A Questionable Story of Stuff

After recently viewing Annie Leonard’s video on consumption, entitled “The Story of Stuff,” I was left with mixed emotions. On the one hand, Leonard is working towards a great cause and her central message of changing the way we produce and consume is an important issue. However, her presentation was too over the top and was full of exaggerations and inaccuracies presented as facts.

Although I found several major problems in Leonard’s video, there were two which really stood out to me. The first was the description of her encounter at Radio Shack. She explains that she found a green radio at Radio Shack for $4.99. She then discusses how there was no way $4.99 could represent the costs of all of the materials, transportation, and labor that goes into making a single radio and that the reason the radio was so cheap was that it reflected “externalized costs.” Basically, the radio was cheap because other people were paying for it in various external costs such as the loss of natural resources and children in sweat shop’s loss of their childhood. Forgetting that the cheapest radio available at radio shack stores is $17.59 according to their website, I believe the real reason the supposed $4.99 radio from her story cost so little was because of basic economic principles such as Economies of Scale. More specifically, when you produce millions of a product at once, it is much less expensive than if you produce one at a time, like Leonard made it seem in her video.

The second major issue I had with her video was her idea that the media and advertisements were some sort of “bad guy” out to trick the world into throwing away old products and polluting the earth. According to Leonard, “Commercials say ‘You Suck.’” I personally have never been verbally abused by my television, and in my opinion advertising is a tool used to help market a product and create brand value. This perhaps reflects my underlying problem with “The Story of Stuff.” On multiple occasions Leonard lists her opinions, but never prefaces them with the statement “in my opinion.” Instead she presents them in a way which would make them seem like facts. While I appreciate her efforts to better the world, I wish she would go about it in a different manner.