One of the conventional pleasures of the American shopping experience has been buying more than you need while telling yourself you are being highly efficient. Beans in 12-packs; two, gallon-bottles of olive oil shackled at the collar bone; high-end electronics like the multipack Philips Sonicare electric toothbrushes I once bought for $300. $300! Where are those toothbrushes now? No idea. In the name of economy I did this for years, until all of a sudden I didn’t.
Times change, our awareness as consumers grows and eventually, if we’re lucky, it starts to dawn on us that warehouse shopping not only turns our apartments into storerooms but that the experience enables more waste than efficiency. As epiphanies go, it’s up there with realising you don’t have to say yes when someone offers you their kids’ cast offs – a moment captured in Emily Mester’s sly and brilliant new book, American Bulk: Essays on Excess. Mester, who chronicles a childhood spent browsing the aisles at Costco in the suburban Midwest, looks not only at the rise of ever more disposable goods but at the relationship we as consumers have with them.
