A few days ago I saw this on Twitter:

John *Hams* Harris @harrisj99hi

Below is an example of the CRAP I can buy from Amazon and have delivered tomorrow. Meanwhile, my friend's father can't get a new CPAP, that his doctor wanted him to have yesterday, due to back orders. How much of the supply chain is backed up with crap?

September 29th 2021

1 Retweet5 Likes

I suggested that given the actual value of this stuff—zero, more or less, in terms of the materials at least—that it was likely not competing with high-value goods currently seeing shortages or other supply chain issues.

However, I thought about this again a couple of days ago when I was out shopping. First, I saw this in Home Depot. Just take a look at that price tag!

Then I saw these in Harris Teeter (actually, I’ve seen them every year since my wife and I moved to Reston, Virginia).

I think they’re very funny. It took me a few seconds the first time I saw one to realize that, of course, these creatures don’t have skeletons! Yet they’re sold next to other skeletons that do actually exist, such as a dog and a monkey. I find it really amusing that somebody sat down and designed/imagined a non-existent skeleton for a plastic Halloween decoration.

All of this also made me think of At Home, a home goods superstore that I once described like this:

A first-time visitor’s emotions are likely to run from exhilarated to wryly amused to vaguely discomfited, as the funhouse-mirror-like feeling of the place dawns. It is staggering how many aisles there are, how many sheer combinations and permutations of stuff. On top of this, the merchandise has an uncanny-valley feel to it, almost as if it has been generated algorithmically based on a Chinese computer’s idea of what an American with too much time and money would like to buy.

Here are the pillow aisles in At Home.

Now I wonder again, is this stuff clogging up shipping or supply chains? I’d still lean towards “no,” but I do find the profusion of junk like this to be kind of disquieting. I do wonder how much of the world’s industrial capacity is tied up, and how much environmental impact is generated, by stuff that nobody really needs. So much of it ends up in the landfill too, just a year or two later.

There’s virtually nothing in one of these stores that will become a family heirloom or a cherished possession. You know how many times I’ve seen these things at garage sales for a dollar or two, with the original sticker still on the bottom?

Before I was interested in urbanism, I was interested in consumer and environmental issues. I first became aware of these issues in high school, by reading Vance Packard, the midcentury social critic who wrote The Hidden Persuaders and a bunch of other books. At the time he was seen as a liberal who maybe didn’t love America, but reading him today, he sounds like an old-fashioned American who grasped very early on just how radical the changes to American life were in the post-war era. Suburbia, of course, is one of these changes. In a lot of ways, contemporary America hasn’t abandoned its supposedly wholesome ’50s self, but rather supercharged it.

So no, shutting down the pillow and ferry-of-the-dead factories probably won’t generate more CPAP machines and microchips. But maybe it should happen anyway.

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