Potemkin retail

Potemkin village: an impressive facade or show
designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition

In spite of the poor economy, the remaining stores in my area look about the same as they always have. True, there are fewer little shops in the strip malls, but the big chain stores seem unchanged. Until you pick something up, that is.

I used to buy casual clothes at Target. I got some jeans there last fall, only to discover that the pockets had been sewn shut. They weren't fake pockets-- after I got my little seam-ripper out and undid the damage, the pockets functioned as normal. It was just a goof. A pair of denim shorts bled blue dye for multiple washings and wound up a much different color by the time I would risk wearing them. And the socks seem to last through only 8 or 10 wearings before developing holes in the heels. As for T-shirts, forget it. The material has gotten very thin and chintzy, and half the time there are threads coming out of the seams.

I'm not trying to pick on a particular chain; it's like this at all the big box stores. I tried ordering shirts from Land's End instead, unaware that they too had cut their quality pretty drastically. The shirts that arrived were... well, okay, you couldn't literally read a newspaper through them, but close. Big headlines, maybe.

I bought some Hanes sweatpants for my son, who still crawls around much of the time. On the first day he wore them, they turned out to be not actually woven material but a sort of felt or other fuzzy stuff attached to a gauzy network of threads. The knees didn't exactly wear through, it was more like they rubbed off. Incidentally, I also once bought a blanket that I thought was microfleece but which turned out to be fuzz attached to a plasticky network in the middle. I washed it once and half the fluff came off. They don't even bother weaving cloth anymore, it appears. And yet the blanket had appeared to be of better quality, as seen through its plastic case (un-openable) on the store shelves.

As the story goes, it's all China's fault. They swindle us with their bad products. But actually, the crappy clothes I've unwittingly bought have come from Singapore and Guatemala, El Salvador and Malaysia as well. It's not all China's fault. Something else is going on here.

Food, as we all know, has been declining in quality steadily for decades, but is now also declining in quantity. The 32-oz jars are now 28 oz, the 7-oz tuna cans are down to 5 or 6 ounces, the 16-oz container of ricotta cheese is now 14 ounces. And yet, prices are up.

Loss of quality is happening across the board. I now prefer to spend money on all-stainless kitchen gadgets or to buy them from (say) a Swiss manufacturer like Kuhn-Rikon. It seems like more money, but it actually isn't, because at least that way you don't have to buy it again in 2 years. And quality kitchen items, like my pressure canner or my Squeez-o, can be found used.

I've replaced bathroom fixtures only to wish I'd kept the dated 1960's stuff because at least the old fixtures didn't constantly come unscrewed, rust in unexpected places, or turn out to contain plastic where you'd expected steel. Must everything be made with planned obsolescence?

But it isn't just intentional obsolescence, any more than it's "all China's fault." In truth, this is hidden inflation. American dollars used to buy steel instead of aluminum, glass instead of plastic, wood instead of particle board, goosedown instead of fiber-fill, silk instead of rayon. Today American dollars buy you stuff that looks good in the store, but which falls apart once you begin using it.

Inflation, on paper, has been bad enough. We all just accept that prices go up every year, and that our wages and salaries don't quite keep pace. But meanwhile the things in our houses, and the houses themselves (think toxic drywall or disintegrating faux-wood siding) have gone to hell, quality-wise. That, too, is inflation, but not the sort that shows up on price tags.

Ironically, the government looks at quality, but only when quality is improving. If you spent $1500 on a computer a few years ago, and this year you bought another computer for $1500, they'll claim that you actually got it cheaper. The new computer, you see, has a bigger hard drive and more memory and a faster processor, so you actually got more computer for the money. They adjust for that; it's called a "hedonic adjustment." They're telling us that we're not actually paying the same prices... not if you measure it per gigabyte or per gigahertz.

But -- get this -- they never adjust for declines in quality. If you had to spend $10 for a T-shirt made with 50% fewer threads than the $10 T-shirt you bought last year, tough luck. The government doesn't "adjust" to indicate that you're paying more per thread.

That lets the government hide inflation, as long as almost everything we're buying gets crappier with every passing year. Which it most certainly does.

And again, it isn't wholly China's fault. We can't pay the Chinese good money for good quality, because we haven't got good money... we have slowly failing currency. The price tag may look the same, but the dollars themselves have lost value. As the dollar has fallen, it's squeezed Chinese companies. Wal-Mart has demanded the same stuff for less real money, and naturally the Chinese have cut every corner they could. What we get from them today is largely what our currency is worth.

And thus, America's well-stocked, cheery retail stores are in fact full of junk. It's all just Potemkin retail.