The Price of a Bargain
The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization
By: Gordon Laird
Published: October 20, 2009
Format: Hardcover, 344 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4606-3
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
"For better and for worse, ours is the age of the bargaineers - the engineers of bargains - whose factories extend from rice paddies to suburban basements everywhere. Each year we are drawn to their doors by the millions", writes award winning journalist Gordon Laird in his incisive and thoughtful book
The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization. The author provides rare insight into the driving forces behind globalization, and lays bare the real costs associated with perceived bargains, that fill the shelves of big box stores and discount chains.
Gordon Laird comes to the conclusion that globalization may have reached its practical limit. In a world of depleting and more costly resources, less available cheap offshore labor, more expensive transportation, and exhausted consumer credit, the real price of bargains has been borne by those other than the customer. The author describes, through extensive research that spans the globe, that the globalized economy of the past two decades is unsustainable and is nearing an end. The true environmental costs of bargains, writes Gordon Laird, are now being realized in higher levels of air pollution, increased asthma and cancer rates, and accelerated climate change. At the same time, the author describes how exploited workers rioting for higher wages and better working conditions, while increasingly scarce resources become more expensive as well. These realities lead the author to conclude that product prices will increase at the same time as consumers have lower incomes and less access to credit.
Gordon Laird (photo left)describes the rise and fall of shopping malls and big boz stores, how industry leader Wal-Mart may have passed its peak growth period, and how dollar stores and independent retailers are adding customers. The author takes the reader on a tour of Alberta's tar sands, the port of Los Angeles, and through mainland China. Each of these integral parts of the world bargain trade system point to what he sees as its decline. All of these changes in the retail, environment, resource, and offshore labor landscape, according to Gordon Laird, represent an overall sea change in the global supply chain. As a result, the author sees dramatic changes in consumer behavior to a more local and regional type of economy. For Gordon Laird, these changes mark the beginning of the end of globalization.
For me, the power of the book is how Gordon Laird combines seemingly unrelated aspects of the global economy, ranging from resource scarcity to Chinese worker riots to less consumer credit, and connects them into an overall global system of bargains. At the same time, the author makes a compelling case that today's familiar shopping malls are soon to be ghost towns, and they will be joined by countless big box stores and power centers. The true prices of labor, environmental degradation, and health concerns have not been part of the low prices for imported consumer goods. That situation is about to change. The author provides policy and market based alternatives to the current bargain economy. Instead of globalization continuing as what Gordon Laird calls a gambler's economy of Las Vegas writ large, he suggests that a more balanced economy will emerge, where the real price of things saves the world economy and globalization from themselves.
I highly recommend the powerful and essential analysis of the true cost of bargains The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization by Gordon Laird, to anyone seeking a more clear understanding of how the search for bargains has many hidden and unaccounted for costs. The book also takes a glimpse into the future of the retail, resource, and transportation industries and how their transformation will change forever the face of national economies and globalization.
Read the powerful and important book The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization by Gordon Laird, and you will never look at low prices and perceived bargains in the same way again.
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