You are not The American Consumer

Reclaim your birthright as The American Creator

Last week I spent an inordinate amount of time picking miniscule shards of Gorilla Glass out of my hand and ear. In a clumsy attempt to drown my liberal tears with a dirty martini, I’d dropped a shot glass on my phone screen and the screen shattered so badly there was a chunk missing.

I’ve had this phone since the pandemic and it worked just fine until it started assaulting me. I’d intended to hold onto this phone until the end of this presidency, at least, but I’m not willing to bleed just to make a point.

I’m a relentless upgrade-decliner. My car is now 11 years old. I’ve only owned four cars in my adult life, having kept each one for about 10 years, until they started costing more to maintain than replace. Waste annoys me. I repair things. I make do. I do without. It’s not because I don’t love a new car, it’s because I hate being called The American Consumer.

I was put here on this planet to create, not consume.

I want things that are built to last, and they just don’t make ‘em like they used to. I’ve had two PCs die within two years of purchase. (Dell, go eat a bag of dicks.)(I’m not advocating for violence, Big Brother, I’m just annoyed because PCs are expensive AF. Truly, I wish Dell well and bless them into a better place like bankruptcy and public shame.)

I owned a bed that cost $250 a month to own because it disintegrated in exactly three months. Nobody agreed – not Amazon, not the manufacturer, not my bank -- that a bed should last longer than three months or that I should receive a refund for being sold a defective, unsafe product. It disintegrated outside of the 30-day return window which was long enough for everyone involved to disclaim responsibility, rules are rules, too bad so sad, nevermind that it could have caused serious injury and/or death.

They make it very difficult to close your account. I stopped using Amazon in January and after three months I’m sure I can function just fine without it. Laters Bezos!

I purchased a set of 12 dinner plates about a year and a half ago and there are exactly three that aren’t chipped and/or broken because broccoli is a burden too great to bear for it to bear.

The plastic lids on my Pyrex bowls flop off in my lunchbox and spill salad dressing everywhere, despite never having been in a dishwasher or even slightly stressed before.

A WaterPik stopped squirting water between my teeth six months after I bought it and I was never able to revive it.

Don’t get me started on clothes.

My dad had a drawer full of my grandmother’s cooking tools – can openers, ice cream scoops, strainers and nut crackers and knives – all of them in perfect working order despite being older than I (reader: I am almost 50 so these tools don’t even have bluetooth). The ice cream scoop is the coolest and it works better than any of the ice cream scoops I’ve owned in the past 15 years.

Politicians and corporations are strapping us in like geese destined for pâté and forcing literal, actual, poison down our throats because they need us to keep shopping for them to survive. Politicians need us to think of them as options in the grocery aisle. “You know, honey, we’ve been eating a lot of democracy lately, why don’t we try something new for a change? Civil liberties and a stable economy are getting old. How about fascism? That looks interesting!”

Every time I see the Temu tagline shop like a billionaire I want to throw things because billionaires do not fucking shop. They acquire quality goods and invest in things that will increase in or at least hold their value. They are not going on shopping sprees for stupid plastic gewgaws that will fall apart in five seconds so they can post their hauls on TikTok and influence other people to click their affiliate links. I mean yeah! Eat the rich! But maybe learn something from them before you do?

At any rate, my phone was smashed and I needed to port some phone numbers to a new account. The lovely guy I spoke with told me cell service for three new lines was $170 including taxes and fees. Pffffft. No, try again with something more reasonable. $115 for an essentials plan that does not include taxes and fees? Sure. Let’s do that.

So I go on the website to figure out which phone I’m going to get.

If I want a new phone, I have to upgrade my service to the more expensive one. I notice that my plan is actually $130 on the website, excluding taxes and fees, and the cost of the $170 plan I was quoted is actually $203, including taxes and fees.

WTF are the taxes and fees? I just fucking want to know what I’m paying here.

The phone is $1200, but I will get a bill credit of $800 a month if I upgrade to the $203 plan, so my actual bill would be $219 ($203 + $400/24 months).

If I keep the less expensive plan and pay for the phone, my actual bill would be $180 plus taxes and fees. How much do you wanna bet the taxes and fees will cost around $30 and my monthly bill will work out to be about the same no matter which way I do this?

If I add a line, all the other lines get less expensive, and then I can get a dumbphone, but that doesn’t solve the problem of my needing a smartphone for work and many life things (plane tickets, concert tickets, paying to park in the city, etc.).

This is way more math than I want to do ever, and it shouldn’t be this complicated.

Luckily, the insurance I had on my phone carried over to the new plan so I was able to replace the glass on my phone for free, but it’s not really free because I pay for the repair with insurance and time. This may be the rare case where I stuck it to the man, though, because the phone company decided it’s cheaper to move a motherboard into a new phone than it is to replace the glass, so I now effectively have a new phone. Do with this information what you will. Dirty martini, anyone? (Just make sure you have insurance first!)

The genius of Tesla isn’t that they’re great cars. Elon Musk just copied an excellent way of selling them. The price is the price. You click buy. You get a car. No math. No negotiation. Just an exchange of money for goods, an easy transaction for busy people.

And that’s the thing! Capitalism needs us to stay overwhelmed and confused so that when we’re confronted with things like trying to figure out the best price on toothpaste we default to the easiest, algorithmically optimized option because we’re tired of doing fucking math.

When we confront this and demand to know exactly what we’re getting and how much it really costs, it results in things like having a frustrated car salesman throw a phone at you (yes this actually happened to me when I dared to insist that a salesman tell me the actual price of a car, not how much the monthly payment was, and he told me to get my husband on the phone so my husband could set me straight [friends, I did not have a husband so I called my dad], since I apparently had a thick head and wouldn’t listen to reason. He didn’t enjoy it when my dad set him straight. I did not buy that car, nor any other car on the lot, after he threw my phone at me. On the way to the next car dealership I got pulled over for very whoa super speeding because American Pie was on the radio and I was having a great time singing along. The officer asked me where I was going in such a hurry. I told him I was going to buy a new car – a slower one -- and avoided getting a Very Bad and Terrible speeding ticket because I made him laugh. WHEW. Fun times, which are now behind us, or may always have been, depending on who you are.).

ANYWAY

This stupid trade war tax on The American Consumer isn’t going to bring manufacturing back to this country – anyone with critical thinking skills can understand that. In order to bring manufacturing back here, businesses need money and time to shift their strategy. They don’t have money and aren’t nimble. Thanks to this trade war, they have even less money and no time.

There are plenty of other places in the world that have manufacturing infrastructure built on exploiting their human labor. So, instead of sourcing cheap goods from China, companies will take the path of least resistance and source from places like India that already have that infrastructure. Hell, even countries that treat their workers well have an advantage here – it may be more expensive to have something manufactured in Germany but it won’t come with a 1092034798234234% tax. Manufacturing isn’t coming back here, it will just move from China to a country with smaller tariffs, and round and round we’ll go with ever-shifting tariffs depending on who that man believes is peeing in his cornflakes that day.

Either way, we – The American Consumer – will pay more. And maybe we should.

Truly, we don’t need one single fucking thing from Temu. We do not need to refresh our home décor each season. We do not need to decorate our houses and yards top to bottom for every silly Hallmark holiday. Our children do not need a room full of new toys every Christmas. We do not need Home Goods hauls or Woobles kits or Grabie boxes or piles of shitty clothes and identities that we buy and immediately discard when what’s trending on TikTok that day is replaced by another core or code.

Not being able to afford mountains of stupid plastic shit is going to rock some people’s worlds because as my dad used to say, “some people are so poor all they have is money.” I don’t want to see anyone suffer, but I would like us to stop behaving as The American Consumer and remember that our core identity is, and always has been, creator. They stole this from us, and now we will be forced to reclaim it. Better to do it now than wait for our hand to be forced.

A man invented a shield so that when you cook bacon you don’t get splashed by the grease. He manufactures them in China, of course, and can charge $25 for them. He’s concerned that he might go out of business because (at the time I heard his interview 5 or 6 escalations ago) he would have to charge $80 and nobody is going to pay that for a splash shield. I’m not sure anyone ever stopped to question whether we need a splash shield at any price! Somehow, we’ve made it through many, many centuries without plastic splash shields for bacon cooking. Do they even need to exist, or did someone manufacture a problem and sell us a solution so they could make money?

People have short memories. I was a kid when our economy shifted from manufacturing to service industry. The workforce was decimated, full of people who had only known factory work for fair wages and a solid pension who lost their livelihoods late in life and weren’t sure how to pivot. With this came a proliferation of trade schools and the great sorting of our youth (me, included) into either college-bound or trade-bound or service industry-bound. It wasn’t that long ago.

These tariffs are just a ham-handed attempt to rebalance an inequity we ourselves created. Manufacturing left the United States because our labor isn’t cheap, nor should it be. We have (or used to have) rights and safety regulations and worker protection. Corporations couldn’t make their money printers go brrrrrrr on our backs so they moved overseas to countries who were happy to exploit their workers. Now, we’re becoming one of them. If manufacturing does return here, we’ll get to enjoy the experience of being exploited ourselves. Paybacks are a bitch.

We’re not being treated unfairly by China or any other country. This is peak capitalism, where the corporations have eaten too much and now they’ve got indigestion. We were warned this was coming, we just didn’t believe we’d be the ones who’d have to deal with it.

Yes, this was a metaphor.

This too.

We played ourselves because we bought into the corporate lie that owning lots of things was a demonstration of success. We handed our souls over to capitalism and chose to ignore that our houses are full of things only possible through someone else’s suffering.

Corporations already own us. I “own” dozens of video games on consoles that I can’t access unless I pay a subscription. I can’t sell those games, or trade them, or even play them when my console bites the dust. I ripped all my CDs, got rid of those clunky fuckers, and now am filled with regret because the hard drive where I saved them failed, and the backup failed, and now I rent my music from Spotify. How many movies I “purchased” from Amazon Prime were vaporized when I deleted my account? How many Nook and Kindle books gather cobwebs in the cloud because I no longer use those devices? I can’t trade them. I can’t sell them. I can’t pop them into a Little Free Library. They were never mine to begin with.

My worldview is glitching and the monsters in the machine are clawing their way into my psyche. I am so angry that I didn’t, or wouldn’t, or refused to see this as it was happening, and even angrier that the idea that we’re just The American Consumer is continuously forced down our throats and reinforced by everyone from the politicians to the media to the influencers to our friends and family. I hate that this is how everyone views us. I hate that this is how we view ourselves. My belongings feel like a toxic burden, a source of shame, a manipulation.

It's within our power to change, though. All we need to do is reject this false identity, stop shopping, and remember that we are The American Creator.

All things worth owning have a cost. We deserve to understand what it is, and we deserve to understand how it’s paid for.