Letters to the Editor
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One way to bring jobs back to the U.S.
The repair economy. It has atrophied considerably under the onslaught of cheap merchandise. For example, a woman will buy a poorly made 20 dollar pair of shoes and call it a "value". The shoes last three months. She throws them out and buys another 20 dollar pair of shoes. After 1 year, these shoes have cost her 80$. Calculate that over three years. If she had purchased one pair of well made shoes and had the heels replaced by a local shoe repair shop, she'd have spent less and given a local a job to do. Now, add on appliances, electronics, garments, furniture, and so on, and we'd have a lot of people working.
Retail does not have to suffer if the contents of our bulging closets, sheds and garages cycled through consignment and thrift shops. Locals would be hired to man the thrift shops instead of the big box stores.
Thie would keep things out of landfills and the reduced need for packaging and long haul shipping would lessen the load on the environment.
The low cost of consumer goods has created a housing problem of sorts in that people move to ever larger houses to warehouse their cheap consumer goods. They'll spend tens of thousands of dollars to warehouse a thousand dollars worth of 10 dollar shoes and tee shirts. Perhaps a good bit of this current crisis is brought on by our incessant mall ratting.
So, we can have a vital and sustainable economy if we valued the goods we had instead of treating everything as disposable.