E-commerce and the Broken American Dream
Among other things, I am a long-term seller on Etsy, an e-commerce site that used to be all about handmade arts and crafts. I also sell on eBay, but for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on Etsy, primarily because eBay has always been a pretty "catch-all" proposition.
Naturally, the Big Brother algorithm knows that I'm active on Etsy — and have been, for 18 years — so I get served a large number of ads and links to various "helper apps" allegedly designed to help Etsy sellers maximize their success.
I'm OK with that... I'll take all the help I can get!
But that help is not actually useful. In looking at the 100 largest sellers on Etsy and making "recommendations" accordingly, success comes from offering thousands of low priced items people will buy purely on impulse.
But here's where the whole thing breaks down, at least from my perspective: being successful on Etsy no longer has anything to do with "handmade goods" and everything to do with reselling cheap trinkets from giant importers like Ali Express or TEMU.
Except... it seems that everybody has been reading the same playbook and so you end up with hundreds of hopefuls (not) selling the same trinkets in a marketplace so saturated that nobody is enjoying any actual success.
Sadly, the only real success here goes to the giant import conglomerates... where they are undoubtedly laughing all the way to the bank because they keep selling crap that cost them 10 cents each to entrepreneurial hopefuls for 99 cents each... who then turn around and have to sell them for $1.25 each because their original dream to sell for $9 each has been made impossible by oversaturation.
Of course, by the time you've handed off your slice to Etsy, PayPal and shipping supplies, the entire proposition is upside down. The only way to make anything substantial from cheap trinkets is to sell hundreds of thousands of them... which returns us to the domain of large organizations, rather than individuals hoping to create a successful home-based business.
As for the whole "handmade by unique individual craftspeople," that has completely gone out the window! People are instead spending their hard-earned cash on bucketloads of junk that's cute for a few minutes, until it breaks or ends up in the next garage sale.
Which brings me to a completely different corner of the American Dream: Homeownership.
We talk a lot about how we are "much better off" than we used to be because (among other things) the typical family home is more than double the size it used to be, just 50-60 years ago. Ironically, over that same period, family size has decreased.
I became really aware of how things have changed when Mrs. Denmarkguy and I toyed with the idea of moving to a smaller place... only to discover that the "2bed/2bath starter home" has pretty much gone extinct, in favor of a new norm that's pretty much the place we already have. Nobody builds 1200 square foot houses, anymore. That was the norm in the 1960s... but it has been growing steadily ever since, peaking/plateauing in 2015 at 2,700 square feet.
And there we were, trying to downsize from 1,800 square feet!
Now, remember the bit about family size shrinking, because people are having fewer and fewer kids? Mean we have even more square footage per person living in the house, relatively speaking.
Now, if we back up to the previous Etsy development — where people were buying one nice handmade item for maybe $75, now they are buying an entire shipping cart full for the same amount — what we really have here is a world in which we have larger more expensive "containers" in which to put all those cheap trinkets we're constantly being pressured to acquire.
And even so, something on the order of 30% of American households have at least one offsite rented storage unit somewhere, and an equal number no longer have room in their garage for actual cars because they have so much stuff to store.
And clearly, I am "doing it wrong," at least if I want to enjoy any level of success.
Not to be macabre, but it is at times like this I am not really sad that I (most likely) don't have that many years left on this planet!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!
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2026.06.04 21:55 PDT
1571/2836
Starter homes and retirement homes were largely pushed off the market by the real estate bubble of the early 2000s. People who bought land with a home cheaply made themselves rich knocking down a perfectly good small house and building a mansion on the lot instead.
Housing developments in suburbia with HOAs ballooned in that same timeframe, saturating the market.
Older neighborhoods in cities were often targeted by eminent domain law abuse as "blighted" so they could be bulldozed and sold to developers.
I remember elderly friends of my parents who had a post-WW2 neighborhood house with 2 bedrooms and a single bath, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen on a compact main floor. There was an attic for storage and a basement with laundry and a workshop or sewing space that could have been an extra bedroom. It wouldn't meet modern code for egress windows, but that kind of issue is relatively easy to remedy, especially compared to total demolition.
Greed is a constant in humanity. However, the political and legal incentives of the time incentivised especially short-sighted and destructive behavior. Zoning laws, artificially low interest rates with easy credit, and the assurance of federal bailouts if it all happened to go wrong rewarded greedy behavior at every level.
Sure enough, it all went wrong. Now we have consequences including high inflation rates raising prices, and a distorted market of durable goods failing more and more to meet consumer demand. But we can't have the illusion of prosperity torn away when the baby boomers rely on their real estate as a major part of their "investment portfolio," so that bubble and the stock market must be propped up with easy credit, and never allowed to correct. So we have the "K-shaped economy" distorted by politicians trying to support their corporate cronies and aging voters while everyone outside those groups suffers, and the popular "alternative solution" seems to be more of a command economy because "the free market failed."
I don't know if there was a specific point at which it happened but it seems like we somehow measure everything in terms of dollars, including our sense of self. We even measure happiness in terms of dollars. And it seems that we have created a system that if you somehow prefer less and a simpler life, you are regarded as some kind of social pariah. Like it is almost Un-American to not spend every cent you have on goods and services.
Zoning laws are crazy in most places. I was having a somewhat lengthy discussion with one of my cousins in Denmark — he actually lived in the US for 3 years — any pointed out that through his lens of perception as a foreigners, zoning in the US seemed exclusively designed to maximize profits rather than to optimize housing people. I can't say us how I disagree with that assessment.
We have since given up on finding a smaller place not for price reasons but for simple availability reasons. There's just nothing going, and on the rare occasions that there is it's usually snapped up by some Private Equity Firm as a knockdown to rebuilt as a luxury property.
A lot of zoning laws seem to be tied to gentrification, racial discrimination, and early 20th century progressive goals of eliminating "slums" and "blighted neighborhoods" without considering what it would cost to house the now-displaced minorities, or else no real concern for them. The left and right alike were often openly racist toward Jews, blacks, and poor European immigrants like the Irish. "Modernization" often meant destroying their growing communities.
Without looking at the political side of it, the *sociological" side seems to suggest that we have created a very "ME focused" society. Nobody considers the impact entirely ME actions has on others, on the community, or on the surrounding community/environment. "Rational self-interest" is fine, but obsessive self-involvement can be very destructive...
My cousin bought me a cell phone holder for my car for 99 cents off Temu, I remember saying to her I probably wouldn't use it anyway so don't spend the money. Well she did anyway, months later it's still in the trunk of my car. I wondered at one point though, how can large retailers even compete with pricing like that. My cousin, she complains a lot after she goes on a site like that being bombarded with offers that sound to good to be true, and they usually are, and she ends up getting junk. I think 99 cent sweaters is a push to believe but she falls for it. Me, I'd rather not be bothered. The grand kids had a wood shaped box out back filled with toys they finally outgrew they played in the sandbox with. I asked them if it was okay for me to finally get rid of them and they helped me carry them all to the curb. I took the hose and rinsed them off though they could have used a good scrubbing, within two days they were all gone. I guess in todays economy using a little elbow grease to get a bargain beats Temu.
I've never been able to understand how they make it work. Some trinket is 99 cents and then they offer free shipping on top of that. As a seller online, I know full well but shipping costs more than 99 cents most likely, I can't ship anything for less than about 4 bucks.
I'm just trying to get rid of stuff! But the system is really not rigged to help anybody simplify and buy less, quite the opposite.
Around here, we use to "buy nothing" app quite often to recycle things, and to find things we need.