that people act like are entirely induced by modern forces and that if you can just you know free yourself free your mind that you can get past when in fact these are like essential elements of being human and they're the things that get

exploited in order to create consumer culture when you look around at the people around you and don't understand their role and like often don't understand your own role or or have this like deep and abiding sense that maybe your role is like bullshit maybe you're not doing anything valuable with your time maybe you're alienated from your your purpose and your your humanity by the work that you do that is that creates like a lot of a lot of like psychological tension for people I think because if you can look at someone and go oh that person is a farm worker they harvest the food that I eat that you understand your relationship to that person and they're in their relationship to their work and your relationship to their work and when you take out all of the jobs from from a

country or a society that are you know toward the creation of the material goods that the society needs you take out a lot of jobs that that are sort of like fundamentally understandable and that fundamentally sort of like tie people to each other and to the work that they do and what you get is like a service economy which is what the United States basically has and what the beginning of consumerism implemented so what's a service economy this is basically like where we're at in the United States right now is that we have an enormous amount of people who are they are sort of at the whims of the general public and are sort of beholden to the spending habits of the general public in like a really direct way like those are generally jobs that

are not organized that don't have like a strong union presence in them less likely to be full-time benefits positions their jobs that tend to be much more seasonal lower paid you sort of trade manufacturing jobs which after industrialization when unions became much more popular you trade those jobs you know without sourcing with globalization to other economies where they also become worse those jobs get worse for other people who are now doing them and then the jobs that are remaining for people who might otherwise be doing them are also worse you know labor costs a lot and the people who run the economy are generally trying to limit it this is making me wonder like why newsboys went extinct because I know one of the reasons was that it was replaced

by home delivery but it's like why was that more economical and required so many fewer when why did we have to lose children selling newspapers this is this is all I care about part of it was probably child labor loss and yet children are allowed to ride their bikes around checking papers on but the point is that they don't do it all day so there you go so it became a morning job so okay in the the 19th century prior to to this era you have a populist that is like in America that is like mostly rural that mostly you know makes their own clothes grows most of their own food and the things that they need to buy usually come from like dry goods stores

they don't participate like actively in like the formalized nine to five work economy because that sort of comes with industrialization right so shopping as a thing does not exist as it does today in this era and this is like the late 19th century it's not that long ago yeah because like you go to the general store and like the guy in your community who owns it is behind the counter there's no like packaged goods at this point and then for other stuff like if you wanted if you needed more milk then you could like personally produce or more eggs or something and you had like a neighbor down the road who who had extra you just like traded with people around you which is nice but also like I don't want to overly idealize it because there was a lot of

hunger in this era this also reminds me of the book I think it's called debt by David Graber he's like you know we have this idea and we teach history as if before there was credit there was money and before there was money there was bartering and if we lived in a village I would just be like hey I've got some extra cheese can I have some of those socks you make and you'd be like yes here you go thank you for the cheese here your socks and the kind of opening point of that book is like actually that doesn't make sense because like who's to say that the person who wants socks you know can offer something the sock maker wants like why would the sock maker necessarily want cheese what if your lactose intolerant and all I can make is cheese what do I do then

from the beginning or for as long as we have engaged in commerce there's also been a concept of debt and of not having the exact right specific goods to exchange in the moment as the way that economy is originally worked but being like you give me socks and then I will owe you and I will sell my cheese to someone who has something that you want we I think that we want to have also this utopian idea of commerce existing in a way that was like more trusting and and more effortless and not about debt and it's like no we've it seems like we've always had debt and we've probably always been horrible to each other about it where I think that like the horribleness of the way debt works in today's economy is is a lot more evil than anything

we could have achieved before but yeah we've always believed in debt right right a lot of these types of stores had you know tab systems where you would basically like owe it to them like if you're a dry good store owner and somebody owes you a couple bucks for some flour and some nails and they they put it on their tab it's not like that guy is just going to like avoid your dry good store for the rest of his life like he has to come in there again eventually he's probably not going to move he's probably not going to go to a different dry good store because there's probably not like really a competitor and you know if he can't pay for for nails and flour then like he probably doesn't have you know the ability to shop around you know you exist in

communities with the people who are providing the goods and services that you need and that makes the sort of concept of debt just a little bit like smaller scale and more understandable right as opposed to existing in an economy that asks us to sort of imagine and grasp these huge imaginary numbers that have no relationship to the actual money that we use in our day-to-day life right right the first industrial revolution has come and gone and we're starting the second one at which point mechanized production of consumer goods really starts to kick into gear and you end up with a lot of things being mass produced and like really huge quantities for like relatively low prices buying something ready made that's made in a garment factory is a lot less expensive so you

get a scale of consumer goods that is like never existed before in history it becomes a lot less work intensive to just buy something and because there are all these new factory jobs you know the the industrial revolution brings with it a lot of different types of labor that have never existed before so you get this rural population that is like moving to cities in droves the urban population of the united states basically triples in the 1800s and you get them doing new types of work you get them working in factories doing all of these these types of jobs that are made possible by industrialization and then you create like a like a layer of sort of administrative workers over them which is like basically the beginning of widespread office work so you have a lot of

consumer goods that have never existed before and a lot of people whose lives are different than their parents lives the marketing and advertising industry is sort of sort of emerge alongside industrial production because what you have is a lot of goods that don't really have a natural market because nobody has needed them before such as well one of the best demonstrations of this i think i have crypt this example from a book called satisfaction guaranteed which is by the historian susan strasser who i love but she starts satisfaction guaranteed with like the story of crisco the crisco began as sort of like a perfect example of industrial problem solving you've got all of this raw material cotton that is being used to make textiles to produce ready-made garments that

can be sold in stores so you're using all of this cotton in such a large scale and one of the waste products of industrial cotton cultivation is cotton seeds cotton seeds contain an oil if you press them and then partially hydrogenate the the oil that they express hydrogenation it's hard to say it creates trans fats i know that changes the chemical structure of this oil and what it does is it makes it solid and shelf stable at room temperature okay cotton seed oils previously a waste product you can get out of them basically a block of fat that exists in a form that it has never existed before in human history it is the first like pure vegetable oil in the united states wow all cooking that was done previously in the united states was done with animal fats

there's no natural market for vegetable oil people don't this is blowing my mind right now i'm picturing the people who came up with this like they have this like block of crisco in front of them and they're staring at it like the guys in ghostbusters too i mean i think that's basically what happened and and so and so like you have this like glowing piece of like solid room temperature theoretically cooking fat in front of you and you're like how okay think think think how do we get people to buy this right you know it creates another revenue stream for cotton producers it creates a bunch of factory jobs it creates a part a product for proctor and gamble that they can market so there's a lot of financial incentive on the part of lots of people involved in the

process of of creating crisco to make it profitable so proctor and gamble you know creates a marketing campaign they tout its health benefits they develop recipes that then they then give out at stores explain how to use it explain its benefits probably lying about them to sort of like you know induce demand for this product that no natural demand existed for i feel like his growing up in the 90s like every product that like was invented was marketed as if like you were the last person to be hearing about it right right and it's like look at this thing that's utterly essential to your life how did you ever survive before you dumb bitch like come get some immediately yeah absolutely and when mass media is still sort of like being developed it is really

possible to tell people that like oh everybody uses this it's fantastic you've never heard of this before you haven't been using crisco like like look at this drawing of this happy lady on this marketing pamphlet don't you want to be the happy lady i do i do want to be the happy lady it's all i want and this happens over and over again in the sort of process of industrial production is that you realize you have the ability to make something and then you have to figure out how to sell it really explains a lot yeah and and this is still like basically like the guiding functional rudder of consumer culture clearly it is extremely explicit because this is also the era of like the sort of nascent labor movement right the industrial barons had a lot

of problems with their workers these factories keep catching on fire and then it's a pr issue and people are sub tweeting about us right our workers are complaining that we keep killing them it's kind of annoying right this is the era of like the developing american labor movement this is the era of strikes and pinkertons and and all of this real upheaval about the relationship of workers to capital to their bosses to the industrial barons that determine the circumstances of their lives now and in most people at this point do not trust the robber barons do not trust the industrial barons think that they are doing bad things for the country think that they are hurting people you don't have the phenomenon that you have now where people are like obsessed with like

Elon musk and Jeff Bezos is like godkings like it was surprising to me learning about this period having grown up in the america of you know the last 30 years that the labor movement was so strong that like the sort of robber baron you know leaders of capital class was like genuinely worried like people were genuinely scared by strikes and by the power of striking workers which did not seem true to the country that i grew up in right this is an era of the you know nascent labor movement in the united states that is like you know manages to gain a considerable amount of power the the threat of striking workers was a real threat to the you know way of life of the ruling class and you know the ruling class definitely had its allies and media

there were probably plenty of workers who sided with the bosses but i think generally on average my understanding of the period is that people were really distrustful of this system and really distrustful of the rich maybe because their friends kept dying in front of them the intent of the industrial barons during this era is to disrupt this perception a little bit and they've got sort of a convenient thing going for them which is that there is now a different type of worker available to them which is office workers and people making more money people with disposable income people with like a type of like potential lifestyle that didn't exist before scabs as far as the high can see and the information in this era comes from mostly from a book by william leach

called land of desire which is about department stores basically what happens is that industrial barons see sort of an opportunity to like hit a lot of birds with one stone and so you have all of this product that a lot of it does not have a natural market people don't know that they need different clothes for different situations because that has never been true in the past you know largely like you know people had people had a couple suits of clothes and you you you know you washed them you mended them you altered them as you needed to alter them the idea that like you needed a that office work required a business outfit or that required a certain type of clothes to indicate that you were a person who did a certain type of work did not exist so you had to you

needed a place where you could sort of explain all of these goods to people and sort of make them desirable and make them available and make them legible visible to people you have people with disposable income that don't do physical labor anymore so you can sell them fancier stuff and then you have burgeoning cities that have a need for public spaces and a need for the shaping of civic life and we haven't really decided as a country yet at this point like what a city is going to be and how it's going to be how it's going to function and who were going to be influential within it and what happens is that a lot of these industrial barons end up opening like sort of grand department stores you get wannamakers macy's marshal fields a lot of these sort of like old

names that still persist in some ways during our current era or that have been sort of phased out recently i went to macy's recently and there was one guy working the entire floor it was great yeah macy's has changed a lot like if you've ever been to a a department store flagship in like the city that it's based in that has been there for like forever like the macy's in herald square there used to be there was an old riches in atlanta that's no longer there r.i.p to riches these are like cathedrals you know industrial production was giving us all of these goods at like friendly prices that had never existed before so you need a place to put all this stuff and then you make them feel like really really fancy and you staff them up with people who are basically who are service

workers but who are sort of like quasi servants and what these are intended to do is sort of like attract this like burgeoning middle class into these spaces to spend their money and also to pete the ruling class the the money to elite in this era as their friends as people who are providing them with things as people who are interested in the in the civic success of their cities who are they put on performances they hosted concerts they gave away turkeys at thanksgiving they um they contained uh lots of services that people could access just like bumpy an american gangster right right so the industrial barons needed to sort of repeat themselves as like marshals of civic good hmm wow and of people who were sort of like benevolent and who were

going to provide for this this new middle class that was sort of like developing a class consciousness of its own right yeah it's so interesting to like like not only are you noticing a consumer class and then inventing things to sell to them right or like coming up with industrial like uses for industrial byproducts and being like yeah we can people will buy this they'll decide they want this if we tell them to also you're inventing a like civic space in which to be a sort of like pseudo governmental figure in a way right if you're like king of the department store then you really you are in charge of a sort of town square type of a space right right you were really an unelected civic figure huh wow this gives the industrial barons an opportunity to basically

split workers and have middle class office workers think of themselves as fundamentally different than people who worked in factories and mines and stuff like that right and it helped the middle class understand their their fortunes as tied to the fortunes of the wealthy right to like tell them that they're different but also like that they have to remain ever vigilant about remaining different and like that if you don't buy the right home furnishings you might actually look like a factory worker and that would be terrible you have a real opportunity to sort of exploit some of these like anxieties in people and that's how you create trends i knew it that's how you get people to buy stuff they don't need like it's not the only way of course all this excess

stuff excess inventory that the world manufacturing apparatus is so good at creating now how does this stuff sort of function in like the history of consumerism and it basically functions in this way as you you try to you know you use whatever whatever tricks you can to sort of induce demand and exploiting anxiety is like in whatever way possible is one of the oldest sales tricks in the book and you also get an opportunity to and i referenced this before but to sort of sever these goods from their origin you can look back on some quotes of advertising and marketing people who were sort of like creating their creating their industry being very explicit on the fact that you should not let anybody know the conditions in which these things are made nobody should

ever be thinking about a factory when they buy a dress they should only be thinking about how they feel and the opportunity to sever consumption from production it gives an opportunity for manufacturers for brands for marketers to sort of fill in their own backstory and in in effect you sort of get people en masse in this in this middle income tier to like forget about workers to forget about people in factories to forget about people who make material things you convince them over time that their fortunes and the fortunes of the working class are not just like not only just not aligned but are at odds yeah because you get used to your conveniences and you get used to your consumer choice to all of these new comforts that you have and then suddenly

when striking workers you know want better safety conditions and want slightly shorter hours and want more pay suddenly those people are threatening the sort of ease and comfort that you have scratched and scraped and inclined to get yourself and also feeling like it's obligatory to have these things right we're like as a woman anyway it is like you're making some kind of statement if you wear the same outfit every day or like the same couple of outfits like that's something that for children is like something that can single you out for vicious mockery like something that marxie was like somehow really weird and like that's just a standard that we accepted sort of suddenly and then can be used to turn us against each other

poverty is a great social sin in america right this is sort of like a thorny subject because this sort of gets into like more contemporary arguments about like whether or not it's classist to criticize she in and people who shop there oh wow yeah my understanding of she in is just that like it's super cheap you can order a ton of stuff so people are on social media doing these like by the way i thought it was called shine for like years so do i i have to stop myself from not pronouncing it shine because i have been told repeatedly is not that i know and yet my brain wants it to be shine so i want to pronounce it as a german word but and then like people will do these halls where they get like

you know these giant you know very satisfying to look at giant bags and boxes of clothes and then my understanding of the kind of ritual of it is that then like a lot of it is gonna suck and you're gonna have to return it or something and i have like never returned an online purchase in my life i lack the executive function to do it so i'm just scared but tell me about she in because that's what i know she and is sort of fascinating it sort of takes a lot of the a lot of the dynamics that i think we're going to talk about in more detail a little bit later to their logical extreme where everything is extremely inexpensive there have been lots of allegations of worker abuses against them there have been situations in which people have like regulatory

agencies have found really elevated levels of lead in their children's clothing in particular that's not good right and they make really inexpensive clothing essentially is it like forever 21 prices i remember forever 21 when i would chop there being like a dollar 90 for a tank top and you're like they're practically paying me to wear it yeah i think that like a good way to describe this for people in their like early to mid 30s is that it is like forever 21 prices if inflation had not happened between like 2004 and now oh wow so you get these really really inexpensive things and you get people who who buy just an enormous amount of them and who don't want to repeat an outfit and who um you know are sort of like quasi-compulsive about this and this is

an indefensible way to interact with the world but people people feel like this is sort of central to their identity they feel like they are you know not fully participating in the social world if they can't do these things if they can't have this much clothing i think we should see more tv characters repeating outfits you know partly because gist of an outfit is really great it would be nice to see it again you're like there it is looks good and i am you know enormously sympathetic to this idea this sort of anxiety that is inherent in a lot of people that that they have to continue buying new clothes and having new clothes otherwise they are going to look behind they're not going to fit in with their friends they're not going to fit in with like the culture at

large they're they feel out of sync with things because everything is really accelerated by the internet and we live in such a visual culture now because of you know camera phones and whatnot that i understand why people especially young people feel like they're being constantly observed right yeah because they are so that's fair because in a lot of ways they are so i understand why they are defensive about this process of continuing to buy more and more clothing as cheaply as possible from from sources that are bad and like none of our none of our clothing comes from good sources you can spend a lot more money and still encounter the same problems that you'd encounter with she ends clothing so it's really just the sort of like rate of replacement

that is i think the worst that is uniquely bad about she in people are defensive about this and say that you know this is this is the only stuff that i can afford to buy this is this is within my price range and like i want to be able to participate in culture too and i am sympathetic to that but i think that you have to sort of take the wider view in that like this anxiety in you that you feel has been induced for the benefit of these companies it is not inherent in your being it is not inherent in culture it is not inherent in human life the reason you feel anxious about this is because it's profitable for a lot of other people for you to feel anxious i think the only like structural way to solve that is regulatory but also i think that there is probably also

personal value and ethical value in acknowledging that sort of working through your feelings on it and then like opting out of it as much as you can if you don't have a whole lot of money and you're trying to buy some clothes to you know go to your first job and you want to look professional then yeah you might have to buy like a bunch of of cheap shitty clothes in order to do that because if you got to show up every day you're going to need a lot of different stuff but also i think there's a lot of people who are doing this i think part of it's compulsive i think that we sort of exist in a in a constant clothing casino where we're just trying to like order enough stuff to get like two things that we really like right yeah it's impossible to tell

whether any of the stuff will fit it's impossible to tell if it's going to look like it does on on the website so uh something that online commerce does really effectively is sort of alienates people not only from like the process of the creation of the thing they're buying but also alienates people from the thing itself you are not buying like a material good you are buying the idea of a material good right that you don't get to see in person until after you've already paid for it and then you know returning things is a pain in the ass so you you get people who really over consume and intend to return things and then just don't yes and that sort of builds in a certain amount of surplus sales for these marketers and for these companies that wouldn't

exist otherwise so internet shopping is pretty effective at that i feel like you just answered one of my essential questions which is like why do we live in this economy where it's like so much easier to get like 50 of something and two of them are decent than to just get like the thing you need and it's like because everyone makes more money if you buy a bunch of crap and then it's too stressful to return it it's like that's just obviously more profitable for the people who are selling you stuff and that's why we all do it because objects proliferate you know if a market for them can be somehow created i mean this actually reminds me of the conversation about true crime and like when people are like true crime is big now and i'm like well true crime has always been

big it's just that whenever there's a new sort of media platform for it to be on like it will drive the progress of that platform and like proliferate on it and sort of find a voice there and we've been witnessing that with with new platforms but that's just what it does and i guess it's just it's the same thing with clothes and stuff like that yeah yeah i think it's interesting here if we go back a little bit in time and look at sort of like the creation of online shopping yes in the same way that like the true crime helps platforms do their thing new types of media and porn historically helps new types of physical media work out what is going to be the dominant form going forward with like vhs and dvds i think that clothes shopping sort of helped

cement like once they figured out how to sell clothes online online shopping really became a thing that wasn't quite as much of a novelty as it had been right you know during the during the dot-com boom in the in the late 90s you get like a series of companies that sort of come online we know what a lot of them are it's amazon and ebay and some of their contemporaries and then a little bit later paypal so pets.com yeah pets.com and then a little bit later paypal which helps people feel okay about making payments online so once you have like the basic infrastructure to like what a website should look like how to purchase something on a website and a way a way of paying that you feel reasonably safe about like putting your credit card number into a website then you've

got sort of like the basics set of how online shopping will work and how it still works you know the dot-com boom goes bust and a lot of these companies sort of fall away but some of them stick around one of them sticks around is Zappos it started as basically a shoe site where you could buy like a really a really wide variety of shoes and now it sells all kinds of clothing and accessories and stuff but back in the day in 1999 it was founded and then in 2003 they introduced something that has been highly influential which is free returns oh yeah no posting see i've never returned something so i wouldn't know yeah the entire history of consumer culture is trying to find ways to take friction out of the process of buying something so you have a product that you want to

sell you create a use case for it you create an ideal customer for it you market it you advertise it you get it in front of people you get it in stores during the department store era not only where we sort of like creating classes as we know them in the united states but we were creating consumer credit and that takes another level of friction out of the process like you can buy stuff that you can't like strictly afford right now when you move shopping online there is a considerable obstacle and that you can't fucking touch the thing you can't feel it you can't put it on you can't sit on it you can't for shoes you can't walk around in them and see if they rub like you can't you can't see if it has a weird smell which is often an issue yeah you're not sure

that it's going to be like exactly the color that you think it is online shopping prevents you from having a lot of information about an object that you would normally have about the object before you purchased it so how do we make those risks feel less how do we how do we make people feel like they are not playing themselves by ordering by ordering something online that that is going to like be on their body that they that they need to to enjoy feeling and enjoy standing on you know whatever how do you get past those objections because those are real and reasonable objections people did not want to buy clothes online there is no obvious use case for a website that sold sold fitted clothing or shoes online yeah what zappos did was introduce free returns so basically

they were saying like we know you don't want to do this we get it this is a bad idea but we guaranteed that you could return your shoes first it was within 60 days now famously they they have a 365 day return policy which i think they went to pretty quickly because that is what you need to offer in order for people to grant you the premise of buying shoes on the internet yeah if people feel genuinely confident buying something online that makes more sense to buy in person will not incur them any additional fees then they'll do it if they feel really good about it then they'll do it so zappos essentially created the the capacity in people to buy clothing online and a lot of those policies you still you still see reflected throughout online shopping

they are not sustainable policies and this is part of how online shopping gets so centralized in just a few websites because it is really expensive to offer free shipping and free returns and to take that many returns okay and like taking returns is really labor intensive like you need a person to physically open the packages and inspect the items and and scan them back into inventory or scan them out to get junked or to put them out for like an off off-price channel to go to outlets or whatever depending on the condition of the item or whatever and doing that by hand is like I interviewed a couple of people about this for when I wrote about the sort of like nasty logistics of returns and like two separate people said the word nasty to me

and what in reference to specifically do you have examples taking these returns opening these packages trying to sort the absolutely random bullshit that's inside of them trying to decide if it's saleable trying to decide if it should be broken down for parts trying to decide if it should go back into regular inventory if it if there is time for it to go back into regular inventory before that stuff is discounted somebody has to sit there and do it by hand there is no machine that does this because you have to evaluate it with your own eyes to see if it's used and it seems like anything that requires like a human job to do it that can't be outsourced to a computer is like something that is a business you have to be very

careful about right and much of the popularity of online shopping has to do with businesses sort of doing everything they can to induce people to shop online because that is a less labor intensive way of selling than than renting storefronts and staffing stores you can reduce your real estate costs you can reduce your labor costs you gain back some profitability that you have probably lost over time the tendency of the rate of profit is to decline so you are constantly looking for ways to to goose that again and to get as much shareholder value as you can out of these processes so that is I think why you see a lot of brick and mortar retailers really asking people to to order online and pick up in store because that is a person who just needs to be handed

something it is not somebody who needs to ask a question or who needs you to go find something that is supposed to be in stock but isn't because you have functionally turned that store into like a fulfillment center wow which just changes the level of customer service you have to provide it changes how you have to staff the store like you know if people are checking out online then you don't have to put as many people up at the registers like you reduce the the line wait time for in-store customers so they're happier theoretically this should work it often it does not really work that way but people are attempting to streamline it enough and make it a big enough part of the business that it works basically and it makes sense on paper but it just

gives you that like creepy feeling like society has ended and nobody told you yeah we are sort of like at the at the point where where a lot of the sort of like interpersonal texture of this stuff is just gone yes like really what I need in a store is for a salesperson to tell me that I look cute and what I've picked out and I understand that I might not actually look cute as far as they're concerned but really that's what I'm paying for is to be told I look cute that's what I want to be able to try something on before you pay for it it's fantastic it's it's quite reasonable yeah and fitting rooms are like sites of trauma for for many of us but like it's true when you sort of like stop having access to them in the same way that you used to because right the stores

are gone you miss them I miss them oh yeah I would love to be able to walk into a store and try some stuff on and uh and walk out with just what I like and what I think I will actually wear instead of having to like convince myself I will wear the stuff that I have already ordered to my apartment and paid for yeah and also like as a side note I do wonder about the people who originally were in charge of designing dressing room lighting because I assume that somebody at some point was like well it should be as harsh and unflattering as we can possibly find because people buy more stuff when they feel terrible I guess I don't know yeah I think that that is part of this sort of like overall deterioration of like the the retail experience as we were promised when the system

was created because these these old grand department stores had like beautiful settings for you to try on clothes to be helped to have things suggested to you like somebody who could do alterations would come in and tell you how they could often for free sort of you know nip this here and tuck this there and and it will fit you like a glove and but all these services and all of these facilities they they take up a lot of space that doesn't have product in it they require a lot of labor dollars perhaps as the head of a company believe that you could save and still sell basically just as much stuff so it goes from being that experience to being it's a nice fitting room but you go in there by yourself and there's like an attendant there who can like get you another

size if you need it and then you sort of like start losing things from that experience like the lighting is suddenly not so good the carpet is stained hasn't been cleaned in forever you know suddenly the attendant is not there um and get your own fucking sizes the light bulbs have been changed to something from something flattering to something that lasts a long time um so that you don't have to do as much maintenance the quarters in which you're doing the trying on have gotten smaller because they wanted to recapture some of that square footage to put product in you know so it's sort of like degrades over time and then you get all the way to the point where it's like just ordered on the internet you can try it on at home and if you remember you

can return what you don't like and if not you've paid for it and we'll have your money and that just makes it feel like essentially the middle class was created in order to like create a buffer between the working class and the ruling class and to create someone to like align with the ruling class but not be them because that would be terrible yeah and the payoff for like taking on this role is like well you get all this stuff you know and you get to shop in these beautiful department stores and have a turkey thrown at you by Andrew Carnegie and so you're like okay I'm gonna make this Faustian bargain and then time passes and generations you know die and are born and then like the thing that you like sold out your once fellow workers for just

sort of gradually degrades into almost nothing right it's like an Elka Seltzer the middle class experience the sort of philosophical failure of online shopping and its sort of technocratic promise is the idea that just having enough purchase options available and enough things to choose from and enough opportunities to buy things is enough to solve your problems is enough to be satisfying to you and it just fundamentally isn't because we were in this situation where this system was created in order to offload excess product to make new types of things profitable to create an opportunity to divide workers into two different groups that are you know putatively at odds with each other and to like sell the promise of like wealth

and privilege and aspiration to the middle class and that's why in the very beginning service was so important to these to these places because people had to feel special people had to feel served people had to feel like they imagined that rich people felt all the time and you could access that experience if you went in and bought something that's why the show is called are you being served god i'm learning a lot yeah yeah you could you know it's sort of a king for a day experience yeah well but then like over time again the tendency of the rate of profit to decline means that this experience degrades like the the promise was always hollow we were never going to just buy enough stuff to be happy so hollow stuff degrades pretty easy it turns out

i genuinely think that that is why you get a lot of these sort of like tension in retail stores why you get people you know assaulting workers why you get people you know having such intense rage at people in restaurants at servers and restaurants because this is there is this like sort of fundamental promise of the like consumer system that we live in that you the consumer are a always right which is like a concept that was created at the the dawn of department stores explicitly that by virtue of having money to spend then you are basically god for the duration of that interaction and you and you have people who will serve you yeah for a lot of people that's the only time in life where they have anybody who is sort of like

there to help them you know the middle class has hollowed out a good bit there people are more precarious financially than ever and there's a lot of people who end up falling out of the middle class and into you know a lower class position and that feels terrible because we have spent so much time inducing anxiety in people over being not rich enough you know i think that amazon has is sort of like the logical extreme of this like department store system because you you end up with a company a private company and people you did not elect who have sort of warms their way into the infrastructure of daily life in america it's hard to overstate the scale of amazon they have 150 million prime subscribers in the united states including me including me

the capacity for sales businesses for retailers to become like essential infrastructure in people's lives is like a first of all sort of demonstrates the the failure of like government in the united states to like actually govern its citizens and and provide things for them that should be more universally available and be like you know people do need objects they there's stuff that people need for for day-to-day life that is not optional a lot of the stuff sold on amazon is optional but you know some of it's not and depending on where you live depending on um whether or not you have a car there are some things that just like genuinely the easiest way for you to and maybe the only way for you to acquire something is through amazon because

there is like a real degradation in the sort of like daily functional infrastructure of life in like a lot of rural areas in and a lot of places where local stores have like closed and not a lot has reopened to to serve those communities so you end up just ordering stuff from wherever it's cheapest and like you know amazon is is so consolidated that that usually ends up being the the fastest and and relatively most inexpensive way to do a lot of that there is like a lot of like regulatory stuff that has gotten us to this point something i always like to mention on this topic is the 1980 motor carrier act say more um it deregulated the trucking industry malls big box stores walmart target etc and amazon would not exist if trucking regulations had not been

massively changed in the united states you know a lot of a lot of good union trucker jobs that like you could be a one-income family and put it in college by being a trucker those went away wages for truck drivers went down enormously and that's what made it affordable to cart enormous amounts of consumer goods across the country and mass so walmart target etc do not exist without like the gutting of the trucking system yeah a lot of commerce as it exists in the united states at this point is exists in formats that allow employers to pay less money employ fewer people do less for them provide fewer protections provide less stability because all of those things are expensive labor is expensive benefits are expensive providing stability means that you

might have to think about somebody else's well-being before you think about your own profitability that would be terrible right which is like essentially what union contracts sort of force people force employers to do against their will right is to recognize that workers are an equal partner in the creation of value not just an equal partner but the workers are the people who create value right they should be protected as such because you know without without the people driving ubers you just have a bunch of guys in an office in san francisco like shouting at each other on conference calls you don't have a product like you don't have a service it doesn't exist and that's not rare you could find that you know you guys are abundant so you've got in one of my

co-workers Derek Thompson has written about this but he has written about like there's like a real problem of like innovation in rich countries like there is not a lot being invented that's a value that like we have sort of like stalled out on our ability to imagine new futures as like a ruling class and that's bad because the ruling class decides what the rest of us get you know the there's just not a lot of creativity not a lot of vision happening which is uh which is bad because there's all this money sloshing around to create things that don't work and to employ people who move numbers around in spreadsheets who probably who are making a lot of money but probably don't like their jobs and probably don't feel fulfilled and feel and probably do feel alienated and then

you've got like that process that makes things worse for a lot of other people and that is like sort of like the the upshot of consumer culture is that somewhere in there there are there are good things that have happened as a result of industrial production like don't don't let me sound like you know I don't like air conditioning and washing machines and cheeseburgers like you're throwing your sub-o into the machinery yeah like the the technology that has been developed over the course of the last 150 years has done a lot of good things for people but a lot of those have been accidental I mean yeah at least thinking about the you know the terminology of like the market will sort of figure it out like the market response to what people want and it's like

that could be but like it turns out that the market it like a lot of the market is like 50 guys in quarters at fleece pullovers in mountain view california they don't respond to what people want they invent the juicero was it called that it was the juicero right not the juicero juicero is how I always pronounced it in my head in order to interact with your friends on social media in order to interact with with virtually anything in life there's an opportunity to buy something or something being offered to you that you might not have known about before people who use instagram I think see this most acutely and it's also as far as I understand it like pretty common now on tiktok instagram is full of sponsored ads you know your ability to chat

with your friends and see what they've been doing today is sort of interspersed with ads you know think about tv ads when you make content as a network and put it on air and pay for it and go through the process of creating it and then a an ad air is between that show and the next show the person who gets the revenue from the ad is it's mostly the company that footed the bill to create that content and to produce it and to create something that people want to look at whereas on instagram if you put up an instagram story create something that your friends want to look at and enjoy seeing and that go to that app to look at it the person or entity that gets the money from the ads that air between those units of content is instagram you end up not only

creating a lot of value for a company that you don't work for and that does not pay you anything but you also end up being constantly bombarded with things to buy right so you're actually losing money on on using instagram none of that value created none of the money for it goes to the people who created the value it goes to the people who created the platform i feel like you've answered my central question which is like why does shopping feel like such a false promise now and the answer essentially is like because it was always a false promise i feel like only people who don't have to worry about money say that money doesn't buy happiness and be that like maybe it doesn't buy happiness but it like buys you a lot of the like stairs

steps that you need to be standing on for happiness to be not constantly like whisked away by like disasters yeah like there are so many things that like i need or my house needs and i'm like oh my god i have to buy a colander like jesus christ like right there's so much going on and i have to somehow choose from like the south the thousands of colanders available to me all of which are like difficult to obtain in different ways but then there's the feeling of like i need something that i can't get like i need a feeling and i don't know how to get it so i'm gonna buy this bathrobe and then there's how people become brands which is probably a whole other episode but it makes sense that we want to be brands because brands are loved and cared for in american culture

we figured it out we're not dumb the more consumerist society gets the less of like an actual safety net there is for anything the less of like an actual because where there is sort of like a broad safety net that provides for people's basic needs that they don't have to like pay for at point of sale that are you know that are publicly funded and accessible to everybody that is something that can't be marketed to because the need is taken care of as consumer culture and and consumer companies and these conglomerates that sell all of the stuff to us become more more powerful there is no incentive for them for community programs or publicly funded programs to continue to exist because you know i guess it's really just like a

question of who is actually running society and i think to a large extent it is like google and amazon and apple and you know these huge tech companies that that determine so much of like the infrastructure of our daily lives and if they're going to be maximally profitable then we can't have non-market solutions to any of our problems yeah so you have to buy everything you need in life through you know one of these four companies and you have to build your self-conception through your purchases and through who you patronize and who you do not it's this sort of like mirage of agency it makes this seem like yeah like we're using our consumer choices to make ourselves feel like we have control and identity and to make up for like the

feeling of control that we have lost by the fact that like we really only have like four conglomerate options to turn to for most of the significant transactions or moments of our lives like we're like that we're so successfully owned by so few people that we have to console ourselves with being like look at look at my instagram look at my belongings they imply that there's an interesting story to my life and that i'm free right and like i don't fault anyone for doing that like i am doing all the things that i'm remarking on as worrying it's just that like i don't know how to stop doing them that's why it's scary because it's hard to stop right right and like you know in a lot of people's lives that is like the slice of agency that that they feel like they

have is that they can they choose how they spend their money you know the power that is available to them they want to wield it in certain ways and it becomes central to how they think about themselves in certain ways because because how you wield power is you know largely reflective of of who you are as a person i think you feel like you're being supplied with this endless array of solutions and yet it's only become another problem for you and like why are you not thriving when everyone else is thriving clearly because you can see them thriving in the ads people are really trying to like meet their neighbors and figure out like what what is within our collective power in this neighborhood on this block in our neighborhood to do something about some of this stuff you see

like mutual aid organizations and community fridges with free food that have popped up you know since the beginning of the pandemic and i think that those are those are great they pool resources among people who are not socialized to pull pool resources with each other if a person needs something and you have something you should give it to them and we're going to figure out what people need and what we have and what can be exchanged together the increased union activity across the country in the past year or so is is another indicator of this that like okay we've been told we're at odds with each other we're co-workers so theoretically we should be competing against each other for raises for um acknowledgement for management things like that but like actually

what if we helped each other what if we combined whatever power we have together figuring out ways to think more like that to think more about each other as people to whom our fortunes are are tied instead of people against whom we're competing in some way is like not only like a salve for some of the anxiety that makes us more susceptible to consumer pressures but just a great way to like occasionally in small ways like step outside of that system to help people meet each other's needs yeah yeah and i mean surely we have enough information to understand that the one of the ways to enact change and to make things hurt for people in charge is to disrupt the flow of goods and services by which you know really these words just all mean capital yeah well

ups drivers their 25 year teamster contract runs out next year oh i i do have an irrepressible polyana streak so this is just how i'm going to end any conversation we have to try and witness the possibilities that are engendered if we are kind of in this moment of everyone looking around and realizing that they're living in the consequences of the generations that went before them being bought out by capital essentially and realizing that like the the porridge that you traded your birthright for has already been eaten and there's just like no more porridge to lose i am a big believer that like it's worth it to try to act ethically when you can nonetheless mm-hmm so like if you can go ahead and like start thinking about the ways that those changes

might be pleasant for you and that you can go ahead and start doing them then i think that that is like a good exercise like ethically and morally even if you're you know you can't credit yourself with like toppling capitalism or whatever i don't think that has to be the goal of any action and i don't think that actions are failures because it doesn't do that i think that trying to mediate your own consumer impulses is like just the first step but it's a worthy first step yeah also like if you happen to be the individual who topples capitalism then that's great as well and that was online shopping thank you so much for listening thank you for joining us and continuing to ask these questions like what is this what's going on

how do i do things it sums me every day and i'm happy that you're wondering too thank you so much for your patience and waiting for this episode we can't wait to see you in two weeks you