There used to be this country, now vanished beneath the seas, where countless small retail shops flourished and customers would come in and buy things like televisions and stereos at retail prices that they could afford because they had solid middle-class (or above) jobs with wages and salaries that went up every year along with that country’s economic productivity-- that they helped create. This let them use some of their savings to routinely make purchases like this throughout most of their lives.
Massive big-box retailers could not score deals with manufacturers or sell products below cost to crush their competition (and then jack those prices right back up after most of their small shop competitors were wiped out). The small customer-centric shops had protections that came from "fair trade laws", and domestic manufacturers were protected by laws that did not allow foreign countries to dump products onto our shores that were made by slaves, by children, or by otherwise exploited workers-- all as a means of unfairly competing with our own manufacturers. So they had to sell on value and quality through stores that had to focus more on customer service and locality to remain in business and thrive.
The employees at these countless shops were not paid a fortune, but they were decently-compensated. They had steady jobs and benefits that allowed them to live respectable lives while working in those stereo shops-- many of them located right there in your town. Remember? No? Some of those employees lived right down the road from you, right next to the English teacher, or the auto dealership service manager, or the grocery store clerk. Remember? No?
This long dead country also had higher annual GDP, their children did a little better than them when they grew up because they went to well-funded schools that were paid for by the taxes that everyone paid according to their means, and in most cases, if they had kids, and almost all of those households did, it only took the salary of one parent to accomplish all of this. Hell, they even had dinner together every night. Remember?
That country’s political and business leaders decided somewhere along the line that it didn’t want that life for its own people anymore, and the kids that are growing up in this new country can’t afford to desire or buy things like stereos, new cars, appliances, houses, or to even send their own kids one day to college-- the way that their parents helped them do. It’s just no longer possible for most of them-- so their kids go into debt and make decades worth of payments to just hang on-- dreaming of a new set of ear buds so that they can stream crap-sounding digitized dreck into their heads everyday, partly to shut out a world that shut them out long ago.
It does not have to be this way. Every crisis brings with it new opportunities to change this world. The question is, just what kind of country do you want to live in? A winner take all society, run by global monopolies, that mostly sell cheap disposable crap out of warehouse sized stores to going nowhere stressed-out families, or would you maybe like a country where that little hi-fi shop down the road can exist again and prosper along with you and your family?
We actually have that choice- whether we know it or not, we have it.
And yes, this is absolutely on topic.
