Cheap Goods, the End is Near.
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ANALYSIS, Global — Our town, our world, is drowning under a flood of cheap sub-standard products. Products that we can and did once live without.
This is because our modernist global economic system in English-speaking countries largely runs on the manufacture and mass consumption of cheap low-priced goods made from oil-based plastics.
Think about that for a second. What really happens?
The following chain of events was loosely based on media reports of the China pet food story, Fisher Price scandal, and recent other events.
Here is one average scenario:
A company in your city anywhere in the world gets an idea for a new product.
The company fly an award-winning designer over to design the product to be produced in a Chinese factory.
The Chinese factory signs a contract negotiated at the lowest possible cost. They have to, as the large company can always find a cheaper manufacturer.
To make or increase their profit, the factory owner in the distant Chinese factory substitutes paint or other ingredients to lower the cost.
The workers in the Chinese factory get small wages, and become sick from the toxic substances used (the human body does not like petroleum by-products, chemicals like formaldehyde or metals like lead.)
The designed goods are mass-produced and packaged in cardboard crates made by clear-felling forests and polluting pulp mills.
Via shipping containers on massive tankers, the goods finally arrive in the USA and western markets where they are shipped to their final destinations via road transport (because the governments won’t invest in railways).
The big company launches a huge marketing campaign with massive media-buys to market the new product to it’s core 15-19 y.o. female demographic at a price-point of USD $3.50 for which the factory gets 7c per unit.
In the local Walmart distracted ‘tween female consumers discuss whether the latest new betty-boo-thingamebob they do not need is worth $3.50 USD.
Walmart forces the company to initiate a promotional price-drop after they are not selling, to a new price of $1.99
The company re-negotiates its price even lower with the Chinese factory to around 4c per unit.
The factory increases the length of shifts and figures out new and unsafe production techniques to increase production.
At $1.99 the products walk off the shelves. And everybody congratulates themselves.
Postscript or how it ends:
The designer wins an award for innovative ‘tween design.
The big company executives vote themselves a bonus for ‘their’ product.
Walmart sets up a new store shutting down ‘main-street’ shops selling local products.
A few Chinese workers become sick. A father dies in an accident.
The Chinese factory owner buys a BMW.
More oil is imported by the Chinese to meet massive factory demand further driving up oil prices and forcing peak oil situation. (Plastics use oil)
The teenage consumer, taking the whole supply chain for granted throws away the product after the week.
After a few weeks betty-boo-thingamebob’s are broken everywhere.
By the end of the year 1 Million betty-boo-thingamebob’s are in landfill.
Being made of plastic they never decompose.
So that’s it. Depressing isn’t it?
Consider then this whole process happens every minute or more often. How many products are over-produced globally?
Too often we feel powerless. What can we do? You? Me?
Plenty.
Change the Rules… it has already started
Well global business is something humans designed. And we can change the rules.
Fact is Web 2.0 and the Creative Age are already changing the rules.
The Phone changed the rules. the Internet is changing the rules.
Steam powered industrial thinking changed the rules in 19th century England. Modernism changed the rules. But we are still stuck in modernism. or reacting against it (post-modernism).
The zeitgeist is with a creative age.
Here’s a starting point on how to join in, feel free to add your own ways.
First things first:
1. Stop buying plastic cr*p you do not need. Educate your children to do the same. Talk about it with your online and real world friends.
2. Go to local markets. Buy handmade goods of quality from local producers.
3. Don’t shop at Walmart, Coles, Woolworths, K-mart or Target for everything.
4. Do not buy bulk purchases of intensive production products such as meat, unless you actually eat them. Buy smaller portions. Buy from markets or butchers so you can know where the meat is from.
If you can’t see the cow then don’t eat it.
5. Food does not come in a packet. It grows in or on the ground. Food walks around.
6. Make sure your kids understand how much work goes into plastic cr*p and cheap clothing.
7. Don’t buy cheap clothing or other items because they are cheap. Buy something of quality that lasts.
This chain of events relies on US. Our Families.
The fact is companies manufacture cr*p we buy. They may use advertising to manipulate us to buy.
But you say, what about the economy?
I am not saying don’t buy or don’t shop. I am say Buy to Last!
But if you work as a cog in the chain of a big company manufacturing rubbish, and you are miserable, why not quit?
A number of friends and colleagues have done this. Not every one is cut out for a lifetime of politics, back-stabbing and crawling over broken bodies.
Earn less perhaps, spend less for sure. Coporate paypackets require expensive expenditure to maintain a lifestyle.
The new status symbol in the creative age will be the artist. So get a head start. Even corporates will want the corporate innovator. Corporates must co-opt innovation agents as they are vehicles for implementation, not inspiration. People create inspiration.
People have started already. It’s called downshifting or tree-changing and is part of a broader trend.
We as people are not the problem, it’s the systems people work in that are. but we have a small part to play in keeping an old system going.
We need to transition to a creative economy based less on manufacturing and consuming wasteful plastic cr*p.
So if you’re an innovator start out about designing a new system. You won’t be alone.
Second steps: be educated.
Read the book by David Bosshart “Cheap”.
Watch or read “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore.
Read “The Ethics of What We Eat”.
We don’t do something because we think we can’t.
We can. We do. We wrote the rules. We can change them.
Creative production and output in Western countries is ahead of industrial output.
Creative products don’t pollute the Earth as much as 1 million pieces of plastic cr*p.
Become part of the global innovation.
I hear there is still a market for a great buggy whip.
If you think not yet, remember the bell tolls for thee.
Take care,
Christopher
Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.
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Sep 3rd, 2007 at 2:05 pm
[…] b) manufacture more plastic cr*p we don’t need […]
Oct 8th, 2007 at 11:41 am
[…] bit of background. My earlier post called for an end to cheap disposable goods. Over a 1000 of you had read that […]
Feb 2nd, 2008 at 2:49 pm
[…] > Cheap Goods the End Is Near […]