Tech Won't Save Us - The Online Shopping Boom Is Over w/ Amanda Mull

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Amanda Mull to discuss the history of consumerism and where ecommerce goes in the next few years as interest rates rise and its market share stalls. Amanda Mull is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes the Material World column. She’s also a shop steward at The Atlantic Union. Follow Amanda on Twitter at @amandamull.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Amanda has written about consumerism, buying less junk, the pivot to TikTok, and why free returns are coming to an end.Paris wrote about the problem with Apple’s town square store concept.Amazon curtailed massive warehouse expansion plans it made early in the pandemic.Lauren Smily wrote about the shut-in economy in 2015.William Leach wrote Land of Desire: Merchants: Power and the Rise of a New American Culture.Support the show

I think we're sort of like starting to butt up against this sort of extreme of what it is that people can be made to do as far as buying things online. And I'm very interested to see what happens when it sort of stalls. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Amanda Mull. Amanda is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes the Material World column, and she's also a shop steward at The Atlantic Union. Amanda recently wrote a column looking at how a lot of e-commerce websites are starting to end the policy of free returns. There's starting to be a fee or some other kind of difficulty that comes with returning a product that you buy online as return rates have

increased, as companies are trying to kind of cut expenses and all these other reasons that this is happening. But in having Amanda on the show, as I mentioned, she writes a column called Material World, and that looks into consumerism kind of broadly in American culture. I thought it would be fun to kind of have a broader conversation about how kind of consumerism develops, how it becomes something that is expected of people, you know, in the United States in particular, as we focus on in this conversation, but that also kind of extends around the globe to other societies as well. And I think this conversation gives us a really interesting way to look at it in exploring how this comes about in the late 1800s, early 1900s, how this develops through the 1900s, how it's related to how workers and how people in

society see themselves and how there's increasing kind of worker stratification between those who are kind of entered into this consumerist mentality into a new era of kind of growth and consumption and all these other things as consumption has kind of moved onto the internet where we have e-commerce, where we have these kind of gig companies doing delivery all the time, where we have more people kind of looking to buy things through social media apps and TikTok and Instagram and all these other things. Obviously, we talk a lot about history, but often through this conversation, we're weaving that history into things that come today and relating it back to what is happening now and how things that happened 150 years ago, you can see very clear links to how that leads to things that happen today with the rise of Amazon and these other forms of consumption that we have right now.

And ultimately, at the end, this leads us to this conversation as to like, how do we kind of rethink this relationship with consumption? How do we challenge this? Because do we just keep wanting to like buy more and more things all the time? You know, as I was talking about last week with Mary Jane Rubinstein, like obviously kind of capitalism is reaching this point where it's very difficult to like continue growing, to find new places to very difficult to like continue growing to find new places to grow to find new things to sell us and so like do we want to keep on that path

where you know we just have companies expecting us to buy more trying to sell more to us you know exploiting workers in various parts of the world in order to make things cheaper and cheaper or do we need to think like why are we so kind of tied into this cycle of consumption and how do we need to think like, why are we so kind of tied into this cycle of consumption? And how do we kind of stop that or slow that down or start to change our relationship with it? And obviously, it's not just an individual conversation, but a structural one as well. So, you know, that's a long way of saying I really enjoy chatting with Amanda. I think you are going to really like this conversation if you're at all interested in why we consume as much as we do, how that all works, how it came to be, and all these other big questions. If you do enjoy the conversation,

make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the conversation on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every week so I can keep having these fantastic conversations with people like Amanda. You can join supporters like Faith from Chicago, Zez from Pittsburgh, Mizlove from the Netherlands, and Ian Donoghue in Berlin by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Amanda, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you. I read your column in The Atlantic very frequently

because I think that you write about so many issues that are like, even if they're not tech focused, as we'll be talking a lot about today, like I think they're fascinating personally. And so I love reading your work and I'm very happy to have you on the show. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you. I want to start with a big question and then we'll kind of dig in and kind of like go through all this history and all this fun stuff that we want to chat about. What 20 years, since the beginning of the 2000s, really, with the advent of online shopping and all of these new types of services that exist in order to help us shop better, faster, more efficiently, and more constantly, I think. If you look at some of these sort of like cultural conversations that are happening, and some of the battles over things like identity

politics and basically all other types of politics. A lot of that ends up getting fought in the arena of consumerism over advertisements, over products, targeting things like that. Consumerism sort of undergirds everything in the United States, at least. Yeah. One of the symbols that comes to mind is, of course, like the MAGA hat and, you know, needing to buy that as like a symbol of representing who you are. But of course, also, you know, we see pride merchandise. There was a story just the other day about how Target is now taking a lot of pride merchandise out of its stores because of like, you know, protests by, you know, a small number of very

vocal kind of right wing groups. And obviously, we see this a lot more in the United States right now, but it shows how consumption and how the products that you buy or even the products that are available to be purchased become really tied up in these broader political conversations as we are all considered to be and think of ourselves as because of how all these things are talked about as consumers even more than citizens or whatever, right? Right. So much of these arguments in the United States, so much of sort of identity creation in the

United States comes down to who has the right to be the target of marketing and to be marketed to in this conception, in this system is to be a valid, valuable person and who is allowed to have their needs catered to and who who is allowed to have their needs catered to and who is not allowed to have their needs catered to and is a really powerful thing in the United States and American culture because that is like a primary sort of ground of like personal agency for so many people. You know, there's a lot of systems, cultural, political in the United States that don't really work anymore. And so there's, I think, fewer and fewer places for people to feel a sense of community, a sense of agency, a sense of their ability to act on the world and have

the world sort of give something back to them. More and more of that over time, I think, gets funneled into consumer decisions. Absolutely. Like, you know, what you're talking about makes me think, of course, discussions around representation in ads. You know, are there enough people of color or gay people or whatever being represented? And do we see them on the screen? And of course, I think those things are important, but like, it's not the only thing, right? Like if there's still a lot of inequity in society and these people are still kind of don't have access to the same like opportunities and income and all these kinds of things that other people do, then that is not going to actually fix serious problems just because they're appearing in ads and things like that. And I think it also picks up on like a bigger issue that exists when we think about like, how do we address problems in society?

So often that is positioned as like, are you buying the right things in order to address a problem? Like, you know, climate change is happening. It's really bad. Are you buying an electric car and like the good light bulbs and like all this kind of stuff

when these are often like much larger structural conversations, but we can reduce it to an individual level by talking about consumption. Right, right. I think that this entire process of identity via marketing is, in a larger sense, sort of indicative of how much ground we've ceded to corporations and to corporate power in the West, in the United States, because it is

sort of the favor of those companies, those power structures that ultimately convey a sense of validity on people, that convey a sense of agency and a sense of identity on people, I think a lot of these arguments end up being on their ground. And it would perhaps be more fulfilling for all involved to find new ground to have them on, or sort of at least be conscious that these are arguments that I think a lot of times these corporations want us to be having in the way that we're having them, because it's ultimately, you know, whoever wins, it's helpful to them, in that you see the ways that others sort of like the structures of society and structures of culture have receded. Lots of other, you know, institutions, religious institutions,

community institutions, things that are not profit focused, things that exist because of, you know, a level of community care and mutual community interest outside of a profit structure, the more those recede and the more those are privatized and sort of given over to the interests of capital, the more branding and consumer experiences are where people sort of feel like they can act on the world. Totally. And it's not just like looking for the brands that you identify with. But of course, as we've had this like neoliberalization of society, as we've had the platforms rise,

we're all expected to like create our own brands as well. We're expected to be brands to kind of represent ourselves for work purposes and all these other sorts of things. I want to pivot our conversation a little bit. You know, we've been talking about what consumerism is like today and, you know, the many ways that we kind of interact with it and that it affects us and, you know, that we see ourselves, you know, through the lens of consumption. And I want to talk a bit more about like how this comes to be, because you had a fantastic piece where you talked about like more of like the origins of consumerism in American society and

the links to the department store. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about that period and how that kind of emerges? This is always such an interesting topic to me because, you know, trade and commerce have existed for millennia, but consumerism as we know it is an extremely modern system. In the United States, it started to emerge towards the end of the 19th century. You get this 40 years from like 1880 to 1920-ish that are really, really consequential in sort of determining how much of commerce is done today and much of culture is done today. And in that you see, we've gone through the industrial revolution, a lot of factories are up and running, there is all this excess capacity to produce goods, and there is not much inherent demand for many of the things that

can be produced. So you have to induce demand, you have to explain to people who are perhaps previously unaware of certain types of products that are now more widely available, why it is they would want to spend their money on these products. At the same time, you also get the sort of rise of major American cities in the way that we know them now. You get a population of office workers in those cities. You get the institutionalization of like white collar work and knowledge work at the beginning of all of these industries that people that have, you know, become much more robust now. So you've got these sort of like twin situations where you have a lot of product and a lot of capacity to make product. you have a new class of worker who is doing a new type of day-to-day activity and who is living in new places and sort

of centralized. So what you end up with is the rise of department store and department store barons. And those sort of pop up in pretty much every major American city at the time. This model where you have these sort of palaces of retail possibility, they house all of these new types of products that can suddenly be bought off the rack instead of being ordered or made at home or bought from a peddler. And they are staffed with service workers, a new type of service worker who are there to sort of explain to you what it is, all of the stuff is. They're really like lovely experiences. If you've ever been into like, you know, the Bergdorf

Goodman store in New York, there's still some old department stores out there from this era, you know, close after it. These are beautiful structures. They're huge. They're impressive. They're architecturally ornate. And they are built for essentially this population of office workers to sort of come and be catered to and be served in such a way that sort of over time helps them think of themselves as distinct from people who work in production, people who work in factories, people who work on farms. And in that way, these department stores are really useful to the people who build them. Because at the time there was, you know, this is an era of enormous labor strife in the United States. Workers in general were not particularly sensitive to capital. Like they didn't like the

robber barons. They were called that because people were generally suspicious of them and generally opposed to them. So you have this rise of like really brutal factory conditions and labor strife and company trying to put down strikes and things like that. And then you have this class of workers suddenly that is not working in those conditions, but who is still a worker who still has that relationship to capital that factory workers do. And a lot of these consumer experiences were sort of created to create sort of an ideological rift between people who worked in production and people who did knowledge work and primarily consumed. That was their

relationship to physical goods. So these department stores really were like the physical site of where this rift was created because it allowed people who worked for a living to get like a little taste of like the good life, a little taste of what it's like to be rich, what it's like to have abundance, what it's like to have everything you want, what it's like to have someone fuss over you. And, you know, an opportunity to fulfill a lot of desires that like you might not have even had a generation before or that you didn't know would be possible. And in that way, you start to create a population that identifies more closely with rich people than they identify with other types of workers. It was really explicit at the time that department store barons were intent on using the institutions that they built in order

to become sort of like civic heroes to the cities that they built them in. And over time, that is something that helped privatize a lot of basic services in cities, public spaces in cities. The argument they were making with these stores, and then like explicitly also a lot of the time in their public comment was that they were better stewards of municipal resources than governments or than democratically elected officials. And they carried so much favor with this new sort of more moneyed class of workers that effectively over time, they did basically form an ideological alliance with them.

You know, it was done in a lot of different arenas, but it was done in large part through the creation of these consumer experiences. I find this absolutely fascinating. I have so many thoughts on what you've said. But like, when you talk about the department store, like what comes to my mind is where I am, we don't have them anymore. But across many cities in Canada, you still have like the old Hudson Bay department stores that were like, you know, the big department stores in Canada back in the day. And I remember as well, like, until fairly recently, actually, like, you know, the big department stores in Canada back in the day. And I remember as well, like until fairly recently, actually, like if you were kind of outside of the center of the city or if you were outside of the city, then instead

of like the department store, your experience was like the catalog, right? And you ordered from the catalog. And this was like a big part of how you engaged in consumption, like to get it to access more people. But when you talk about the department store like the image that comes to my mind because i have so little experience with this is like the film carol with kate blanchett and rudy mara because in the film like you know she goes into this department store that that's where kate blanchett's character meets

rudy mara's character and uh buys like a train set for her daughter or whatever and like i think in the depiction like you can kind of see how this is something that like a more kind of well-off class goes to experience and then you have these workers who are there who are more kind of lower on the kind of socio-economic ladder and and kind of serving these people i found it really interesting when you said that, because it brought to mind to me, you know, when these gig economy services were rolling out about a decade ago, there was discussion. And I remember in particular, a piece that Lauren Smiley wrote, where she wrote about the shut-in economy and how, you know, all of a sudden you had this new kind of class of servants, but you also had more people who were served, right?

More people who could access the types of kind of services that were previously only available to more of like, you know, a wealthier subsection of society, but could have things delivered to them, could access services in this way that wasn't previously available to them. And so when you talk about like the department store starting to make this wealthy experience accessible to like a broader subset of people, like that was immediately what came to my mind as you're seeing this extended, but also further dividing, like creating more of these lines between people who can access these things, people who can be served in this way, but then the people who also do the serving, right? Right, right. The sort of like seminal book about this was written in 1994.

It's called Land of Desire. And it's about the rise of the department store barons in the United States. And it's fascinating. I really recommend that everybody who's like interested in this topic at all read that. It was written by a historian. And like just reading through it, again, it was written in 1994. You can see Amazon emerging from it. Like you can see DoorDash emerging from it. Like these systems that we have now, I think taken to like somewhat of a logical extreme, like I don't know how much further you really can go in like a material sense than like just getting everything delivered. But you can see the ways that these dynamics were sort of astroturfed into culture by people with

very explicit intentions in creating the system and creating the ways that the people who interact with the system would then relate to each other. It can seem a lot like consumption and consumer culture can seem a lot like something that just sort of sprung up naturally, but it was pretty carefully planned. And like the planning of that that was done 150 years ago is still sort of foundational to the consumer systems that we interact with now. Like I said, Amazon and DoorDash are not so different than how these early American department stores thought about how to play different types of people, different classes, different socioeconomic strata off of each other. Absolutely. It changes some aspects of it, but it's still built on this foundation

that has been established for a long period of time. And that, you know, we know is successful that has allowed a lot of companies to make a lot of money. It's just kind of bringing it to a new level, kind of amping it up, getting us to consume even more, getting more ads in front of us to encourage us to keep buying. It is sort of like inherently like anti-solidarity, like, because what it does is like consumption is inherently like an individualistic system, because it asks you to interact with your problems on a sort of like individual case by case basis. It encourages you to not look for more community minded ways of thinking about the problems you have or the problems that other people might have. And it encourages you to think about this all as sort of like a zero-sum game. Like, if someone else is solving their problems, there are fewer resources available for you to solve

yours. That is like just inherent in the entire system. It is inherent in its creation, in sort of creating a structure in which if you're one of the people who ostensibly benefits from consumerism, who experiences material abundance because of it, who feels like they have a lot of options because of it, then you ultimately end up sort of incentivized not to want better for the people who work in producing this abundance because it makes prices go up, it makes things less available, it makes, you know, and there are, I think there are non-consumerist ways that we can create abundance for everyone. But the system that we have right now, the abundance is something that people have to compete for. Absolutely. And as you talk about that kind

of individualist framework, it also ensures that because you're buying things, you're making your money through your job or inheritance or however you get your money, and then you're buying things, you're making your money through your job or, you know, inheritance or however you get your money. And then you're going out to buy things. You don't need to think about where that comes from. You don't need to think about the broader kind of relationships that goes into production in a way that, you know, if you were relying on kind of the farmer down the road or, you know, the various other people in your community to like do things for you and kind of trade with them or barter or

whatever, you know, there isn't that same degree of like connection and like community awareness, maybe of what's going on because you are just earning your money. You're spending it to get your thing. You know, that service is going to be available to you. You don't care how it's delivered. It's just, you know, that's it. Yeah. And that is like another really integral aspect of the consumer system. And that is like another really integral aspect of the consumer system. And this is another thing that was like explicitly baked into it from the beginning is that perceptually it severs consumption from production. Totally. You first become aware of a product when you see it in a store. And especially back when the system was created,

department stores have gone downhill, you know, back when the system was created, the first time you encountered something, oftentimes the first time that you understood that it was possible to have this thing was on a, you know, a beautiful shelf and a beautifully lit, very ornate, fancy room with someone asking you how they can serve you. So your ability to see anything else that happened before that moment with that product is sort of severed by consumerism. There's marketing materials at the time, people talking about advertising at the time, where you can see people writing for their professional peers in these sort of emerging industries of advertising and marketing about how important it is that under no circumstances should people know how clothes are made.

Under no circumstances should people buying clothes think about a garment factory. Under no circumstances should they think about, you know, how the realities of production. And these sort of like facades of consumer excess go a long way toward masking what it is that things actually are and what human and material inputs go into creating them and how that happens. And that has only become easier over time with offshoring, moving so much of production to other countries where it's brands that market these products may not even really know how they're made, let alone people buy them. Now, it's such a fascinating development.

It's such a fascinating history. It's so fascinating to look at how there are all these connections and how this system, as you say, ensures that we don't like what is actually going on here and that that is like actually core to it right and i think in part we like saw aspects of that during the pandemic where all of a sudden like the supply chains were fucked up and we were like wait all this stuff comes from over there and we can't get it here as easily and like how does this actually work and no one understands like how this system actually works because it's so complex and like messy.

And it was like, I feel like it was in a sense, like a bit of a learning experience for the public again, to remember how all of this works, to remember that all of our goods come from like way over there, because that's how we've set it up for a number of decades. And that we're actually very kind of like globally reliant and interconnected and that, you know, it's not only kind of the system of consumerism that has been set up over a long time to kind of dispel that and to kind of hide that and kind of abstract that for us. But as we become more reliant on these tech companies and these e-commerce platforms and

these gig services, they are also like not only getting us to consume more, but they also want to further kind of abstract the whole relationship that happens there. They don't want you to think about the warehouse workers, packaging, all that stuff. They don't want you to think about the Chinese factory workers. They don't even want you to think about really like the delivery workers who get it to you. Right. It's just like it arrives on your doorstep or whatever, and you press the button on your app and that's it, right? Right, right. Yeah.

The e-commerce sort of structure exists as, like you said, just extra layers of abstraction between the end consumer and however the thing that they're receiving came into being. Because then with online shopping, you remove even like understanding of the physical reality of an object that you're buying before you pay for it. And then you're removing the fact that like in a store, you have to go to checkout and have an interaction with somebody or you have to see the people stocking shelves. There's just further and further layers of abstraction that that sort of work toward that goal that was really sort of created 150 years ago that the less the end consumer thinks about where anything they're buying came

from, the better it is for the people selling things, the easier it becomes to sell. And maybe it's worth talking about how that develops as well, right? Because we're talking about the department store and like, you know, late 1800s, early 1900s. But obviously, this kind of progresses through the 20th century to ensure that consumption becomes something that's not just done by like, you know, more of a middle class and like an upper middle class that's gaining access to these department stores and to this experience, but something that is like expected of the much wider public and, you know, kind of the middle class expands over that time and the post-war

period and all this kind of stuff where, you know, we're having people leave cities. So the department store is mainly like an urban concept as far as I understand, you know, we're having people leave cities. So the department store is mainly like an urban concept, as far as I understand, you know, people are leaving cities, people are going out to the suburbs, all of a sudden, there are shopping malls that are springing up that are dependent on the outsourcing that you're talking about. Can you talk to us a bit about that transition as consumption becomes something that becomes much more of like a mass practice that is expected of the wider public, as there are these developments that occur in society through the 20th century? Shopping follows population. The department stores were a response to the sort of concentration of

people in urban cores. So when you get white flight, when you get this sort of migration to the suburbs, especially because it is wealthier people in this era migrating to the suburbs, people realize that, oh, we need to follow them. If we're closer to these population centers of affluent people, it's easier to get them to shop regularly than if they have to make a trip into the city. And they may be afraid of the city, as was a common theme during the latter part of the 20th century in the United States. So you get these shopping malls, and they contain department stores. And some of those department stores are very nice, but they also contain this sort of like larger structure of retail that develops over time to sort of meet the geographic

capabilities of the suburbs. Because you've just got more space, you've got a lot of like open land that can be developed into shopping areas, you have a lot more space for smaller stores, smaller, more specialty retailers to sort of fill in around department stores. And that's basically what you get with malls, you have anchor tenants, which are the Macy's, the Bloomingdale's, you get all of these sort of places, these are stores that used to have like one location. There was a Bloomingdale's, there was a Macy's, there was a Rich's. And in the 20th century, things become chains. Things become sort of more spread out because you have this sort of atomization of the population. And then you have in the 80s, especially we deregulated trucking.

So it became a lot easier to move goods very cheaply around the country. So you could have one company that owns stores in California, in New York, in Florida, and there were cost effective ways to move inventory among those stores through distribution centers. Before we deregulated trucking, it was much more difficult to do that in a cost effective way. So you've got trucking that costs like basically nothing relative to what it costs in the 70s. And you've got a sort of spread out population, you've got sprawl, you get the rise of these more complicated shopping structures, malls, strip malls, and then you get like, as you said, the sort of expansion of the consumer mindset to people who make less money. And shopping and consumer culture is like

a demand inducement machine. So it requires like growth at all costs for the people who manage these companies to be happy, which means that not only do you have to make people shop more, who are already shopping, but you have to find ways to induct new people into the system. So you find ways to build other types of stores, You get Walmarts, you get Targets, you get discount retailers, Dollar Generals, things like that. And they really benefit from the deregulation of trucking too, even more so than other types of chain stores, because that allows more and more price pressure downward. Being able to bring more and more people into a consumer mindset is great for people who are trying to manage these

companies and manage privatization of public goods and things like that. Because it is, as we said, consumerism is an anti-solidarity machine. If you can get people who do work in production, who do work in these industries, to sort of buy into the mindset that you spent decades indoctrinating wealthier people into, then you can then sow division within lower classes themselves. You can see this baked into American culture with the idea that if you hustle hard enough, if you look out for number one, if you do everything you can for yourself, then you can rise. And that idea is sort of, it's very baked into consumerism and it's very anti-solidarity. Yeah. And you know, it's the kind of hustle bros that you see on Twitter today are

like, and LinkedIn and places like that are like the extension of this thing that's just been going on forever as you get like the pushing of this mindset and like, you know, you need to be fighting for yourself and you need to try to be advancing yourself and all this kind of stuff. But I think that when you talk about the development of this like model, I think one of the things that I find most fascinating is how like, you know, it's not something that just like organically happens. It's something that is like, that there's a lot of effort put behind in order to ensure happens. And there's a lot of developments that encourage it. Like you're talking about the particular framework that's kind of put in place about 150 years ago. We talk about the rise of like the advertising industry

and all this kind of stuff. But then you talk about, you know, obviously we're discussing the creation of the suburbs, the pushing of automobility, especially in the post-war period in the United States and Canada and places like that, as you're getting people to move out to suburbs. And that requires a changing in the way that this all works. But in order to enable that, as you're saying, we have the deregulation of trucking. You also have containerization, which makes it possible to more easily ship goods across the ocean, basically, across long distances. And then, of course, the creation of these markets in other parts of the world that are creating these goods much more cheaply and the de-industrialization that occurs, particularly like after the seventies in, you know, the West, in North America, so that all these things are moving abroad.

We're losing those jobs, but we're getting cheap goods as a result. And we're using a ton of credit to buy a ton of things. And like, there are all these developments that lead us to like where we are today that I think like, you know, like obviously it's worth like assessing the conditions of what's going on. But I think it's also always important to understand like how we get to this point and all of the decisions and like policy choices and stuff that go into it. Because like if we ever want to try to address it or like to think critically about how we

change this structure or think about doing something different, like you ultimately need to know how it was created in the first place. Right, right. Absolutely. And I think it's important to think about the systems that we have as like a series of policy decisions. Consumers and didn't happen organically. It didn't happen naturally. It was not an accident. It was something the world that we have today was created by people who had the capability of doing so. And they chose the systems that we have for reasons that are identifiable. And that they were, you go back and look at some of the historical record from this time, this was all like very explicit. Like, it was not a secret.

It was not, it was not something that people were shy about. And, you know, if we created this world, we can create a different one. Absolutely. And, you know, I wrote about this in the context of automobiles in my book where, like, I was like, you know, it looks like the automobile is this natural progression, but you can see like these interests that are pushing a particular model of like communities and transportation because they are going to benefit from it if we move in this direction direction both in the sense of selling products that is going to make them profit but also you know by some other actors by gaining control over people by creating this kind of a

system right so yeah i i completely agree with what you're saying one of the threads that i found really interesting is you were talking about these department store magnets kind of ensuring that they are creating these like public goods right that they are drawing people in saying like, it's not just that we're offering you this kind of place that you can shop, but there's this whole experience that is kind of going on with it. And we're doing things that are good for the community as well. And I feel like you see that extended through shopping malls as well, where, you know, there's no public spaces. So we're creating this public space in the suburban area. And it's just surrounded by all these stores that you can just so happen to visit as well. And then like, as I was thinking about that, I was even thinking about like, the Apple stores, right? And particularly, like under the leadership of Angela Arons, I think her name was she came from Burberry to Apple. And like her whole thing was the Apple store is the town square. And it was going to have like all these educational opportunities and like hangout areas in these new store designs and stuff like that. And you can just see this like continuing to inspire like designs for retail. So it's not

just buy things, but also we're doing these other positive things for the community. It's not just, you know, purchasing it's, we are having these positive impacts on society beyond selling you an expensive product. Right, right. And you can see the continuation of that in like Jeff Bezos's climate pledge and things like that. It's a big thing in philanthropy. And it was a big thing in philanthropy at the time, you know, the robber barons were big philanthropists. They wanted to be seen as sort of like privatized statesmen. And with department stores, you got this just really explicitly. You got department stores that were holding free concerts during the summer.

You got giving away free turkeys at Thanksgiving to the poor. A lot of department stores had medical services. You could see a doctor. You could mail a package. You could do all of these things that under a different type of system would be handled collectively by the state, by another apparatus that's more democratically chosen. The department stores and all of these like ancillary services and do-goodery were really just sort of the pitch by capital to let them handle this stuff. It worked really well for the robber barons, I should stipulate. But you can see the sort of ideological tendency in a lot of people in liberalism to sort of let these people handle it because they are successful, they have all the resources, they're good stewards, they're civically minded, you know,

let them handle it. They've got it under control. And the, that pitch was made in large part in the creation of consumption in the arenas in which we do it. And when you look at some of the historical record, you can see Amazon in it. This is one of those places that I think it's really clear. And I think like, as you talk about Amazon there, it's probably worth fast forwarding a bit and talking about like how that actually comes to be right. You're talking about how, you know, obviously there was the creation of these department stores, strip malls, we have shopping malls as well. This is a model that took out a lot of more kind of like independent retail. And like, you know, we think about kind of the loss of the downtown and the

main street as those types of more independent stores are kind of declining because you have the big Walmart department stores coming in because you have the big Walmart department stores coming in because you have the chain like bookstores and other things coming in to replace those particular kind of versions of retail and kind of adapting to this new model as it's more suburban and all this kind of stuff, right? You don't have the foot traffic walking down the main street as much as in the past. So how does that then shift to e-commerce? I imagine this kind of begins in the 90s as we start to have the dot-com boom and stuff like that. What drives people to start shopping online? Because it must be a bit of a jump for people or a change to think about,

I'm not going to go to the store. I'm just going to buy this thing I can't see on the internet. Right, right. This is another one of those situations where I think it's useful to look back at like what was actually happening at the time and how people thought about things at the time. Because the delivery sort of regime that we have is convenient in a lot of ways for people that can afford to interface with it. It's really easy to get used to it, especially since other options for other sort of more traditional types of commerce sort of, and a lot of places have dwindled, especially in places with poorer populations. So in the late 90s, when Amazon was founded, when you get a lot of other like sort of.com startups that were trying to figure

out what this model would be to sell things online, it was met by a population that was like largely pretty skeptical of having to buy something on the internet. This was, you know, it was a novel technology. It seemed like the Wild West. It seemed like buying something online was probably a great way to get your credit card stolen. You know, there wasn't a lot of trust. And people sort of, I think rightly, were especially suspicious of buying sort of like

very taste-dependent goods online. Clothes, furniture, things that you have to like physically interact with, or that have to meet some sort of like, secret sauce of like personal happiness in your mind before you'll decide to keep them. People didn't want to buy shoes on the internet, people did not want to buy jeans on the internet, like inherently, there was there was no great, like unmet demand for these services when they were created. So they had to be sold. And one way that is very effective at getting people to take the leap and buy something is to do everything you can to remove what is often called like any kind of friction from that buying process.

Basically take away the reasons that somebody might logically say no. And online, you know, shipping costs something. You cannot remove the cost of moving something from place to place. It has to be done by a human. It requires gasoline. It requires capital investment in warehouses and trucks. Like, it is a cost-intensive process. As much as you try to beat down the wages and working conditions of truckers and stuff, there is still a cost there. Yeah, they can only go so low. There's like a floor to how much you can pay them. And some truckers essentially get paid like negative, depending on the sort of lease agreements and things like that they get sort of conned into going into. Yeah, it's ridiculous, right? And

one of Amazon's kind of innovations, quote unquote, is basically like creating not only its non-union warehouse workforce, but alsowork in like, logistics at the, you know, the last mile consumer end, which is terrible for everybody's pay. But in the late 90s, this system had not quite been created yet. So internet retailers were looking and saying, okay, there's a lot of stuff that people just don't want to buy online, because it is like on its face, ridiculous to buy a lot of this stuff online. So and they especially don't want to buy it online if there is some sort of like monetary risk involved. So the price of shipping, the price of returns becomes like a big problem, because a lot of this stuff was just the same stuff that you could like walk into the gap at your local mall and buy it. So why would you

take the extra monetary risk of buying it online and not having any idea whether you're going to like it. So what they did is they found ways to eliminate the price of shipping and the price of return shipping from what the consumers see. Some of that gets baked into the purchase price for goods that don't have like an in-store equivalent. So like an Amazon or something like that might bake a little bit of it into the purchase price because you can't go into the store and go, this is cheaper here. But in reality, because a lot of these were startups, they just lost money. They had enough capital investment and they used it to buy market share, which was essentially just getting people like used to buying things online, getting people sort of acclimated to the risk and the process and not liking things.

And that being like a normal part, having paid for something you don't like at all being a normal part of the shopping process. And they did that for years, you know, not just Amazon, a lot of companies lost money on this. And over time, they got more and more people sort of inured to the realities of doing a lot of their shopping that way. They got people into the sort of like the idea that it was convenient. And for some things it is convenient. For other things, having to order something online and wait two days for it is actually pretty inconvenient

as opposed to the way that you might have received that thing in the past, which is like spending a half an hour doing an errand out in the world near your home. But, you know, they were effective. They ate enough of the cost of this process to get enough people on board with it that they started to affect the financial realities of brick and mortar retailers.

And as brick and mortar retailers suffer and become less pleasant places to interact with, become fewer in most places, you get more and more people who just like end up online. Absolutely. It's such an important development, right? Because as you're saying, these companies are able to lose all this money because they have all this venture funding. And you're assuming because it's a quote unquote tech company, that it's going to make these kind of multiples of revenue. So they have much easier access to capital than a traditional, like, you know, retailer who has a bunch of stores all around the United States or the world or whatever. And so they can lose all this money to subsidize the shipping costs and other costs associated with the business.

And then, you know, these retailers have to try to match it. Like I remember the conversations around like Amazon's offering free shipping. Of course, people don't want to pay for shipping. So now all these other retailers have to kind of match it and figure out how they're going to like eat that cost essentially. And that makes it a lot more difficult for companies that can't as easily do that and that i think is part of the reason that you see like the brick and mortar retailers struggling part of the reason that you see a lot of other kind of businesses and even e-commerce companies struggling as well because amazon becomes this kind of juggernaut that is difficult to challenge

that has a lot more money so it can subsidize this business model. And all these other companies like have to follow on with that. And it's not like as easy to do, because it's expensive. As you're saying, shipping is not cheap. Right, right. A lot of what Amazon does sort of follows in the Walmart model, which was so disruptive to the sort of retail sector in the United States. Walmart really prospered on the twin developments of freight deregulation and containerization and moving things overseas. So scale allowed them to apply, you know, price pressures to their suppliers, that other retailers, smaller retailers, even like regional, like decently sized regional retailers just could not.

So Walmart could get things at prices that were just not available on the sort of open market. And that allowed them to sort of like kill off competition because people want things that are low priced. A lot of people need things that are as low priced as they can get them. And even people who don't, who can afford lots of sort of discretionary goods, like don't want to pay more than they have to for something. If there's, especially like the types of things you would buy at Walmart, like to sell a luxury good, you have to make an entirely different pitch. And the pitch is where the extra price comes in, the effectiveness of that pitch. So even people who make a lot of money

often do not want to buy everything that is like nice, they want a lot of cheap stuff too, because it's available and because it gets normalized. So you have these like price pressures that just other retailers cannot compete with. And that sort of, you know, helps further centralize sales and then jobs at these mega retailers. And then Amazon sort of by putting all of that online, I think sort of managed to beat Walmart at its own game in that way. And Walmart is like, I think, doing a pretty good job of trying to catch up like their website, they have taken a lot of the tactics that Amazon pioneered, including like having lots of things listed by third party sellers on their site and run with that and done a pretty good job, I think, of aping the

Amazon model. And it just makes it really, really hard for smaller brick and mortar, smaller e-commerce, anybody else to compete unless they're selling a luxury product that has a luxury pitch with it. Absolutely. The apples of the world, basically, who are charging that extra margin because it's Apple and you just have to have it. I wonder, like, you know, obviously we've been talking about how this emerged and how it affected like the broader landscape as we were kind of heading into the pandemic. And then as the pandemic hits, like, what does that mean for e-commerce? Because I feel like ahead of that, we're, you know, we're talking a lot about how it is affecting like brick and mortar stores and like what the future of that is going to be. And then as the pandemic hits, obviously people are buying a lot more online, but like, what was that whole experience

like and how was it kind of shaken out as things have, you know, started to quote unquote, gone back to normal, like as people have kind of gone out in the world anymore, aren't doing as much online shopping or at least exclusively, what was that whole process like? Right, right. The retail and e-commerce had like sort of a fantastically strange time during the pandemic. And since, you know, things have started to normalize a little bit after the initial like sort of like very acute emergency, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of sales shifted online because they had to, depending on where different shutdown measures were in place,

there was types of stores that couldn't be open. There were just not as many products available, like in real life as there would be otherwise, if you were just going to the grocery store or whatever. So people started looking online, they started looking beyond the retailers online that they might usually use. So they went beyond the Amazon and Walmart and Target websites. And, you know, we're looking at I bought KN95 masks at some point from like Staples because they had them. No place else did. Everything just sort of got mixed up.

People started shopping for things they had never shopped for in the past. They started shopping at places they had never shopped in the past. And that created sort of a mess. It meant that like nothing was predictable. So the people in charge of like doing like retail buying and retail planning, like never had the things that like people suddenly decided they wanted and they never had anything in the quantities that people wanted. They either had too much of it or none of it.

And it was it never matched demand. So you had this like huge demand mismatch. And then you had people buying stuff that they like weren't really sure if they wanted it or not, or they weren't sure if they could trust the website that they were buying it from. Or it was a great environment for people to make not great decisions about buying stuff or not buying it and about where. So you get this like huge spike in online shopping, but also a huge spike in the return rate of people sending stuff back because everything was chaos,

including what was going on in like the rate of people sending stuff back because everything was chaos, including what was going on in like the heads of individual consumers. So you see this real spike in the return rate and along with the spike in sales. And I think that like sales have like somewhat normalized online since this initial chaos. What has not normalized is the return rate. And that has created, I think, some issues for a lot of people. I mean, returns, first and foremost, are not pleasant as like a person who buys stuff. Like, it means that like the system that you're working with is not providing you with what you need, if you're just constantly returning things. I mean, there are people who do this compulsively. That is like a small proportion of the population. But there are far more people who are just like trying to figure out what it is that they're supposed to be getting

and where it's supposed to come from and just not having the information they need to make good decisions. So you get people sending a lot of stuff back and then they get used to this behavior. So they just sort of like, all right, whatever. It's free to send it back. I have no idea what size I wear in this anymore. Let me order three sizes and I'm going to try them on something that you would in the past have done in the dressing room. I'm absolutely guilty of doing that. Yeah.

So many people do it. I do it. I write about this for a living and I do it because in a lot of situations, there's just not like a great alternate way to go about it. So you end up doing that. You end up sending stuff back and you get used to this behavior. So even when more of your purchases are going back to the brick and mortar stores, like where you live, when you order online, you're still sort of used to being like, I'll just order a bunch of stuff and see what works and send the rest back. It's free.

And returns are just like a nightmare on a logistical sense. Forward shipping is labor intensive and cost intensive. Backward logistics, reverse logistics is like way, way worse. Because getting all of that stuff back into an inventory system and making sure that it is what it says it is on the, you know, packing slip that you get back, that it is in the condition that it was promised, that it can be resold, that, et cetera, et cetera. It's just like, it requires so much labor. It requires time. And it just like leeches money out of the bottom line. And the bigger the retailer is, the easier it is for them to absorb this, which is why the really big retailers tend to be the ones with the most laissez-faire return policies. But for smaller retailers, I have read

estimates that a single return, before you even factor in the cost of shipping, costs a retailer like $10 to $20, which is an enormous amount of money. Reverse logistics are a real nightmare. I reported the story on this in 2021. And two different people I interviewed who like work in the reverse logistics field, use the term nasty to describe what it is they're trying to do. Like it is it is just nasty on an environmental level nasty on like a literal level, because you know, you're getting back all this weird stuff that's been in people's homes and on their bodies sometimes and you can't do anything with it and it's nasty on an environmental level a lot of that stuff gets thrown out a lot of it gets sold in um big discounted batches

container batches to uh developing countries where it is then sort of like picked over by local distributors and to to supply shops there and then like what isn't wanted is just like dumped. There are just like huge merchandise dumps in, there's one in the desert in Chile and I believe there's one in Ghana that you see sort of pictures of every now and then from the AP or from some international news organization that occasionally covers this stuff.

So you just get this like huge, this huge material waste that is sort of created by the fact that these systems just don't meet the needs that they're supposed to meet very well. And that's what inefficiency is. When the system you have and the needs it's trying to meet just don't work.

And so that requires, of course, prices have to be pushed even lower then because the system has to accommodate this inefficiency in e-commerce because VCs basically decided that we were going to buy a certain amount of stuff online, whether we liked it or not. It's so fascinating to hear you describe that, right? Because it's aspects of this we wouldn't often think about, and I would say like as an individual, maybe you don't need to be thinking about it as much, but like on a structural level, like there are people making decisions that kind of shape the way that we act, the way that we purchase things that does kind of affect this bigger picture. I would just say like on the broader point about like e-commerce and its stabilization, I remember during the pandemic, Amazon was saying that it was doing this massive

kind of warehouse build out. It was because it was seeing unprecedented demand. And then a year or two later, I believe it was Andy Jassy, the current CEO was saying like, yeah, we've actually pulled back on that because we overestimated how much things were actually going to continue growing like after the pandemic. Right. And so you can certainly see that. And I would say like on the returns, I've noticed that as well in Canada, where more retailers are adding, you know, a price for return shipping. I wonder if you've seen that with Amazon as well, because I feel like one of the things I remember is like back in the day, like I'm thinking like 10 or 15 years ago now, even if you didn't have a receipt, like you could still return stuff to Walmart and they would at least give you like store credit. Like they didn't care.

And I know Costco also has a really like lenient return policy. Is Amazon still doing free returns or are they starting to change that too? Well, before we get into that, something really interesting on the sort of like growth front, it was fascinating to me how many large companies decided that like whatever happened during the first year of the pandemic was like a trend that would continue and not something that like might be reversed, at least in part. They were like, everyone's going to stay in lockdown forever. Yeah. Yeah. This was sort of fascinating to me about Peloton specifically. I've written some stuff about Peloton. Fascinating company. I was like, Peloton should be fine after the pandemic

because surely they don't think that like the sales they did in like the first year when nobody could go to a gym, when nobody was traveling, when nobody was spending money in any other way, surely they don't think that those sales trends will continue when people can do all this other stuff again. And apparently they did. Like I have read like articles about like reporting on what the planning was like. And apparently their CEO at the time just thought that this was like a permanent sea change. And which is one of the reasons they're in there. They're in the trouble they're in now. And I think the same was true with a lot of retailers. There was sort of the assumption that like, you know, people buying more and more things doing more and more of their overall purchasing for life online was something that was only going to go up, like

that percentage of things you buy online versus in person was only going to grow over time, and that the acceleration was going to stick. And like, I don't know why they thought that I haven't seen like a good explanation for why that assumption was made, but it was made pretty widely. You know, there's a lot of ways that sort of like the tech industry is, I think, a little bit disconnected from like what it is that normal people, regular people consider like a good life, and like a good use of their time. But it's very clear to me that like a lot of people who are sort of moving money around in the tech industry think that everybody wants to get as much as possible delivered and does not want to interact with the general public, does not want to go out into the physical world, but

in spaces with other people that they don't choose to interact with. And that this is like a sort of like baseline human want. And that if you can give them that it will be infinitely profitable, you will gain infinite new business, you know, you will gain market share, you will, the growth will continue forever. And I think that like, what we've seen since the pandemic ended is just like, sort of a repudiation of that. People like like interacting with the physical world, people like leaving their homes, like normal people like being able to run out to the grocery store and like get a couple things for dinner, instead of having to like, choose some things on a website and schedule a delivery and wait and see if it all comes and see if it was right. And I think that like one of the more interesting retail dynamics right now is just the people who run the industry trying to figure out where they went wrong in that. And I don't know

how much introspection exactly there is. One of the ways that they're starting to sort of address the financial results of that sort of mismatch in consumer behavior and corporate prediction is through trying to shape behavior in ways that are less financially difficult for them. Part of that is just charging for returns. The return rate at brick and mortar retail is across categories generally does not exceed like eight or 9%. Like that is normal for a brick and mortar store that eight or 9% of their sales will come back in returns. Online for certain categories, it can be like 30% average. And like for some categories and some retailers, it can get up to like 50. So you've just got like a really, really huge volume of stuff that comes back because internet shopping is just poorly suited to a lot of things. It's poorly suited

to a lot of like human material needs. So you've got to find ways as a retailer to sort of temper that behavior. And that involves moving some of the burden of retail shortcomings or e-commerce's shortcomings onto the consumer, which is to say, if you want the convenience of ordering three pairs of pants and three different sizes and seeing which ones fit at home, then you're going to pay us $7 for that because to return the other two, you'll have to pay it. Or the alternative is trying to sort of guide people into behaviors that are a little bit more efficient for retailers, which is returning things in person to one of their stores. If there's a store available, if they're a retailer that has also brick and mortar, returning it to a retailer that is unrelated, but has like a happy returns kiosk or something like that. There's all these reverse logistics companies

that sort of aggregate the logistics of moving things backward to retailers. Like there is some company that I buy stuff from regularly, I think it's Madewell, that every time I want to return something, it asks me to take it to Staples. And Staples is not convenient to me. Like I live in Brooklyn. So like, big chain stores are not as convenient as they are if like you live in a suburb near a mall. But every time before I say no, I would like to send this back in the mail. They're like, Are you sure you don't want to take it to stables? So you've got this like reverse engineered system of trying to sort of like clean up some of the inefficiencies of reverse logistics. Or you've just got straight up.

You're going to pay seven dollars if you return stuff. And we'll use that to subsidize the cost of the ways that our system is inefficient. They almost sound like Elon Musk. Pay me eight dollars. And we'll use that to subsidize the cost of the ways that our system is inefficient. They almost sound like Elon Musk, pay me $8. Yeah, if you want this, you got to pay me $8. Yeah. I wonder, as we start to wind down this conversation, where do you see this going? Because in recent months and even years, I know, there's been a lot of discussion around like the issues of Amazon and how they are kind of platform and their interface has just been kind of filled with like crap basically. Um, and people don't trust it as much anymore. There's talk of

like the kind of Chinese retailers that are moving in, you know, Shein and Timu and these kind of retailers who are getting more attention in the American and Western markets. And also like the talk of like TikTok being a new vector for commerce and, you know, the possibility of like live shopping, like moving the shopping channel onto like Amazon and these other platforms. Like, what do you make of all of the things that are happening? Yeah, yeah. The TikTok phenomenon is really interesting to me in general, because I

think it sort of rose out of this phenomenon that you mentioned of like, you get these massive retail platforms, Amazon, Walmart, and Target are all this at this point, basically, which is that they allow third party sellers to create listings on their website to sell products that Target does not own. Sometimes they do the fulfillment, but it is a way to have more options on their website and to create more of like a one-stop shop to capture more business. And then they take a cut of the sales. And with that, you give up a degree of control about what is being sold through your website, because you're sort of having to take people's word for it, that the product looks like it does in the picture and that you're putting the right measurements in and stuff like that. And the lack of control over these types of marketplace listings,

which is what they're usually called, that also affects your return rate. Things come back when you can't verify that the listings are accurate at a corporate level. And I think that consumers don't love this in a lot of ways, which I think is why you see TikTok as a huge vector for recommendation. Because what people are looking for is somebody who has like tried something and can tell you that it's good or bad. Because there's like very little way to evaluate that yourself in a lot of these situations, unless you go ahead and pay for something up front and receive it. And you can't really trust like a Google search anymore because it's just filled with like SEO garbage, right? Like reviews and stuff by searching the web. Right. It's very hard to surface anything useful. Google, especially for shopping,

a lot of it is full of A, ads and B, sort of these very like junky retailers that are like that you've never heard of that have these names that don't make any sense that are selling stuff that is like implausibly cheap. A lot of it is just bought on AliExpress. And like you set up a quick storefront and you get it SEO'd and for a little while until it gets taken down because people realize it's scammy. You're showing up in these shopping results. Google is sort of bizarre in that way right now, because a lot of times their ads are like more reliable than their like regular results if you're looking to buy something which is wild yeah yeah because the ads are bought by like actual companies with actual product that they have like developed or at least selected from a supplier instead of just sort of like scammy drop shipping stuff it's certainly one way to get people to click more ads if you make the actual results untrustworthy.

Yeah, yeah. It's a really bizarre sort of like turn that things have taken recently because at least if an ad has been bought, then somebody is there doing business at least. And Google probably, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing that Google does like a little bit more vetting on things that show up

in that sort of ad carousel than it does in its general results. But yeah, the ads end up being like more useful, but which is why you get the rise of things like TikTok as a shopping powerhouse. Because TikTok is particularly good at, you know, showing you a person who is like identifiably a real person who was sitting in their bedroom that like looks like yours probably, and it's telling you they bought this thing and they liked it and they think it's a good deal. And like, that is like the level of guidance that people are looking for, basically, because that is like, those are decisions that they have sort of had their ability to make those sort of like stripped out of the shopping process.

And like being an informed consumer is, has always been like sort of a lie because like the person selling you something is always going to be better informed about it than the person buying it. There's just like an informational mismatch, but that informational mismatch has expanded a lot. So you go to places where you can reliably find people who are actual people talking about whether or not something is good. You see this a lot on Reddit, too. Like I increasingly over time when I have a question about something, whether it's a shopping thing or not, I will put in, you know, search inquiry Reddit because I want to see like actual people just talking about it.

I do the exact same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because otherwise, like what you find is just garbage. It's unusable. It's content farms. It's things written by, you know, very low wage workers that were, you know, contracted on Fiverr or whatever to write some some blogs about like SEO keywords or to endorse products or whatever.

And like, it's all unusable so i i think that if these sort of like structures that we have on the internet to buy things remain as bad as they are like only more and more people will go to these third parties to like access some like level of human discernment and human taste because otherwise like making these decisions feels like impossible. You get like existential paralysis reading Amazon reviews of like a bookshelf. I definitely get that. Yeah, I do think it's really interesting to see how that all develops, right? And to see how people become more reliant on it as, you know, like you were talking about and we have been talking about through this conversation, like things become more

abstract. Things are moved online. You can't actually figure out if this is something good or not. And now it's not even just being sold by Walmart or Amazon. So you know that they are kind of checking it over and making sure it's a good product. But now it's marketplace thing that anyone has just put on there. It has some weird name. Is it actually trustworthy? Is it going to be okay? And of course, people are looking for people who they can trust to give them advice on purchasing decisions because we all have to buy so much in the course of our lives and often buy much more than we actually need. And I think that's my final question for you is, obviously, we've been talking about how this is a system that has been built over like, you know, a couple centuries or 150 years or whatever, that is designed to ensure that, you know, we buy more things consistently, because that is what is

necessary for the economy, and for it to consider keep growing and like all this sort of stuff. And this is like a structure that's been created. What do you think is the chance that we can like, push back against this consumerism, like not be expected or not feel like we need to buy so many things all the time. And obviously, this feels like a bit of almost like an individualist framing. But how do you think about that? I think that we're at sort of a unique spot in this system, because I do get the sense that there is like a level of exhaustion on an individual level with what is being asked of people by the system, and the results that it is like a level of exhaustion on an individual level with what is being asked of people by the system and the results that it is giving them, which are not often great.

I think that there is a period of time in any marketing cycle where things are novel and people are interested in trying them. And that period looks like growth. It looks like real demand for whatever it is you're selling. And often I think that that is misleading. I think it's more accurate to say it's curiosity. And this happens with a lot of individual companies. find delightful or useful or worth having in some way unless you have like some sort of thing that you can really sell them you know low prices whatever those companies tend to fail they tend to go back down you saw this with like blue apron and a lot of the um yeah a lot of the meal kit companies so that people were sort of like interested in the the idea that this was like the sounded novel they were curious and then a lot of people tried it out and like sort of decided that like oh this is like this is interesting but like i'll just go to the grocery store yeah i i feel like it's similar with like the kind of monthly subscription

companies too where it was like subscribe and we'll send you a box of shit every month related to this thing that you know our company is based off. And I feel like that had a moment as well and then really dropped off. Right, right. I think these are like great examples of the power of curiosity to look like meteoric growth and the power of venture capital subsidization to make, you know, a good value proposition look like genuine consumer interest. And I think that, you know, what you saw in the sort of short cycles with those companies is people eventually just sort of like, they get sick of it, you know,

it ends up not being like a good value proposition for them. I do not know if that will happen with online shopping as a whole. But I get a sense that like, it is going to be much harder for companies to grow from here. Because I think we are sort of the technology that exists now with the costs that exist now and that don't seem like they can be pushed lower in meaningful ways. I think that we are sort of at a logical extreme of how much people actually want to buy things online. seen any reports, any estimates, any projections that show online shopping growing like meteorically in the next several decades that nobody thinks that there is like a predictable future in which online purchases make up more than 50% of our overall purchases or even anywhere near 50%. I think we're sort of like starting to butt up against this sort of extreme of what it is that people can be made to do as far as buying things online. And I'm very interested to see what

happens when it sort of stalls. Because all of these companies are sort of predicated on the idea of growth at all costs. And like what happens when there's not a great opportunity to grow at the rate that your investors or your shareholders have come to expect. In brick and mortar retail, that looks like cutting labor costs, like shoestring, staffing stores, which means that the stores get worse, they get more disheveled, they get less pleasant to go into, which pushes people online. And then ultimately, the short term thinking around like quarterly results or whatever, ends up killing a lot of these brick and mortar retailers, probably more so than even online pressures do. And like, what does it look like when that happens to online retail? Like,

where do you when you press down the costs, because so many of them are already shoestring costs in the first place. So I don't have a lot of predictions, but I do think it will be very interesting. Yeah, I think we're entering an interesting moment where we have higher interest rates, so the money is not as easy to access to keep like money is real again. Exactly. Then, as you say, you know, the cost of shipping and stuff, even return shipping is going up. So, you know, you're kind of disincentivizing a kind of easy consumption that was happening before. And now, you know, the model itself is potentially under pressure. So where does that all go when labor costs are already kind of pushed down a lot? Yeah, it's going to be interesting to

see where it goes. Amanda, we'll be reading your column to figure out what is happening in the consumerism industry more broadly. Thank you so much for taking the time. It's been fantastic to chat. Thank you so much for having me. Amanda Mull is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a shop steward at The Atlantic Union. You can follow her on Twitter at Amanda Mull. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.