Online Shopping with Amanda Mull

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. 

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Transcript

Sarah: That was just the doorbell because my Amazon order is here, which I might actually have to sign for. So I'm just going to 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 Mull. 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 ethical behavior looks like in 2022. If you want bonus episodes and other bonus content, you can find that at patreon.com/yourewrongabout or on Apple+ 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 Your Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you why it takes 47 steps to buy a washcloth. And with me today is Amanda Mull, 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 the first reporter that I trusted on Covid. You and Seth Meyers, man. Without you guys, I don't know what I would've done.

Amanda: Well, thank you so much. Yeah. I think that you've got my beat 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. And I worked in fashion for a long time before that, so I have always been really intensely interested in why people spend money. 

Sarah: And that makes sense because you also have great personal style. I feel like you're covering the world of objects, and you're not against objects.

Amanda: 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 figure out why I'm like this and why I do this stuff.  

Sarah: 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 ongoing battle between me and my mom where every weekend she'd be like, “Let's go to the beach and swim.” And I'd be like, “Let's go to Alamo, Moana”, because that was a mall. And I loved the mall. I loved the process of the mall, going to the mall, seeing the things, touching the things, the music, the fountain, the observing other teens. I don't know, it's what I imagine the agora, the marketplace to be like. 

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 you can have email, hooray, you can check stocks on AOL. That was one of its main uses. You can chat. And you can buy underwear in your underwear. I feel like this was somebody's slogan at the time. There was this sort of techno utopian sense of, “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 as tiny as possible. It's like Sam Neill folding that paper in Event Horizon to show how a wormhole works. That's what shopping is going to do for our lives. 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. And you're in a giant garbage dump. And somewhere in the garbage dump is the normal rug that you want. But where could it be? 

Amanda: Yeah. Yeah. There are failures in online shopping that are both functional and philosophical. We just have a scale of stuff that the human mind cannot really easily contend 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 a bookshelf or in a sofa or whatever, that is going to make it function well for me past a certain point. Google, over time, has become in my mind, in my experience, and in the experience of some other people who I've read on this, sort of 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 from the incentives that I am functioning on.

Sarah: It's also, isn't it amazing to note that we just accepted that sort of without really noticing that it was going on, just quietly Google became, 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 don't worry about it. And we kind of don't.

Amanda: Right. I think we really are sort of like frogs boiled slowly. 

Sarah: That's what makes us so delicious.

Amanda: Yeah. When it comes to this part of the Internet's infrastructure, I think that Google was 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. The sort of screenshots of what they looked like in the nineties and the early two thousands, late two thousands and on. What you really see is the expansion and the amount of real estate that ads have. They used to have a different color background to them. They used to have larger flare next to them. They have over time begun to look more and more like legitimate results. 

Sarah: And it also depends on the consumer evolving or being left behind right. I will just assume that the first nine results are ads and also the bottom four, probably. If I'm an old lady and I'm trying to Google something and I'm served 14 scams at the top of the page and I'm like, this must be the most relevant, then I'm just going to get scammed all the time. 

Amanda: Right, right. This type of media literacy is difficult to establish in people. It's difficult to cultivate. Google is, at this point, basically a utility.

Sarah: I don't know how you could live without it, honestly. 

Amanda: 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 the Internet's infrastructure that is for profit and not necessarily thinking about the best interests of the people who use it. And 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? 

Sarah: Maybe this is why, I don't know how they did it in the most recent Spiderman, but I remember in Andrew Garfield Spiderman, when he started turning into Spiderman, he goes online and he Bings it. Calm down, I'm Bing’ing whether I'm turning into Spiderman. And at the time I was like, this is the most awful, egregious ad placement ever. Never in 100 years would Peter Parker use Bing. 

And now I'm like, no, Peter Parker would use Bing because he knew how all this was going. He was like, screw you guys, I'm using Bing. 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 Anna Helen 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, eh, whatever.  

Amanda: Yeah. 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 company 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 to buy something you need at a decent price, or it's to find some information about a health problem you're having or something like that, you have to wade through all of the layers of profitable bullshit that exist between you and the actual thing or piece of information or help that you were looking for. 

Sarah: I’m picturing Shelley Winters in the Poseidon Adventure, just swimming and swimming. Just hold your breath. Just keep going. You're going to make it. 

Amanda: 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? Not me.

Sarah: Best mattresses 1974. 

Amanda: Yeah. You might get a carousel at the top that's Google shopping results that are all ads, and you might look through those. Some of them might be enticing. The sort of really pernicious thing about the way that Google ad search results function is that a lot of times they do show you stuff that is fairly relevant and stuff that you're interested in, but it rubs me the wrong way that I am being shown that because somebody paid to have that incepted into my consciousness.

Sarah: Yeah. This gets to something that I feel is underlying a lot of this, which is the theme of millennials as consumer and how 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 I just something happened within an industry and we were just blamed randomly as the people who are supposed to be buying the most stuff.

Amanda: Consumer history is very short. Consumerism as we understand it and as we experience it now is about a century and a half old.

Sarah: That is incredible. 

Amanda: 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 a 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 exist in perpetuity with no challenges or no change in consumer taste is just very weird. A lot of businesses that serve consumers are not really designed or intended or built to last more than a generation or two and I think that's fine. 

Sarah: So since we have a fairly short history of shopping as we know it, could I have it all right now in a condensed version?

Amanda: Sure. Sure. Well, shopping itself and consumerism itself is pretty short. But commerce has been with us as long as humans have had complex society. I think a lot of people who want to critique consumerism for very good reasons tend to sort of idealize a past in which people didn't have to buy things. And that is a past that has never existed. The concept of a centralized marketplace goes back to prehistory, and you can find archeological 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 became 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 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. Once you get to a point in pre-history where people start making tools and doing more complex skilled tasks, it makes sense that not everybody would be a person who knows how to make pots and pans. Skill specialization in trade like that is a really natural and important part of human society and it has been for tens of thousands of years.

Sarah: Now and understandably, we link commerce with feeling distanced from each other. Most of the stuff in this room comes from Target. I don't have a sense of meaning behind the objects or a feeling of I made this, or somebody I know made this, or 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 as something where people are in community with each other, and then it's become something that makes us feel extremely alienated from each other.

Amanda: I think that is precisely the narrative arc of human consumption over time. The vast majority of human history, people provided certain things for themselves, before the advent of garment factories, the women in families generally were spinners in weavers and people who could make 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. But you still get to the point where you have, think about like the Silk Road. This is thousands and thousands of years ago where people were going out and finding things that were unavailable to people where they lived and acquiring those things, and then reselling them to people in places where those things didn't occur naturally. 

And this has been a process, this sort of globalized trade has always been an element of human life, it's just the scale to which that determines the objects and 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 went to baker's and bought bread and bought meat from other people and went to baths. 

Humans in complex society basically can't live without commerce. This is an important way to understand why consumerism is so central to life now because it really does play on this sort of very essential cooperative way of living that people have had for a really long time. And it just takes the cooperation out of it. 

Sarah: Wow. Yeah, and of course it makes perfect sense to think that 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 fundamentally very different from us, less frivolous, less interested in stuff, way more capable, way more rugged. To think about people going to a nice sort of spa bath in the Middle Ages conflicts with the idea that people in the Middle Ages were entirely busy dying of the bubonic plague, right? Or like writing in a manuscript. 

Amanda: In humans, inherent in humans is this real desire for pleasure and for beauty and for leisure and for all of these things that- 

Sarah: That people act like they were invented in 1975. 

Amanda: Right? And that people act entirely induced by modern forces. And that if you can just free yourself, free your mind, that you can get past when in fact these are 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 have this deep and abiding sense that maybe your role is bullshit. 

Maybe you're not doing anything valuable with your time. Maybe you are alienated from your purpose and your humanity by the work that you do. That creates a lot of 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 in their relationship to their work, in your relationship to their work. 

And when you take out all of the jobs from a country or a society that are, toward the creation of the material goods that the society needs, you take out a lot of jobs that are sort of fundamentally understandable and that fundamentally tie people to each other and to the work that they do. And what you get is a service economy, which is what the United States basically has and what the beginning of consumerism implemented.

Sarah: So what's a service economy? 

Amanda: 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 sort of at the whims of the general public and are sort of beholden to the spending habits of the general public in a really direct way. Those are generally jobs that are not organized, that don't have a strong union presence in them, less likely to be full-time benefits positions. They're jobs that tend to be much more seasonal and lower paid, you sort of trade manufacturing jobs, which after industrialization, when unions became much more popular, you trade those jobs, with outsourcing, 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. Labor costs a lot and the people who run the economy are generally trying to limit it.

Sarah: This is making me wonder why Newsboys went extinct. Because I know one of the reasons was that it was replaced by home delivery, but why was that more economical and required so many fewer. Why did we have to lose children selling newspapers? This is all I care about. 

Amanda: Part of it was probably child labor laws. 

Sarah: And yet children are allowed to ride their bikes around chucking papers, but the point is that they don't do it all day. So there you go. Yes. So it became a morning job. So, okay. 

Amanda: In the 19th century, prior to this era, you have a populace that is in America that is mostly rural, that mostly makes their own clothes, grows most of their own food. And the things that they need to buy usually come from dry goods stores. They don't participate actively in the formalized nine to five work economy because that sort of comes with industrialization. 

So shopping as a thing does not exist as it does today in this era. And this is the late 19th century. It's not that long ago. Because you go to the general store and the guy in your community who owns it is behind the counter. There are no packaged goods at this point. And then for other stuff, if you needed more milk, then you could personally produce or more eggs or something and you had a neighbor down the road who had extra, you just traded with people around you. Which is nice, but also, I don't want to overly idealize it because there was a lot of hunger in this era.

Sarah: This also reminds me of the book, I think it's just called, Debt by David Graber. He's like, 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 are your socks. 

And the kind of opening point of that book is actually, that doesn't make sense because who's to say that the person who wants socks, can offer something the sock maker wants? Why would the sock maker necessarily want cheese? What if you're 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 economies 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. I think that we want to also have this utopian idea of commerce existing in a way that was more trusting and more effortless and not about debt. And it's like, nope, it seems like we've always had debt and we've probably always been horrible to each other about it. I think that the horribleness of the way debt works in today's economy is a lot more evil than anything we could have achieved before. But yeah, we've always believed in debt. 

Amanda: Right. A lot of these types of stores had tap systems where you would basically owe it to them. If you're a dry goods store owner and somebody owes you a couple bucks for some flour and some nails and they put it on their tab. It's not like that guy is just going to avoid your dry goods store for the rest of his life. 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 goods store because there's probably not really a competitor. 

And if he can't pay for nails and flour, then he probably doesn't have the ability to shop around. You exist in communities with the people who are providing those goods and services that you need and that makes the concept of debt just a little bit smaller scale and more understandable.

Sarah: 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. 

Amanda:  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 in really huge quantities for 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 has 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, 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 moving to cities in droves. 

The urban population of the United States basically tripled in the 1800s. And you get them doing new types of work, you get them working in factories, doing all of these types of jobs that are made possible by industrialization. And then you create a layer of sort of administrative workers over them, which is 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 from their parents' lives. The marketing and advertising industries 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.

Sarah: Such as? 

Amanda: Well, one of the best demonstrations of this, I think I have cripped this example from a book called, Satisfaction Guaranteed, which is by the historian Susan Strasser, who I love. But she starts Satisfaction Guaranteed with the story of Crisco. Crisco began as sort of 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 on such a large scale. 

And one of the waste products of industrial cotton cultivation is cotton seeds. Cotton seeds contain oil if you press them. And then partially hydrogenate 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. Cotton seed oil was 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 pure vegetable oil in the United States. All cooking that was done previously in the United States was done with animal fats. There's no natural market for vegetable oil. 

Sarah: This is blowing my mind right now. I'm picturing the people who came up with this, they have this block of Crisco in front of them and they're staring at it like the guys and Ghostbusters 2. 

Amanda: I think that's basically what happened.

Sarah: And so you have this glowing piece of solid room temperature, theoretically cooking fat in front of you and you're like, how? Okay. Think. How do we get people to buy this? 

Amanda: Right. It creates another revenue stream for cotton producers. It creates a bunch of factory jobs. It creates 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 creating Crisco to make it profitable. So Proctor and Gamble, creates a marketing campaign. They tout its health benefits, they develop recipes that they then give out at stores. They explain how to use it, explain its benefits, probably lying about them, to induce demand for this product that no natural demand existed for. 

Sarah: I feel like growing up in the nineties, every product that was invented was marketed as if you were the last person to be hearing about it. And it's like, look at this thing that's utterly essential to your life. How did you ever survive before, you dumb bitch? Come get some immediately. 

Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. And when mass media is still sort of being developed, it is really possible to tell people that Oh, everybody uses this. It's fantastic. You've never heard of this before. 

Sarah: You haven't been using Crisco?

Amanda: Look at this drawing of this happy lady on this marketing pamphlet. Don't you want to be the happy lady?  

Sarah: I do. I do want to be the happy lady. It's all I want. 

Amanda: And this happens over and over again in the sort of process of industrial production. You realize you have the ability to make something and then you have to figure out how to sell it.

Sarah: It really explains a lot.

Amanda: Yeah. And this is still basically like the guiding functional rudder of consumer culture. 

Sarah: Clearly.

Amanda: It is extremely explicit because this is also the era of the sort of nascent labor movement. The industrial Barons had a lot of problems with their workers.

Sarah: These factories keep catching on fire and then it's a PR issue and people are sub tweeting about us!

Amanda: Our workers are complaining that we keep killing them.

Sarah: It's annoying.

Amanda: This is the era of the developing American labor movement. This is the era of strikes and Pinkertons, 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 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 obsessed with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as God kings.

Sarah: It was surprising to me learning about this period, having grown up in the America of the last 30 years, that the labor movement was so strong that the sort of robber barons, leaders of the capital class, were genuinely worried. 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.

Amanda: Right. This is an era of the nascent labor movement in the United States that manages to gain a considerable amount of power. The threat of striking workers was a real threat to the way of life of the ruling class. And, the ruling class definitely had its allies in 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.

Sarah: Maybe because their friends kept dying in front of them. 

Amanda:  The intent of the industrial Barrens 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 a type of potential lifestyle that didn't exist before. 

Sarah: Scabs. As far as the eye can see. 

Amanda: 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 hit a lot of birds with one stone. And so you have all of this product and 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, largely. People had a couple suits of clothes and you washed them, you mended them, you altered them as you needed to alter them. 

The idea 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 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 what a city is going to be and how it's going to be, how it's going to function, and who it's going to be influential within it. And what happens is that a lot of these industrial Barons end up opening sort of grand department stores. You get Wannamaker, Macy's, Marshall 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.

Sarah: I went to Macy's recently and there was one guy working the entire floor. It was great.

Amanda: Yeah. Macy's has changed a lot. If you've ever been to a department store flagship in the city that it's based in, that has been there for like forever, the Macy's and Herald Square. There was an old Rich’s in Atlanta that's no longer there. RIP to Rich’s. These are cathedrals. 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 really fancy and you staff them up with people who are basically service workers, but who are sort of like quasi servants. And what these are intended to do is attract this burgeoning middle class into these spaces to spend their money and also to paint the ruling class, the moneyed elite in this era, as their friends, as people who are providing them with things as people who are interested in the civic success of their cities. They put on performances, they hosted concerts, they gave away turkeys at Thanksgiving. They contained lots of services that people could access. 

Sarah: Just like Bumpy in American Gangster. 

Amanda: So the industrial barons needed to sort of repeat themselves as marshals of civic good and of people who were sort of benevolent and who were going to provide for this new middle class that was sort of developing a class consciousness of its own. 

Sarah: Yeah, it’s so interesting, not only are you noticing a consumer class and then inventing things to sell to them or coming up with industrial uses for industrial byproducts and being like, Yeah, People will buy this. They'll decide they want this. If we tell them to. Also, you're inventing a civic space in which to be a sort of pseudo governmental figure in a way. Right? If you're king of the department store, then you are in charge of a sort of town square type of a space.

Amanda: Right. You were really an unelected civic figure. This gives the industrial barrens an opportunity to basically split workers. And have middle class office workers think of themselves as fundamentally different from people who worked in factories and mines and stuff like that, right? And it helped the middle class understand their fortunes as tied to the fortunes of the wealthy, right?

Sarah: To tell them that they're different, but also that they have to remain ever vigilant about remaining different and that if you don't buy the right home furnishings, you might actually look like a factory worker, and that would be terrible.  

Amanda: You have a real opportunity to sort of exploit some of these anxieties in people. And that's how you create trends. 

Sarah: I knew it. 

Amanda: That's how you get people to buy stuff they don't need. It's not the only way. Of course all of this excess stuff, excess inventory, that the world manufacturing apparatus is so good at creating now, how does this stuff sort of function in the history of consumerism? And it basically functions in this way, you use whatever tricks you can to sort of induce demand and exploiting anxiety 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 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 gives an opportunity for manufacturers, for brands, for marketers to sort of fill in their own backstory. And in effect, you sort of get people and mass in this middle-income tier to 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 not only, just not aligned, but are at odds. 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 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 climbed to get yourself and it.

Sarah: And also feeling like it’s obligatory to have these things, right? Whereas as a woman anyway, you're making some kind of statement if you wear the same outfit every day, or the same couple of outfits. That's something that for children is like something that can single you out for vicious mockery, something that marks you as somehow really weird and that's just a standard that we accepted sort of suddenly and then can be used to turn us against each other.

Amanda: Poverty is a great social sin in America. This is sort of like a thorny subject because this sort of gets into more contemporary arguments about whether or not it's classist to criticize Shein and people who shop there. 

Sarah: Oh wow. Yeah. My understanding of Shein is just that it's super cheap. You can order a ton of stuff. So people are on social media doing these. By the way, I thought it was called ‘Shine’ for years. 

Amanda: So do I. I have to stop myself from not pronouncing it shine, because I have been told repeatedly it's not that. 

Sarah: I know. And yet my brain wants it to be shine. 

Amanda: I want to announce it as a German word. It's not. 

Sarah: And then people will do these hauls where they get these giant, 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 a lot of it is going to suck and you're going to 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 Shein, because that's what I know.

Amanda: Shein is sort of fascinating. It sort of takes 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 regulatory agencies have found really elevated levels of lead in their children's clothing, in particular. 

Sarah: That's not good. 

Amanda: Right. And they make really inexpensive clothing, essentially.

Sarah: Is it like Forever21 prices? I remember Forever21 when I would shop there being $1.90 for a tank top. And you're like, they're practically paying me to wear it!

Amanda: Yeah. I think that a good way to describe this for people in their early to mid-thirties is that it is like Forever 21 prices if inflation had not happened between 2004 and now. So you get these really inexpensive things, and you get people who buy just an enormous amount of them and who don't want to repeat an outfit and are quasi compulsive about this. And this is an indefensible way to interact with the world, but people feel like this is sort of central to their identity. They feel like they are not fully participating in the social world if they can't do these things if they can't have this much clothing.

Sarah: I think we should see more TV characters repeating outfits. Partly because if an outfit is really great, it would be nice to see it again. You're like, it looks good. 

Amanda: And I am enormously sympathetic to this idea, this sort of anxiety that is inherent in a lot of people, that they have to continue buying new clothes and having new clothes, otherwise, yeah, they are going to look behind, they're not going to fit in with their friends, they're not going to fit in with the culture at large. 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 camera phones and whatnot, that I understand why people - especially young people - feel like they're being constantly observed. 

Sarah: Right. Yeah. Because they are, so that’s fair. 

Amanda: 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 sources that are bad. And 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 Shein’s clothing. So it's really just the sort of rate of replacement that is, I think, the worst that is uniquely bad about Shein. 

People are defensive about this and say that this is the only stuff that I can afford to buy. This is within my price range, and 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 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 structural way to solve that is regulatory, but I think that there is probably also personal value and ethical value in acknowledging that.   Working through your feelings on it and then 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 go to your first job and you want to look professional, then yeah, you might have to buy a bunch 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 is compulsive. I think that we sort of exist in a constant clothing casino where we're just trying to order enough stuff to get two things that we really like. It's impossible to tell whether any of this stuff will fit. It's impossible to tell if it's going to look like it does on the website. 

So, something that online commerce does really effectively is sort of alienates people, not only from the process of the creation of the thing they're buying, but also alienates people from the thing itself. You are not buying a material good. You are buying the idea of a material good that you don't get to see in person until after you've already paid for it. And then, returning things is a pain in the ass. So you get people who really over consume and intend to return things and then just don't. 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. 

Sarah: I feel like you just answered one of my essential questions. Which is, why do we live in this economy where it's so much easier to get 50 of something and two of them are decent? Then take a get like the thing you need. And it's because everyone makes more money if you buy a bunch of crap and then it's too stressful to return it. 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 if a market for them can be somehow created. 

This actually reminds me of the conversation about true crime and 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, it will drive the progress of that platform and proliferate on it and sort of find a voice there. And we've been witnessing that 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. 

Amanda: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's interesting here, if we go back a little bit in time and look at the creation of online shopping. In the same way that 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 VHS and DVDs. 

I think that clothes shopping sort of helped cement, 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. During the.com boom, in the late nineties, you get 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. 

Sarah: Pets.com.

Amanda: Yeah. pets.com, and then a little bit later PayPal, which helps people feel okay about making payments online. So once you have the basic infrastructure to like what a website should look like, how to purchase something on a website and a way of paying that you feel reasonably safe about putting your credit card number into a website. Then you've got sort of the basics set of how online shopping will work and how it still works. The.com boom goes bust and a lot of these companies sort of fall away, but some of them stick around. 

One of them that sticks around is Zappos. It started as basically a shoe site where you could buy 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. 

Sarah: Oh. So no posting. See, I've never returned something, so I wouldn't know. 

Amanda: 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 were we sort of creating classes as we know them in the United States, but we are creating consumer credit. And that takes another level of friction out of the process. You can buy stuff that you can't strictly afford right now. When you move shopping online, there is a considerable obstacle in 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.  For shoes, you can't walk around in them and see if they rub. 

Sarah: You can’t see if it has a weird smell, which is often an issue. 

Amanda: Yeah. You're not sure that it's going to be 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 make people feel like they are not playing themselves by ordering something online that is going to be on their body, that they need to enjoy feeling and enjoy standing on whatever? How do you get past those objections? Because those are real and reasonable objections. 

People did not want to buy clothes online. There was no obvious use case for a website that sold fitted clothing or shoes online. What Zappos did was introduce free returns. So basically they were saying, we know you don't want to do this. We get it, this is a bad idea. But we guarantee that you could return your shoes. First it was within 60 days. Now famously 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. 

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 capacity for people to buy clothing online. And a lot of those policies 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. And taking returns is really labor intensive. You need a person to physically open the packages and inspect the items and scan them back into inventory or scan them out to get junked or to put them out for an off-price channel to go to outlets or whatever, depending on the condition of the item or whatever. And doing that by hand, I interviewed a couple of people about this for when I wrote about the sort of nasty logistics of returns and two separate people said the word nasty to me.  

Sarah: What in reference to specifically, do you have examples?

Amanda: 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 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. 

Sarah: And it seems like anything that requires a human job to do it that can't be outsourced to a computer is something that is a business you have to be very careful about. 

Amanda: 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 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 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 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. Which just changes the level of customer service you have to provide. It changes how you have to staff the store. If people are checking out online, then you don't have to put as many people up at the registers. You reduce the line wait time for in-store customers so they're happier. Theoretically, this should work. It often 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.

Sarah: And it makes sense on paper, but it just gives you that creepy feeling like society has ended and nobody told you.

Amanda: Yeah. We are sort of at the point where a lot of the sort of interpersonal texture of this stuff is just gone. 

Sarah: Yes. Really what I need in a store is for a salesperson to tell me that I look cute in 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.

Amanda: To be able to try something on before you pay for it is fantastic.

 Sarah: It's quite reasonable. 

Amanda: Yeah. And fitting rooms are sites of trauma for many of us. But when you stop having access to them in the same way that you used to because the stores are gone. You miss them. I miss them. I would love to be able to walk into a store and try some stuff on and walk out with just what I like and what I think I will actually wear instead of having to convince myself I will wear the stuff that I have already ordered to my apartment and paid for.

Sarah: Yeah. And also 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. 

Amanda: Yeah, I think that is part of this sort of overall deterioration of the retail experience as we were promised when the system was created. Because these old grand department stores had beautiful settings for you to try on clothes, to be helped, to have things suggested to you. Somebody who could do alterations would come in and tell you how they could often for free, sort of, nip this here and tuck this there and it will fit you like a glove. 

But all these services and all of these facilities 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 believes 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 an attendant there who can get you another size if you need it, and then you start losing things from that experience. The lighting is suddenly not so good, the carpet is stained, hasn't been cleaned in forever, suddenly the attendant is not there and get your own fucking sizes. The light bulbs have been changed from something flattering to something that lasts a long time. 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. So it sort of degrades over time. 

And then you get all the way to the point where you just order it 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.

Sarah: And that just makes it feel like essentially the middle class was created in order to create a buffer between the working class and the ruling class. And to create someone to align with the ruling class, but not be them, because that would be terrible. And the payoff for taking on this role is well, you get all this stuff, 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 going to make this fastian and bargain. And then time passes, and generations die and are born. And then the thing that you sold out your once fellow workers for just sort of gradually degrades into almost nothing. It's like an ALKA seltzer, the middle-class experience.

Amanda: 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. 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 punitively at odds with each other and to sell the promise of wealth and privilege and aspiration to the middle class. And that's why in the very beginning, service was so important to these places because people had to feel special. People had to feel served. People had to feel how they imagined that rich people felt all the time. And you could access that experience if you went in and bought something. 

Sarah: That's why the show is called, Are You Being Served? God, I'm learning a lot. Yeah.  

Amanda: Yeah, it's sort of a king for a day experience. But then over time again, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline means that this experience degrades, the promise was always hollow. We were never going to just buy enough stuff to be happy.

Sarah: So hollow stuff degrades pretty easily, it turns out.

Amanda: I genuinely think that is why you get a lot of these sorts of tension in retail stores. Why you get people assaulting workers, why you get people having such intense rage at people in restaurants at servers and restaurants because this is, there is this sort of fundamental promise of the consumer system that we live in that you, the you, the consumer, are always right. Which is a concept that was created at 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 have people who will serve you. 

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. The middle class is hollowed out a good bit. 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 a lower-class position. And that feels terrible because we have spent so much time inducing anxiety in people over being not rich enough. 

I think that Amazon is sort of like the logical extreme of this department store system because you end up with a company, a private company, people you did not elect who have sort of wormed 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.

Sarah: Including me. 

Amanda: Including me. The capacity for sales businesses, for retailers to become essential infrastructure in people's lives is a) first of all, demonstrates the failure of government in the United States to actually govern its citizens and provide things for them that should be more universally available. And b) people do need objects. There's stuff that people need 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 whether or not you have a car, there are some things that are just genuinely the easiest way for you to - and maybe the only way for you - to acquire something is through Amazon. Because there is a real degradation in the sort of daily functional infrastructure of life in a lot of rural areas. In a lot of places where local stores have closed and not a lot has reopened to serve those communities. 

So you end up just ordering stuff from wherever it's cheapest and Amazon is so consolidated that it usually ends up being the fastest and relatively most inexpensive way to do a lot of that. There is a lot of regulatory stuff that has gotten us to this point. Something I always like to mention on this topic is the 1980 Motor Carrier Act.

Sarah: Say more. 

Amanda: It deregulated the trucking industry. Malls, big box stores, Walmart, Target, et cetera, and Amazon would not exist if trucking regulations had not been massively changed in the United States. A lot of good union trucker jobs where you could be a one income family and put a kid 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 in mass. So Walmart, Target, et cetera, do not exist without the gutting of the trucking system. 

A lot of commerce, as it exists in the United States at this point, 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. 

Sarah: That would be terrible. 

Amanda: Right. Which is essentially what union contracts sort of force people, force employers to do against their will, is to recognize that workers are an equal partner in the creation of value. Not just an equal partner, but that workers are the people who create value. They should be protected as such because, without the people driving Ubers, you just have a bunch of guys in an office in San Francisco shouting at each other on conference calls. You don't have a product. You don't have a service. It doesn't exist. 

Sarah: And that's not rare. You could find that you guys are abundant.

Amanda: One of my coworkers, Derek Thompson, has written about this. But he has written about how there's a real problem of innovation in rich countries. There is not a lot being invented that's of value. We have stalled out on our ability to imagine new futures as like a ruling class. That's bad because the ruling class decides what the rest of us get. There's just not a lot of creativity and not a lot of vision happening, 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 are making a lot of money, but probably don't like their jobs and probably don't feel fulfilled and probably do feel alienated. 

And then you've got that process that makes things worse for a lot of other people. And that is sort of the upshot of consumer culture, is that somewhere in there, there are good things that have happened as a result of industrial production. Don't let me sound like I don't like air conditioning and washing machines and cheeseburgers.

Sarah: Like you're throwing your subo into the machinery. 

Amanda: Yeah. 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.

Sarah: Yeah. Thinking about the terminology of the market will sort of figure it out, the market response to what people want, and that could be, but it turns out that the market, a lot of the market is 50 guys in quarter fleece pullovers in Mountain View, California. They don't respond to what people want. They invented the Juicero. Was it called that? It was the Juicearoo? 

Amanda: 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 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, pretty common now on TikTok. Instagram is full of sponsored ads. Your ability to chat with your friends and see what they've been doing today is sort of interspersed with ads. 

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 an ad airs between that show in the next show. The person who gets the revenue from the ad is 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. So you're actually losing money 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. 

Sarah: I feel like you've answered my central question, which is, why does shopping feel like such a false promise now? And the answer essentially is, 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 b) that maybe it doesn't buy happiness, but it buys you a lot of the stair steps that you need to be standing on for happiness to be not constantly whisked away by disasters. 

There are so many things that I need, or my house needs. And I'm like, oh my God, I have to buy a colander. Jesus Christ. There's so much going on and I have to somehow choose from the thousands of colanders available to me, all of which are difficult to obtain in different ways. But then there's the feeling that I need something that I can't get. I need a feeling and I don't know how to get it. So I'm going to 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. 

Amanda: The more consumerist society gets, the less of an actual safety net there is for anything. Because where there is sort of like a broad safety net that provides for people's basic needs that they don't have to pay for at point of sale, 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 consumer companies and these conglomerates that sell all of this stuff to us become more powerful, there is no incentive for community programs or publicly funded programs to continue to exist because I guess it's really just a question of who is actually running society. 

And I think to a large extent it is Google and Amazon and Apple and these huge tech companies that determine so much of 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. So you have to buy everything you need in life through 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 mirage of agency. 

Sarah: It makes us seem we're using our consumer choices to make ourselves feel like we have control and identity and to make up for the feeling of control that we have lost by the fact that we really only have four conglomerate options to turn to for most of the significant transactions or moments of our lives. We're so successfully owned by so few people that we have to console ourselves with being like, look at my Instagram, look at my belongings. They imply that there's an interesting story to my life and that I'm free. And like I don't fault anyone for doing that. I am doing all the things that I'm remarking on as worrying. It's just that I don't know how to stop doing them. That's why it's scary because it's hard to stop. 

Amanda: Right, right. And in a lot of people's lives, that is the slice of agency that they feel like they have is that they can, they choose how they spend their money, 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 how you wield power is largely reflective of who you are as a person, I think. 

Sarah: 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. 

Amanda: People are really trying to meet their neighbors and figure out 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 mutual aid organizations and community fridges with free food that have popped up since the beginning of the pandemic. And I think that 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 are 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 another indicator of this. Okay, we've been told we're at odds with each other. We're coworkers, so theoretically we should be competing against each other for raises, for acknowledgement from management, things like that. But 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 tied instead of people against whom were competing in some way is not only a sell for some of the anxiety that makes us more susceptible to consumer pressures, but just a great way to occasionally in small ways step outside of that system to help people meet each other's needs.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And surely, we have enough information to understand that 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, really these words just all mean capital.

Amanda: Yeah. Well, UPS drivers, their 25-year teamster contract runs out next year.

Sarah: I do have an irrepressible Pollyanna 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 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 the porridge that you traded your birthright for has already been eaten, and there's just no more porridge to lose.

Amanda: I am a big believer that it's worth it to try to act ethically when you can, nonetheless. So if you can go ahead and 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 is like a good exercise, ethically and morally, even if you can't credit yourself with 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 just the first step, but it's a worthy first step.

Sarah: Yeah. Also, 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 in continuing to ask these questions like, what is this? What's going on? How do I do things? It stumps me every day and I'm happy that you're wondering, too. Thank you so much for your patience in waiting for this episode. We can't wait to see you in two weeks.