Mighty Neighborly, a regular feature on the Precipitate blog, explores how everyday, local decisions impact a larger community and the environment.
Between the morning’s writing session in a coffee shop and the trip to my office for student conferences, I stopped for tacos, as I am wont to do on a Tuesday. Because I had only the change from a ten-dollar bill and wasn’t sure if the restaurant took credit cards (the good taco places never do), I had to limit myself to six dollars worth of food. I looked at the menu and thought, but I want beans and rice. Ooh, and avocado slices. But since I had only cash in hand, I bought two tacos and went home.
It seems that bundling of goods and services, tacos being both a consumer good and the highest moral good, is inevitable. Indeed, it is a way of life in the U.S.; from our extra value meals to our cellphone-camera-computers, we try to get as much stuff as we possibly can because a lot of the time, it’s cheaper that way. This is not always a consumer-tech orgy thing. I buy a CSA box because the individual produce items would be ridiculously expensive if purchased individually, and the farmer would not know how much money he’s to get from me from week to week.
The problem is, I don’t like cabbage. Sometimes the cabbage sits in my fridge for weeks before I remember that curry can wipe out even the dirty sock taste of cabbage; often I consider placing it in the work mailbox of my friend and co-worker who inexplicably loves the stuff. The cabbage, a frequent suspect in the CSA lineup, is not enough to deter me because I can use it if I have to.
What I can’t find a use for is a landline. There are limited communications options in my neighborhood, so when I was setting up my apartment, I called the company who I thought was the only game in town. They wanted to charge $60 a month for home internet. Highway robbery! Well, they explained, have you considered that you can switch your home phone service for only $5 a month, and for $5 more, you can add cable. I don’t have a home phone. I learned this might be seen as unusual when the operator tried to convince me that I couldn’t exist in this state. She told me that a cell phone was okay in an emergency. Ah, I see. You should have heard the conversation we had when I said I didn’t have a T.V.
The point, I told her, was that I didn’t want these other services. I just wanted one service, and that service was overpriced. If services could be added for $5, why couldn’t I have one service for $20?
Because they want you to eat the tacos and all of the side dishes. In most industries there’s a tremendous amount of markup. As a member of the committee that designed the reader for a freshman composition class, I worked hard to make sure that the book would be cheap. We wound up dropping selections, eliminating discussion questions, anything to get the cost down. A month later, we found out that the bookstore, which receives subsidies from the university, marks books up thirty-three percent. I wonder why we fund them at all instead of sending students to Amazon, or allowing professors to use the independent bookstores that would be grateful for our business.
While I claimed that tacos and extra value meals were the inspiration for this post, I want give credit to Cord Jefferson, Senior Editor at Good Technology, for his excellent article about smartphones and technology. Jefferson’s position is that there is no ethical smartphone, and that the best way to avoid exploiting workers and the environment is to only use what you need, which may not be the next cool thing. I’ve yet to determine how technology bundling should impact purchasing decisions. For example, does it make sense to buy an iPhone and have all of my technology together when eventually if the camera breaks, I have to replace the whole unit? I assume there are fewer rare earth minerals in single-function devices, but then I have, well, multiple devices that will be made by multiple sweatshop employees.
I’d love to know how our readers solve this problem. Please comment using whichever device you find to be the least of several evils.
H. V. Cramond, Staff Blogger