{"id":292,"date":"2005-10-20T20:39:15","date_gmt":"2005-10-21T03:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/?p=292"},"modified":"2005-12-23T17:47:21","modified_gmt":"2005-12-24T01:47:21","slug":"the-price-of-being-cheap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/20\/the-price-of-being-cheap\/","title":{"rendered":"The Price of Being Cheap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the years I have heard and read about how big chain stores have been putting small local (a.k.a. mom and pop) shops out of business. I never really paid much attention to news like that as long as I was saving money at those national chain stores, and usually I was.<\/p>\n<p>It didn&#8217;t really hit me until a few years ago <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brianmain.com\/blog\" target=\"_blank\">Brian<\/a> had casually mentioned how a newly opened Home Depot at his home town in Michigan was having a negative impact on his father&#8217;s gardening supplies business. I was embarrassed to have been so insensitive to the news, like millions of consumers.<\/p>\n<p>Worst yet, now some experts are finding out how these every-day-low-prices-guaranteed national chains (ahem-WalMart-ahem) are really doing to the American economy. It&#8217;s turned a &#8220;need-based&#8221; consumer culture into a want-based consumer culture. There&#8217;s so much <i>junk<\/i> in most American homes that there&#8217;s now a growing trend in <a href=\"http:\/\/slate.msn.com\/id\/2122832\/\" target=\"_blank\">renting self-storages<\/a> to store all the stuff that most people don&#8217;t need in the first place. It&#8217;s such an irony that Brian&#8217;s family decided to open a self storage facility after conceding defeat to competition with Home Depot.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/big_box_mart.png\" width=\"302\" height=\"216\" class=\"centered\" alt=\"Jib Jab's 'Big Box Mart'\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jibjab.com\" target=\"_blank\">Jib Jab<\/a> is a site that used to create mostly political satire animations. But their latest work, <i>Big Box Mart<\/i>, accurately captured the economic and clutural trend in the United States. If you don&#8217;t agree with the underlining message, at least you&#8217;ll get a good laugh out of the silly animation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the years I have heard and read about how big chain stores have been putting small local (a.k.a. mom and pop) shops out of business. I never really paid much attention to news like that as long as I was saving money at those national chain stores, and usually I was. It didn&#8217;t really &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/20\/the-price-of-being-cheap\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Price of Being Cheap&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-no-logo","category-politics","category-society-environment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p54IqZ-4I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}