Today, we bought a dining table from Ikea to replace our dining table from Ikea. Well, that is not quite true, we made the old dining table from a table top and some legs from Ikea very cheaply 3 years ago to serve a purpose it no longer serves. The new one is a little larger and hopefully, stable enough that my daughter can't rock it and laugh as all of our drinks spill.
Now, I have nothing against Ikea products themselves and I actually don't mind building them myself, as it is kind of like being handy for real, just not. What I dislike is that I must shop at Ikea if I want to get something. Cheap, decent quality, mass produced. What's not to love?
A few years ago I had a discussion with one of my brothers about this situation that I perpetually find myself in and most likely, many of us find ourselves in, a conspiracy. Perhaps not a 'completely intentional' one but close enough to.
We are in balanced crush, have you noticed? I can comfortably even say the majority of us as for these global conglomerates to operate the way they do, the majority of us must buy from them.
In my family, we always have enough to consume mass produced products, never enough to get out of debt. Is this by accident? I don't think so. Mass production works on volumes and margins, and an optimisation to maximise profit and minimise offering costs.
Minimising costs means a crushing of supply chains in about every imaginable way, all the way down to child and slave labour. The lower down the food chain, the more the crush and the wider base crushed. For many companies, it is even possible that the CEO earns more per year than all of the hands-on production level employees combined as production can be in the dollar a day categories.
So, where do low level earners buy when they need something? Well, mass produced conglomerates of course, how can they afford more? Not only are the conglomerates killing the artisans through prices, they are part of the system that makes buying from an artisan impossible as the individual table maker must buy retail materials and has no supply chain to crush down to lower prices for customers.
Their potential customers just don't have the money to spend on such luxuries, even though what they would spend with them is much, much more likely to be invested back into their local economies with more tax paid on it than the conglomerates who use creative accounting practices and shelf corporations to mitigate most tax burdens. Something the small business owner cannot do.
This is what annoys me about Ikea and all of the others similar as well as the government enablers. There is a dishonesty in the system that punishes the local artist with tax and makes them criminals for doing cash-in-hand jobs for a slightly lower price to win a client whilst it is fine to have a company earn 150 million in revenues and pay only 200.000 in taxes in the country it was earned (a local Finnish example). And then, the 149.8 million went offshore.
This is pretty scammy behaviour in my opinion and I think most will already know and agree on but, how often do we think about it? When we get that bargain on sale, we never see the supply chain getting crushed and convicting the unseen into a conglomerated life of consumption.
Of course, neither corporation nor government have any incentive to break this cycle as the balance allows them to have a continual supply of customers that continually push majority of the earnings towards a narrow and very high peak. Cooperation for centralisation of mutual benefit for the few.
What do they say is the way out? Save. What does this mean? No locally made, locally owned, artisan crafted dining table. I have too much debt for such luxuries. And because of that debt, the cycle is very, very hard to break.
To break it, I must save which means consuming cheaply. The debt however has interests that make it harder to pay off the longer and higher it goes. If I do manage to pay it off, it means the conglomerates and the middleman banks have benefited heavily anyway but, my chances are very low.
It is kind of like cigarette companies selling nicotine gum. Yes, the chances of quitting is higher and they will lose a customer but, the vast majority still fail so in the meantime, they are making money by selling gum.
The vast majority of the world fails to break the debt cycle they commonly find themselves in but while they try, those that put them in debt still benefit.
Like the things I built today and will continue on tomorrow, I have been hammered, nailed and screwed. Most of us have no choice but to bend over and buy it.
Always enough to buy, never enough to not.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
