Today I bought things from two different Craigslist folks, which put me in a good mood. I've always had very pleasant exchanges with Craigslist people. I am still waiting to hear back about a solid wood, 5-drawer dresser someone was insanely selling for $20, which I highly suspect has already sold.
First, I went and picked up 3 dozen pint jars and 4 dozen quart jars from a woman about 15 minutes away, for $3/dozen. These were stored in very old cardboard boxes that the original jars had come in. Check it out:
Whoa! Holy 1950's, Batman! I love how "Mom" appears to be in her dotage already. And catch that bit of sparkle on the glass....
The woman I purchased these from had had gardens and had canned for many years, even while raising 6 children. We chatted about gardening for a while, she said she was glad to give the jars to someone who would be growing their own food, and it was nice to see younger people gardening. We agreed that our college town farmer's market has extremely high prices. (There's a granola snob factor, around these parts.) She said I should put newspapers covered with straw under my cucumbers, while for my part, I recommended Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (for about the 100th time). She also threw in two dozen "spaghetti jars" for free. I thought maybe Ball made some sort of specially decorated jar for tomato products or something, but no-- These turned out to be commercial spaghetti sauce jars which are actually, when you take the label off, 26-oz regular mouth Mason jars. I have to remove a few more labels, but the 26-oz size should be good for applesauce. I am not sure how to adjust canning times, but I can treat them as quart jars if need be.
Second, I bought 18 hardcover Time Life Nature books from the 1970's, most of them never opened, for $40. You might think these would be rather dated, and it's true they say "man" and "mankind" everywhere. This is something I will soon have to discuss with Anya. When reading non-fiction books to her, I routinely swap out many of the male pronouns for female ones on the fly, and when reading to herself she usually reads only small bits at a time. She therefore has not yet realized that older books pretend all people are male. But hey, I have to explain this at some point, right? In other respects I like these books much more than recently published ones. The newest science books for kids have so many photos and graphics that they are often visually confusing, and you have to hunt for the text. It's all sidebars and footnotes and captions, and the little bit of real information is largely given in "random factoid" form. The old Time Life books do have many gorgeous photos, as well as diagrams and maps, but there is a lot of text, sometimes several pages of small type in a row. This seems like a better balance, to me. And the photos seem well chosen, from a time when every illustration was costly, rather than now where the goal seems to be a cornucopia of color and the maximum number of different fonts per page.
Yes, when it comes to newly made things I have become a curmudgeon. I used to buy T-shirts at Target, but now the material is so thin and shoddy I will have to go elsewhere. I looked at some waffle-weave thermal blankets at a store recently, and they were so thin and badly woven that in places they looked like gauze (so much for "thermal"). And then there are the stories about food items that still have the same price, but the sizes are just a bit smaller, which they hope you won't notice. Instead of 12 ounces of cereal it's 9.8 ounces; instead of 32 ounces of mayonnaise it's 28. We have rampant, galloping price inflation in the US, which has now hit roughly 13.5% per annum. If you bought jeans or lettuce or printer paper or gasoline today, then by this time next year the cost would be (as a rough average) 13.5% higher. I say "would be" because companies are finding ways to avoid sticker shock, mostly by giving us junkier and junkier crap. Corporations are trying to hide price inflation by cutting the quality and the quantity, and trusting to the indiscriminate nature of the impulsive American consumer.
As Dmitry Orlov says [pp. 81-82 of Reinventing Collapse]:
For decades now, the main thrust of marketing has been to convince everyone that new is better than old, all the while witnessing a steady degradation in the quality of many items. Taking the case of furniture as an example, it has evolved from solid hardwood to softwood with a hardwood veneer, to particleboard with a hardwood veneer, to particleboard with a faux-woodgrain plastic veneer. While solid hardwood furniture can be sanded down and refinished, making it as good as new, the cult of the new forces people to throw it out and then pay for a new, shoddy, disposable, but new-looking replacement. Over the years, I have consistently been able to trash-pick better furniture than I could find in stores, while the overall quality of the trash has gone down continually. At present, most of the trash I see, even in the prosperous neighborhoods, is simply appallingly bad and not worth picking.
Another way of making consumers dependent on a continuous flow of new products is through the use of fashion. Here the goal is to make products that are ugly, while simultaneously convincing consumers that a certain kind of ugly is "in" this year. Next year, a subtly different kind of ugliness reigns supreme, while the previous year's ugliness is simply that -- ugly, and therefore no longer desirable. The combination of teenage rebellion, adolescent conformism and plain immature silliness offers particularly fertile ground for this type of mass uglification. The result is, again, obvious: when the flow of fashionably ugly new products stops, the products that remain are just plain ugly, and the self-esteem of those who are forced to use them rather low.
. . .
The last act in the American consumerist tragedy will end with the now naked consumer standing on top of a giant mound of plastic trash. At the end of an economy where everything is disposable stands the disposable consumer.
As one last example, if you buy non-stick pans you are going to have to buy them all over again in a few years, because inevitably the teflon flakes off. Lately, I care less about the price, and think more about when I will have to buy this item again. Stainless-steel and cast-iron pots and pans will NEVER have to be purchased again, so that's what I use.
And if the durable stuff is more expensive, well... keep your eye on Craigslist.