[ok-sus] Book Review: CHEAP The High Cost of Discount Culture

[Eric Pollard]

According to the Daily Oklahoman, only liberal pansies like the executives
at Wal-Mart would be asking their suppliers to determine the real costs of
their products.

Confused yet?

http://newsok.com/wal-green-retailer-co-opting-liberal-policy-agenda/article/3386300?custom_click=headlines_widget

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 8:01 AM, Harlan Hentges
<harlan at organiclawyers.com>wrote:

>  Following is a link to and an excerpt from the New York Times.
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/books/review/Shapiro-t.html?ref=business
>
> * *
>
> * *
>
> *CHEAP*
>
> *The High Cost of Discount Culture*
>
> By Ellen Ruppel Shell
>
> 296 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95
>
>
>
> Ellen Ruppel Shell has been studying the price, the value and the cost of things
> — all sorts of things, bookcases and summer dresses and plastic wrap and
> key chains and tube socks and hammers. And shrimp  …….Thanks to a huge boom
> in shrimp farming, especially in Thailand, supplies soared during the ’80s,
> and prices started to fall. Now … we eat shrimp as casually as we eat tuna
> fish
>
>  The downside? According to Ruppel Shell, a contributing editor for The
> Atlantic, it’s all downside, and billions of rubbery shrimp are the least of
> it. For a while, there were some newly affluent shrimp-farmers along the
> coast of Thailand as traditional operations were transformed into gigantic
> factories with the help of international lenders and investors. Massive
> onslaughts of chemicals made the factories productive, but fish — like cows
> and pigs and chickens — do not flourish in the long run under such extreme,
> artificial conditions. They get sick, and their ponds become black holes of
> pollution and toxic waste. “What followed was ruinous debt, environmental
> degradation, horrifying human rights abuses and violence that left millions
> destitute,” Ruppel Shell writes. Moral: Despite what’s jotted down on the
> restaurant check, there’s no such thing as cheap shrimp.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Eric W. Pollard
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