The true cost of “convenience culture”

Amanda Lee McCarty is telling me about the first time she used Instacart. It was in 2020, at the start of the pandemic lockdown, when it seemed like everyone was using Instacart, so she and her family gave it a try. What happened next sounds like a prank, or maybe a piece of performance art: “The shopper, for every vegetable on our list, substituted a bag of frozen peas.” She never used Instacart again, but the experience, McCarty realized, was a great object lesson about what we’re willing to exchange for convenience. “I didn’t have to leave the house, didn’t have to put on my shoes, didn’t have to get in the car, didn’t have to put on a mask, didn’t have to drive to the grocery store. And in exchange, I got 10 bags of frozen peas.”

McCarty is a former apparel buyer whose 5-year-old podcast, “Clotheshorse,” offers in-depth, meticulously researched, and often personal explorations of the business of fast fashion, and she’s been thinking a lot lately about the 360-degree expectation of convenience that has rapidly become the default setting of the American consumer. “We need things to be convenient,” she says, “because of how much people work and how many responsibilities we have. And we’ve lowered our standards in favor of convenience. We’ve lowered our expectations of quality in products and in service. And we’ve sacrificed our values.” She points out that we also continue to do this even when the supposedly convenient thing creates inconvenience, like figuring out whether to return 10 bags of frozen peas to the grocery store. “Even if they aren’t getting anything really good out of it, people will show up because of the convenience they perceive.”

The frozen-peas incident was one piece of a larger transformation for McCarty, who lost her job at the start of the pandemic. “I’ve always been the primary breadwinner for our family, so it was a scary situation,” she recalls. “My friends [were] at home buying stuff to redecorate their houses or learn to bake or whatever other 9,000 things were being sold to us. And I couldn’t do any of that, so I was like ‘I have to figure out how to make myself feel better without shopping.’” McCarty has no doubt that if she was still working full-time she would have spent much of lockdown “buying weird stuff off the internet like everybody else.” Instead, she had to turn inward to cope with fear and uncertainty. Ultimately, she says, it was “disconnecting from the consumption machine” that made all the difference. “I was learning new skills, writing, going for walks and working in the yard, what have you. And I realized ‘I’m enjoying this far more than anything I bought from Zara.’”

After years of working as a buyer for Urban Outfitters, Modcloth, Nasty Gal and other fast-fashion retailers, McCarty suddenly had time to think about why so many of us seek happiness, excitement, distraction and comfort in online shopping. “Convenience culture has conditioned us to find our joy in stuff,” she says, “but the reality is that the stuff we’re being sold isn’t that good. And it doesn’t make us happy for very long, if at all. So what do we do? We buy more stuff. We don’t stop the cycle and say, ‘Hey, maybe what I really need to do is start going for a walk every day or try to learn a new skill or join a social group.’”

Both isolation and overconsumption have intensified since 2020. A record number of new businesses launched that first year, and it seemed like fly-by-night clothing retailers pushed by Instagram’s algorithm were a majority of them. People noticed their feeds steadily filling up with sales pitches from brand-new companies whose clothing looked fire in photos and only in photos. I opened the app one day that summer to find its interface switched around, the Activity tag replaced with a tiny shopping-bag icon; this, it turned out, was the thumpingly unsubtle debut of Instagram Shops — for a solid week, every time I hopped on the app with the intention of posting a photo, I instead landed in the flickering, brightly colored mosaic of the Shops tab.

This is the kind of thing McCarty launched “Clotheshorse” to explore. The way that shopping has been integrated seamlessly into our daily routines; the way marketing language is deployed to trigger warmth and familiarity; the way online shopping tweaks our dopamine receptors so the activity of buying triggers a mini-rush. This year, she says, the show has done a series on how brands have gotten into our psyches via emotional marketing, which has been identified by marketing media as everything from a “new science” to a “super weapon” that will make consumers “cry and buy” and businesses “leverage authentic connections.”

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Consuming, meanwhile, is deeply tied to both uncertainty and opportunity. Chances to shop follow us around the apps and the internet courtesy of the personal data social-media platforms have harvested; data on what we have bought predicts what we want to buy next. “We’re at this point where everything has changed because of e-commerce and social media, where shopping is how we get from one day to the next,” says McCarty. Because we get our news from the same places that are constantly serving us things to purchase, spending as a quotidian part of taking in information has been normalized. At a time when the news is laced with near-constant existential uncertainty, its antidote looks increasingly like YOLO doom-buying. Everything is terrible, so why not get those $600 headphones/that Temu haul/ that 8th Labubu?

This, in turn, conflicts with a broad awareness of the environmental impact of overconsumption, with the result that justifying the little treats that get us from day to day requires magical thinking about the toll they take on resources. This is the subject on which McCarty gets the most pushback from people defending overconsumption. “The whole, ‘There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism’ thing: First of all, Karl Marx did not say that,” she sighs. “In the early days of the podcast, when people would say that, or they’d say, like, ‘My consumption will never compare to Amazon’s, so I’m going to keep buying Keurig cups.’ And I would be flummoxed.” But she’s also empathetic: “It’s a way to end the conversation so you don’t have to confront what comes next. We’ve been taught that what we buy and wear and own is indicative of our place in society. If we stop being a part of that, what happens?”

“Clotheshorse” is, in part, a way to have that next part of the conversation. “It took a lot of work,” she says. “It took reading about psychology and grassroots organizing, it took practicing having these conversations with people.” McCarty has thrown herself into it, and though she now works full time as a strategist and planner for small businesses, she also researches and writes each episode of the podcast and reaches out to potential guests.

“The conversation is so much bigger than clothes,” says McCarty. “But talking about clothes, which is often treated as silly and unserious, can be a great way to get into larger issues.” She knew she wanted the live show in Portland to be about making and mending, and the audience is filled with designers, sewists, and people in impeccable handmade outfits trying to comprehend the statistics about clothing waste McCarty is laying down: One in three people who can’t thread a needle or sew on a button, 500 billion dollars per year lost from clothing people throw out because they don’t know how to repair it. Replacing fast fashion with more fast fashion because we can’t fix it is a lack that radiates outward, exacerbating wage inequality, unethical supply-chain practices and microplastic waste. And the faster fashion gets, the more it feeds an illusion that clothing is meant to be disposable. (“Your clothing is not made by robots,” is one of McCarty’s regular reminders.)

The topic of overconsumption can get prickly, particularly when people feel judged for their spending habits. Years of getting in social-media spats over the ethics of vintage reselling and the demise of Jo-Ann Fabrics has definitely taken its toll on McCarty: “The more I stay off social media, the better I feel.” She thinks there’s a turning point approaching with regard to consumption and technology. “People are recognizing that our actions inform what’s happening around us, whether we want the responsibility or not.”

To get back to the frozen peas of it all, McCarty acknowledges that convenience is a hard habit to break. “Fast fashion — fast everything — has made us think convenience is the most important part. But convenience, whether we acknowledge it or not, never checks all the boxes, and [that] has exacerbated our consumerism.” This is a place where division isn’t between right and left, but is an ever-widening chasm between the ultrawealthy and the masses to whom they’ve sold convenience but delivered diminishing returns. “The toothpaste can’t go back in the tube,” says McCarty. “But I’ve seen changes. And they all started with people like you and me not shopping at Amazon.”