I spent a good part of Saturday browsing around a mountain town with one of my friends. It’s been a long time since I explored local shops, and it was a bit of a treat. I naturally found myself thinking about economics, what it means to support local businesses, and whether it really matters.
The one shop that really stood out to me was an art gallery. It was fairly large, with displays for many local artists. I saw a bowl with colors and texture I really loved, but it doesn’t match anything I already have, and I knew it would be difficult to store. I also saw some incredibly creative ceramic vessels featuring comically contorted faces on the outside, and while I kind of loved these, they were not the sort of thing I would ever buy. I saw some coasters I thought my sister might like, but I’m not skilled at impromptu giving and, having appreciated-but-unwanted gifts often foisted on my by my mom, I’m rather leery of forcing gifts on others if I can avoid it.
But what really struck me in this shop was a mid-size painting of a snowy forest with the beginnings of a sunset in the distance. This reminded me vividly of snowshoeing, and I knew it would make a great addition to my room. I was amazed at the quality. It’s price? $200. Which, honestly, was a little surprising to me. It seemed a bit low, but then again, most art is under-priced, in my opinion. People will spend $1400 on a loaded iPhone, but they can’t be bothered to spend $500 on something of beauty (just kidding, many people think phones are a thing of beauty, but whatever). For the amount of skill that went into the painting, only $200? I have to wonder what cut of that the gallery has to take as well – they’re paying to lease the space and hire a worker, after all.
I almost bought it, I really did. Problem is, I’m a cheap-ass, and I don’t typically spend $200 on whim unless I have a pretty good reason. I’m rapidly running out of wall space at it is, but I couldn’t help but think, “This artists deserves to be paid for this!”
But how do you juxtapose saving money vs spending it in cases like this? See, some people, not being very bright in my opinion, want everybody to have large salaries, but want everything to be cheap. These people are asking for something from nothing, one of the surest signs of stupidity, though certainly something we are all guilty of from time to time. If you want people to have higher incomes, you need to be willing to pay it! This is simplified, of course, and I think most people would argue that the chain of command often leeches the earnings, but I’m not interested in hearing some whiny liberals complain about the evils of management as if all management was unnecessary, or as if you could actually have the proletariat also be the ruling class. Go start your own business, come back and tell me you shouldn’t be compensated for the risks you took! But even I’ll admit it’s pretty cringe-worthy hearing top executives receive million dollar bonuses. Frankly, I don’t talk about this subject much because I don’t know much about it. It’s a complex topic.
See, some people argue that spending money is important for the economy, and many have leveraged this as an argument against the FIRE community and early retirement in general. But the world is full of waste and overproduction, and in a perfect world marketing wouldn’t exist because people wouldn’t be swayed from their own convictions about what they desire in life: they wouldn’t need to be deceived. Jacob Fisker’s counterargument against the supposed importance of spending is that not spending would decrease the money supply and perpetuate more “not-spending”, thus dramatically decreasing ecological waste and encouraging systemic sustainability, but I digress. From my perspective, it is not my responsibility to support anybody else, fuck you very much. If I don’t want something, I don’t buy it. I vote with my dollars. That’s actually been the hard thing about this pandemic – it sucks seeing retail and restaurant workers get hit so hard, but did I really need those things in my life? Did anybody, really? Many speculate the restaurant market was already saturated to the brim.
The appeal to shopping locally is that the proceeds go almost exclusively to the producers, which are typically small companies or independent owners. There’s no cut for middle-management. And it can be hard for these companies to compete against large corporations, who have economies of scale on their side.
But that’s the problem: people want “cheap”. I’m always disparaging the average person’s possessions, because the average person’s possessions are worth disparaging, in my opinion. We have so much shit! Things are much more easily acquired than gotten rid of, and the things we aren’t using or enjoying in some capacity are the wasted potential of the earth and the labor that developed them.
I believe it often makes sense to pay more for better quality. But even then, not everything needs to be better quality, and there’s only so much that I need. What I need is considerably less than all the bozo advertisements wants me to believe. Am I mean in saying that some companies deserve to not exist?
Here’s my general approach to all of this: my income far exceeds my expenses, so I’m not opposed to paying extra money for the the things I really enjoy. But I don’t shop locally out of pity. There are only so many bars of shave soap that I need, and I don’t know that supporting the local shave shop to the tune of $10 every year is really worth the effort of driving there when I can otherwise order online. Sorry, guys. That’s just how it is. But there are things like backpacking gear, tools, art, and even furniture that do mean a lot to me, so I vote with my dollars. Osprey is still a big name in the outdoor gear industry, but if I’m not mistaken, they are a fairly small company. I’m cool with that. And I get value from their products. If I didn’t get value from their products, I wouldn’t buy anything from them. It’s as simple as that.
And the beauty is, everybody has different tastes, hobbies, passions, likes, dislikes, whatever. So there are a lot of companies that exists because they provide value to those people. So guess what? It’s especially not my responsibility to support any of these.
But what’s sad to me is that people often don’t know what really matters to them. They just go from one thing to the next somewhat blindly, seeing something at WalMart that’s mildly interesting and throwing it in the cart, like a popcorn machine. It seems useful, and they think they might use it, but it sits in the guest room for years. And this probably happens to all of us in some ways. And it’s like, “You know, if you stopped wasting money on this crap, you could vote for the things that really matter”, and suddenly, you might not think it’s a terrible price to pay $300 for that oil painting of a sunset over a snow field.
But again, these things are complicated.
I don’t trust myself spending $200 on a whim, but it’s still there in my head.