Monday Morsel 3: Are We Sick of Buying Stuff
An Interview with Atlantic Staff Writer Amanda Mull
Meatspace is Lora and Sarah’s weekly digest of weird/wack/need-to-know tech news — and our warm takes on all of it. This is our Monday edition!!
Seeing this interview on the web? Subscribe here: meatspace.substack.com
Know someone doing inclusive, interesting, and/or offbeat work in tech? Respond to this email / reach out on Insta / Twitter and hook us up! (please) (if u want)
Dear friends,
Ok imagine this: you have to buy a mattress, and then you move and have to buy another one, and then another one, and this repeats over and over until you die. This is where we’re at!
Well, where Sarah’s actually at is an air mattress in Oakland, CA, where she just moved (to be closer to the home of the internet among other things!!) and is now sleeping each night on a lumpy allegory for precarity that slowly deflates while she sleeps. That’s because investing in a new Thing is hard. Especially when it’s expensive, and especially after a move, which often compels ppl to think about stuff, and how a lot of it accumulates over the years only to eventually become a nuisance, or nostalgia.
The real premise behind “millennials are killing x y z” is that they (we) are still buying things (avocado toast, tickets to vampire weekend concerts, succulents), but they’re not the “right” kinds of things (homes, engagement rings, meals at hooters). And that’s bc broadly speaking Millennials still love shopping, albeit in new and ever-evolving ways, constrained by the limits of economic insecurity/constant transience, and empowered by laziness! (Related: Ikea even rents furniture now, but Sarah chose to leave after buying veggie meatballs and one duck-shaped storage bin.)
In a word, our relationship to stuff is changing. To make sense of it all, Lora sat down this week with shopping expert/mall fan/Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull.
Read on for wise thoughts on how capitalism values resource-hoarding; how the death of brick and mortar retail is exaggerated (@Lora’s mom no offense); and how once shopping got masculine under Bez0-capitalism, people started paying attention. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity!)
MEATSPACE: You wrote about shopping for 10 years (before coming to The Atlantic). How does your background in fashion influence how you see general consumer trends in your writing?
AMANDA MULL: I think it’s a shame that so much of fashion writing gets walled off from general interest writing and reporting. Because I think the fashion industry is a very interesting case study in how things are marketed, how consumers think about themselves, how consumers look at the things they buy as part of their identity, and how brands and retailers get people to pay premiums for certain kinds of things, even though there’s not additional utility from spending that money or from buying that particular things.
So much is image-based, and so much is perception-based—nobody is trying to sell someone the extra utility of a $700 pair of stilettos. There’s no functional sell there. You have to admit that you’re just buying something because it’s beautiful, or because you think it’s fancy, because someone has convinced you that it’s fancy.
How do u shop?
The weird thing about me is that I wrote exclusively about shopping for ten years. So a lot of my idle time was just spent on the internet on shopping sites looking at things—new retailers, or new brands, or just trying to stay abreast of how things are bought and sold on the internet. I find that I still tend to do that even though it’s not directly part of my day-to-day job anymore.
I tend to buy from a very small set of stores. I buy most of my clothing at ASOS. I buy most of my shoes from Nike because Nike’s size 9 women’s are very consistent across styles, so I can buy things without trying them on. I also try to look for places that have free shipping and free returns because that eliminates a certain amount of tension for picking up after yourself after you’ve shopped online.
To what extent are millennial shopping urges a product of an exploitative labor system? If at all.
Something I think about a lot is that I don’t need more apps to do things for me, and I don’t need more gig economy services to bring things to my apartment: I need more time to do my own grocery shopping or clean my own apartment. I need time to take care of myself, not ways to hire other people to take care of the things that [we] would normally do for [ourselves] given enough time and the financial security to spend that time maintaining [our] lives.
That’s not necessarily true for me. I have a good job. I have good work-life balance. But I think a lot of people who are sort of squeezed and working freelance jobs, or several different freelance gigs or even full time jobs that just really don’t care if they have free time in evenings or on the weekends, end up needing to use some of the money they make at those jobs to try to deal with the fact that their jobs eat up their entire lives.
Lora’s mom (and others) are convinced that brick and mortar stores are dead. What’s your feeling on this?
I think the death of brick and mortar is largely exaggerated. The ways that people use brick and mortar stores are changing, and have changed a lot, and I don’t think they’re going to stop changing. But people still want to go see things in person. People still want to try stuff on. People still want to interact and have an experience.
So I think that retail has shifted in order to be more of an experience for people. The most successful retail stores are the stores that offer people more than just the opportunity to exchange money for a product. Glossier does a lot of world-building, and really successful newer brands that target younger consumers do a lot of world-building. Going to the store is going to that world. It’s like an opportunity to go stand inside Instagram.
So retail is moving towards experiences and, as you wrote in The Atlantic last week, a lot of online companies are moving towards subscription models. What other big commerce trends do u predict?
I think people are sort of getting sick of buying stuff. I am so sick of buying stuff, and I’m a person who loves to shop. I’ve always loved to shop. Shopping as an activity—especially for clothes and shoes and makeup and things like that—has been compelling to me since I was in elementary school. I love to go to the mall. Pretty much any type of mall. I’ll go to a crappy mall. Love it. I find it very anthropologically interesting.
But there is advertising fatigue, because I think that the line has blurred between what is something that we consume because we’re interested in it, or because it’s beautiful, and what is something that’s consumed in order to communicate a branded message to us. I think that consumers feel a lot of tension over what they’re looking at at any given time, and if there’s some secret mechanism behind it that’s trying to sell them something. Everything’s monetized, you know.
And a lot of these subscription services that let you sort of rent things for a short period of time or give stuff back at the end or feel like you’re not buying something but just sort of using it, that is also shopping in a sense. It’s less wasteful. I will totally give them that. If you need the use of a durable good for a brief period of time, it’s definitely more friendly to the environment to rent it in some way than it is to buy it and have it sit in your closet and then get thrown out. But it’s still shopping, in a sense.
And opting out of that purposefully, while I think it’s an ethical thing to do, on an individual level it puts people at a disadvantage—which is why you can’t buy your way out of structural problems.
Even if you try to opt out of constantly consuming things, capitalism is always going to value people who have assets. Maybe you don’t want to build a McMansion so you rent a small apartment forever, which is a less wasteful way to live. It’s a more efficient use of space. But the society we live in is going to economically advantage people who go ahead and build that house and own that land and own that asset, with tax breaks and the ability to sell that asset at the end when they’re done with it, and reap some of that money back, if not all of it and more.
When u say it’s the ethical thing, do u mean ethical in terms of waste?
Yeah, doing what you can to use things responsibly, and use space responsibly and use resources responsibly. Looking at the things that you buy and use as not something that happens in a silo, but as part of a collective behavior, and a finite set of resources that you’re consuming, is really, really important. To try to use what you need and leave the rest for other people. But it’s hard to make that happen in a way that’s meaningful in an economic system that wants you to hoard things.
If you take any issue—whether it’s renting a sofa or something—and you blow it all the way out, you get to this level of incentives and structural problems that whether or not you rent the sofa really cannot effect.
Interesting to use shopping as framework for bigger structural issues.
Yeah, you can’t look at Amazon [for example] and say “how people buy things or what they buy or why they buy things doesn’t matter.” I think that Amazon has made people realize that how, like, a stay at home mom shops is actually something that is political in some ways, and is a result of structural incentives that exist around her and not just “a housewife.”
Shopping is a feminized thing, and there’s a desire to distance the philosophical importance of things that are feminized. Shopping for a family is feminized labor. And to a certain extent shopping for a range of consumer products is feminized labor. It’s hard to get some types of men to buy new underwear. It’s harder to imagine a middle-class woman who has a professional job who won’t buy herself new underwear. Because women are primed to shop, women are socialized to be the consumers.
Ah yeah, it’s interesting how Amazon has become its own larger force that’s shifting that dynamic.
It’s so big and so powerful and so male-seeming. Its website is ugly. Its website is just durably ugly. It doesn’t get better, it hasn’t improved over time. And Jeff Bezos is such a dude, especially now that he’s swole and getting divorced. So I think Amazon helps put a more masculine face on things like shopping for facewash and underwear, and it got so big that people have to meaningfully contend with how and why people shop as an important cultural issue.
It’s one of those things that’s easy to dismiss because we all do it. We all have to buy face wash. But where you buy face wash is a complicated thing.
What is not currently a subscription service that should be?
The term subscription has become so vague that it’s subscriptions, it’s rentals, its memberships—it sort of covers all of those things. It’s really just a payment structure now, where you pay every so often. I wish there were a way for me when I’m sick for people to bring me the good Sudafed that you have to go show your ID for. That’s like the only thing you can’t get delivered in New York City. You can get illegal drugs delivered here. But you can’t get anyone to bring you Sudafed.
Thank u so much!!!
I wanna go the mall now.
Thank you again Amanda! Truly a great experience interviewing you. Check out her recent takes on how Allbirds are maybe not that bad; what happens when u just give in and shop on Insta; and, just for fun, on how hot people are stressful. Also follow her on Twitter, she is a delightful follow! (For example she just bought a new rug and a plant and they are both beautiful and fun.)
SPEAKING OF SHOPPING, ALSO READ:
Deep dive on Rent The Runway from last year (s/o Nell G for flagging RtR) (New Yorker)
Framing things is varying levels of expensive! Who is buying frames (Vox)
Did u know the US government is the world’s largest purchase of consumer goods!? (Vox)
Reply All on how merchants game the Amazon store and make big money scamming innocent people into paying them to learn the same (Reply All)
Yet another case for raising the minimum wage: new research confirms it helps hourly workers and does not hurt the broader economy (CityLab)
STUFF TWEET OF THE WEEK:
See u Friday!
Lora and Sarah