Cleaning Out the Garage

By Vivian Rothstein, Deputy Director, LAANE
July 28, 2011

My weekend was a lesson in the new global economy. For two days I emptied out much of the accumulated “stuff” from my garage – dishes, pots and pans from my kids’ student days, excess furniture, framed posters and much more. Some went to the Salvation Army, others to the recycling center. Obviously I had too many possessions.

On Saturday afternoon I ventured to Costco for the first time in ten years. Hundreds of shoppers were busy filling their super-sized carts with large quantities of…well, everything. Household supplies, bulk food, cleaning fluids, soda, clothing, electronics, furniture. You name it, Costco has it. But in quantities you never dreamed you needed (and probably don’t) for amazingly low per-unit prices. Most of the manufactured goods seemed to come from China.

Sunday night I rented Last Train Home, a stunning documentary about the world’s largest annual human migration – of 130,000 million Chinese workers – from industrial cities to their home villages to see their families for the Chinese New Year. Directed by Lixin Fan, the award-winning film follows a middle-aged couple working in a clothing factory while their children are being raised by grandma in the countryside. Desperate that their kids should study hard and have a brighter future, the parents are dismayed when their teenage daughter drops out of school for a job in the city where she hopes to afford the kinds of goods the Costco shoppers were taking to their cars.

Consumer goods have become cheaper and more plentiful, U.S. manufacturing is going abroad for low-paid labor and taking with it American jobs, Chinese families are pulled apart, and we Americans are drowning in (often poorly made) possessions. Who’s to blame?