Those within large corporations have eagerly been spreading their operations around the globe to generate better profits from cheaper labour and decreasing shipping costs . A nice side effect for them has been the separation of the consumer from the production.
When a consumer is geographically far removed from the product that they purchase and use there is no immediate tactile feedback to learn from. The consumer can never truly know a great deal of things: How the making of the product affected the environment. How the people who made the product were treated. How much recycled material was used in the product. etc. etc. etc.
Because she’s removed it’s very hard for a soccer mom in Kansas to realize, and truly know, that the toys made in Hong Kong that she’s buying for little Sally are making the world that Sally will grow up in a dirtier place. She can’t see the smoke stacks, the fumes and the waste from their production. If they were made in her town, or her backyard, she’d be able to draw straighter lines from her purchase to her daughter’s health.
When consumption is mostly located directly opposite the production on our terrestrial sphere huge inefficiencies of travel are created. To ship a boat full of car stereos to North America from Tokyo takes an enormous amount of energy. While the “cost” of production is lower the actual total cost in the grand scheme could not possibly be.
I’m not advocating making all of our toys and car stereos locally. In fact, that would probably make things worse as you’d loose the environmental economies of scale. What I am suggesting though is that if we had to directly deal with the consequences of our consumption we’d consume less. We’d be smarter. Hiding the cost of consumption in countries too poor to know any better will come back to haunt us all ten fold.
Comments
Daniel Von Fange - August 27, 2004 9:11 am
"To ship a boat full of car stereos to North America from Tokyo takes an enormous amount of energy. While the “cost” of production is lower the actual total cost in the grand scheme could not possibly be."
The total cost in dollars is lower - or the capitalist system would not be doing it. ;)
Shipping stuff by boat is inexpensive. Shipping prices have taken a big nose dive in past fifty years due to containerized cargo coming on the scene (Which really opened up the us/asian trade). You as an individual, with no special discounts could ship a 40' container from Hong Kong to Portland, Oregon for around $6,300 USD. A 40' foot container has 67 cubic meters of cargo space. Pack that up with 1744 1'x1'x1' stereo boxes and you have a cost of about $3.61 per stereo. (Not including customs)
Pack it fully of cellphones, and you are talking 10-20 cents per phone.
Anyway. Nothing like a good tangent.
Dan James - August 27, 2004 10:05 am
Daniel,
Sounds like you've shipped cell phones and car stereos before :-). I totally agree. Money wise it's dirt cheap to ship a kabillion stereos across the sea. But what I was trying to get at, and probably failed at doing so, was that money is not the only cost. The environment, the health of the people in the region they've been produced in, etc has to be taken into account in the grand scheme of things. Companies who ignore that cost (who externalize it) will end up paying big time in the end. Both financially and morally.
Jason - August 27, 2004 11:06 pm
Dan,
I'm not sure if this is appropriate from this topic of not but being a Dell customer, I can say that I was more than a little angered when I found out that after phoning Dell for support on my Dimension Laptop before leaving for Thailand and then phoning when I returned they had moved all of their customer support to an Indian based company. When talking about distance and people being out of touch with the product, the problem of customer support definitely makes sense to discuss here. After just taking a psychology class, we discussed at great lengths the facts that separate western and eastern cultures and how this can definitely be a barrier when communicating. Not only will people phoning Dell become frustrated when they have difficulty communicating, they will feel removed and helpless because of the fact that they feel the person they are talking is so far removed from them and everything they know. Outsourcing techinical and customer support to a country that has such different communication methods, values, and economy is just not good business when you think about how many of your customers you are frustrating. I feel very strongly about this issue and am curious about what everyone else thinks or hear about others experiences with such frustration.
Will Pate - August 28, 2004 8:24 am
Have you been reading Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce? Sounds like you might be open to the idea of true cost pricing. Basically it takes into account the environmental cost of restoring the damage done during prodction, consumption and waste phases and factors them into the retail cost. Adbusters has a politically saturated site describing it, called True Cost Economics. There's more info at the ConservationEconomy.net site too.
Jason, there are a slew of Dell support and service horror stories floating around right now. I'm going to write mine up sometime in the near future, because it's a doozy. For now Dave Pollard's stands as the worst I've heard.