Recently in Consumerism Category

Frustrating story in the NYT today about how small toymakers are being crushed by new federal safety regulations imposed in the wake of poisonous toys from China. Excerpt:

For 35 years, William John Woods has made wooden toys for children. Each one of the 2,000 or so he makes each year passes through his hands at his shop in Ogunquit, Maine, and no child, he said, has ever been hurt by one of his small boats, cars, helicopters or rattles.

But now he and others like him -- makers of small toys and owners of toy resale shops and boutique stores -- say their livelihood is being threatened by federal legislation enacted in the last year to protect children from toxic toys through more extensive testing. Big toymakers, including those whose tainted imports from China led to the recall of 45 million toys and spurred Congress to take action, have more resources and are able to comply with the new law's requirements.

"This is absurd," said Mr. Woods, whose toys are made of maple, walnut and cherry and finished with walnut oil and beeswax from a local apiary. He estimates it would cost him $30,000 -- a figure he calculated from having to pay $400 in required tests for each of the 80 or so different items he produces -- to show that they are not toxic.

"I use beeswax," Mr. Woods said. "The law was targeted at large toymakers using lead. There was no exclusion for benign products."

These homegrown toymakers are banding together to portray themselves as victims of bureaucrats and consumer advocates, and have started letter-writing campaigns to Congress.

Visit the website of the Handmade Toy Alliance to learn what you can do to help. You can't really blame the government for trying to do something to protect the public from the dangers of lead paint-coated toys from China. But this is a classic example of small producers who do things right having to pay for the sins of the megaproducers who only care about cheapness. Small farmers and food artisans suffer from the same bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all mentality, in which trying to address serious health problems caused by mass production has a potentially catastrophic effect on small producers who aren't causing problems in the first place.

Why not offer an exemption for small domestic manufacturers like William John Woods? Require them to put a sticker or something on their toys warning consumers that these products have not been tested under the government regulations, and then let consumers decide if they want to take their chances with these products. Maybe you have a better idea. Let's hear it.

My review in The American Interest of the book "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture" by Ellen Ruppel Shell. I especially liked the way Shell doesn't bother with the fish-in-the-barrel target that is Wal-mart, but instead goes after IKEA. Excerpt:

Though cultural sophisticates may look down their noses at proles piloting their land barges into vast Wal-Mart asphalt lagoons and trundling off in search of cut-rate merchandise, they fail to see how they too are co-opted by clever image-making. Shell slaps them hard in a devastating chapter demolishing the myth of IKEA. She could have just as easily taken a whack at Wal-Mart, every progressive's favorite discount whipping boy. Instead, she smartly goes after the Swedish furniture and housewares giant, which has none of the image problems of Sam Walton's stodgy, middle-American retail empire.

IKEA has positioned itself as a hip, green, stylish Euro-discounter, the kind of bargain barn that people who find bargain barns tacky can patronize with pleasure. Shell demonstrates pretty effectively (all the more so because her tone is so even) that the Swedes are conducting a brilliant sleight-of-hand on their customers. Worse, perhaps, than its environmental record--which is not nearly as pristine as the company would have its customers believe--IKEA sells the idea that furniture should be disposable, that we shouldn't expect anything more from it than a few years' use. The IKEA miracle is convincing people that there's something virtuous about paying for attractive but shoddy Scandinavian furniture that customers have to assemble themselves. This is part of a troubling but long-standing trend in which our valorization of low prices over value is driving out an appreciation for quality and craftsmanship. We have become so used to choosing low cost over quality that we are creating conditions in which we one day soon won't have the choice at all.

I've been working this summer to wake up early to pray for an hour, but it's been hit or miss. Last night, for example, we had a bad thunderstorm blow through. Power went out. All of us woke up. Struggled to get back to sleep ... and when the alarm went off at five, I kept turning it off until it was too late. And so it goes.

I am a horribly undisciplined person, spiritually and otherwise. My m.o. in college was to put off doing the paper until the night before, get juiced on caffeine, write like a fiend ... and, usually, make an A. But I never developed any good habits. I think one reason why I gravitate to highly structured, liturgical religion is because I am all too aware of what a slob, a layabout and a slave to my appetites that I am in my natural state. If I had Michael Jackson's money, I'd probably be snarfing down ... well, not Demerol, but Veuve Clicquot, and importing chickens from Bresse on a chartered flight for Sunday dinner. I need the rigor to remain human.

Notorious Jewish agrarian cult leader Sharon Astyk has been having similar thoughts. Excerpt:

Yesterday, I broke the Sabbath by working. I had a good reason, of course - I have a book deadline in less than two weeks, and I'm getting a little panicky that the manuscript might not be ready in time. It is a perfectly decent reason for doing something I shouldn't - except that I know that if I truly treated the Sabbath as inviolable, I'd have found a way to make sure that the book was further along. I know that somewhere in the back of my head, I had already allowed myself "well, if things get really dire, I could always break the Sabbath." And that's not exactly one of my proudest moments. ...

I do have self-discipline about some things - I won't turn the heat rather than put on a layer, I generally won't fly, even when people offer me a lot of money to come talk at their events, I won't tell someone I think they are right just to keep the peace. But it is a constant struggle with temptation. And I find myself attracted, yet again, to absolute solutions - longing for a life where the easy ways out don't even exist for me.

More:

Culturally, we tend not to have a lot of respect for people who lack self-discipline, or a lot of concern about the idea of temptation. We have decided, for example, that rules about avoiding sexual temptation, for example are outdated - we should, instead, rely primarily on our own self-discipline. Thus, older ideas of modesty (which of course have their problems, since they often were primarily emphasized for women) and restraint have fallen away - to be replaced primarily with self restraint. The only problem is, we don't have much.

The same thing is true with technologies - we are told that there's no point in objecting to a technology, or suggesting we shouldn't go down certain technical avenues - no one has to have a cell phone or a car or a whatever. The problem is that a narrative that says so presumes that we do have a cultural basis for self-denial, that we've been taught how to say no, how to think critically about our technologies, or, for that matter, about sex. It assumes that we've been taught to value self restraint.

There are real merits to self-denial and real pleasures in it, and not just austere ones, or the pleasures of being self-righteous. That is, I genuinely think my life without a car would be better, more enjoyable, more fun than my life with one. The economic, personal, time and social costs of the car - and certainly the costs of a car-based society are simply too high. But not only do most of us not realize that cars actually take more time and money than they return, but most of us have never in our lives been asked to think about what self-discipline might do for us, whether it has any merits, other than the ability to sniff down your nose at someone not as austere. In fact, the accusation of self-righteousness often completely undermines any discussion of self-limitation, simply because we cannot imagine that there are other merits involved.

There is certainly plenty of truth in the statement that I need more personal self-discipline, or that I can't blame the fact that I eat too many cookies on the culture as a whole. And I don't. But in a culture that dismisses the idea that temptation is a problem, that we might begin addressing our deepest social problems by restricting our capacity to give way to our worst selves, it is very hard to even begin to find a way at those problems.

Boy, she nails it, doesn't she? We don't live in a culture that sees temptation as a problem. Anybody who says we should resist it, or cut back on luxuries for some greater good, risks being called a scold, a Puritan or a snoot. These are the psychological defenses of someone -- or an entire culture -- who has a problem that they're not willing to come to terms with. As Wendell Berry has written:

"The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know it will not do."

Do we know that? Do I? I'm not sure that I do, but I give thanks that I have Orthodoxy to help me learn it day in and day out, despite my own laziness and lack of discipline. Fr. John Romanides, in the first line of his "Patristic Theology," writes, "The chief concern of the Orthodox Church is the healing of the human soul." Not "salvation in the next life," though that is entailed by Fr. Romanides statement, but healing of the human soul in the here and now. How profound that is, as I'm starting all too late to learn.

Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal writes about how America Online is trying to screw him out of $103. It's a pretty outrageous story. I've been on AOL since 1994, when it was a cool new thing to have. It seems like eons ago that AOL ceased to be cool, and in fact having an AOL address was considered the height of uncool. I never changed, simply because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of having to inform everybody I'd given my e-mail address to over the years that I had a new one. When AOL ceased charging for an e-mail account, that seemed like a smart thing to have done.

I'm wondering, though, if AOL stuck me with a hidden $103 charge as they did Zweig. Julie pays our bills, and she hasn't had an AOL account in ages, so she probably wouldn't have thought to have questioned an AOL charge on the credit card last year. I'll have to check my credit-card bills from the last few months of 2008 to see. If AOL did pull something like this, then whether or not I can get them to refund my money, that's going to be the thing that causes me to leave AOL, whatever the hassle. And I will do whatever I can to make this a public relations nightmare for the company. Nothing gets me wound up like corporate mistreatment of customers, as you may recall.

In today's NYT, Peter Steinfels takes the upscale-sleazy women's fashion and lifestyle magazine Marie Claire to school for a feature about five materialist ding-dongs who are finding comfort in hard times from religion. It's completely understandable that people who had rejected religion when times were good would find it calling to them in difficult times. But Marie Claire's idea of religion and hard times are pretty unintentionally funny. If I were the publicist who pitched this article to the NYT religion columnist, after reading how he responded in print to it, I'd climb under the bed and not come out till Monday. Excerpt:

Still, you should anticipate the objection that promoting religion as bargain-basement therapy is something of a category mistake, like publishing someone's account of voting under the banner "More Engrossing Than Sudoku" or trumpeting romance as "Juicier Than Fish Sticks" or describing the joys of cooking as "Faster Than Gardening."

Then there's the word "cheap." It doesn't appear a lot elsewhere in these pages. This is not to complain about the items surrounding your article about the effect of today's hard economic times on our sense of hope -- the $4,100 skirt or the $4,995 dress or the $1,250 clutch or the $315 diamond-dust-based body treatment at one spa or the $250 head-to-toe feng shui scrub-down and massage at another.

After all, Marie Claire also features what it calls "steals" and "best buys," although nothing that is "cheaper," except of course faith. Be warned, however. Some grump will probably write you about the best-known religious use of "cheap" in recent times. It occurs in the opening sentence of "The Cost of Discipleship," by the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed for his role in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church," Bonhoeffer wrote. "We are fighting today for costly grace." Perhaps your "five modern career gals" are too young to have heard of Bonhoeffer; otherwise they might have felt nervous about their tendency to treat religious faith like comfort food or a fashion accessory. Tell them not to worry. Bonhoeffer was the kind of guy who wouldn't know a Manolo Blahnik from a Vera Wang.

Go Peter Steinfels!