Maybe for Consumers, Less Really Is More

When I was in college, I had a marvelous economics professor who introduced me to the law of diminishing returns.

Imagine you are crossing Death Valley, he urged. You’re dying of thirst and you reach an ice chest filled with 100 icy bottles of Coke. You crack open a bottle. Nothing ever tasted better. By the time you hit your 50th bottle, however, you’re beyond sick of it.

That’s the law. The more you have of something, the less you appreciate it.

*

Fast forward 17 years and I’m in the parking lot of Costco, where hordes of customers are filling their oversize SUVs with vats of volume discounts. The man next to me is loading his van with case after case of bulk goods, including A-1 Steak Sauce.

“Do you have a restaurant?” I ask, nodding to the case of sauce as he relinquishes his emptied cart to me.

“No,” he chuckles. “We just like it.”

So he needs a case?

But I should talk. A short while later, I’m standing at the Costco checkout contemplating my volume-discount purchases: multiple loaves of bread for the freezer, cases of Diet Snapple, a salon-size container of shampoo--not even my favorite brand. And I’m seriously wondering whether I really need all this now.

This notion also hit me over the head, literally, the other day when I opened a high cupboard in my laundry room and was assaulted by a dozen or more tumbling toilet paper rolls, a volume discount 36-roll pack. Why not, I’d reasoned at the time. My family of four will go through it.

Well, we use sugar, too, but does that mean I should buy a lifetime supply?

Enough already.

*

As I look at the droves of customers around me, carts overflowing, shoulders weary, it occurs to me that in America our buying habits have grown way out of proportion to our needs. Our culture, stimulating as it is, incites us not only to spend more than we have, but also to buy more than we need.

“America is over-stored and overstocked,” admitted the vice president of merchandising for a major chain of discount stores I spoke to the other day. “In the past 20 years there’s been an overemphasis on price. Customers fill their carts with low-priced merchandise and forget to look for things that they connect with emotionally.”

Exactly.

“Give us this day our daily bread,” says a prayer many of us learned as children. Note, it doesn’t say our yearly, monthly or weekly bread.

Yet here I am, the typical consumer, buying loaves as if I’m anticipating a famine.

We’ve all heard the artist’s maxim: Less is more. Doesn’t the same hold true for consumption? Hoarding isn’t pretty.

Occasionally, I get it right. The other day when ordering child-size ice cream cones for my two small children, I asked the server to please make the scoops smaller than usual. My husband (whose middle name is Two-for-One) shot me that are-you-nuts? look: “Why should we get less than we’re paying for?”

Well, experience has taught me that 50% of the ice cream ends up down the elbows, on the clothes and all over the car seat. Why buy the headache? Enough is enough.

I recently read about a top-drawer chef famous for his nine-course meals. Each course takes only three bites to consume. After that, he rightly reasons, people’s taste experience drops.

Exactly.

Now I’m not saying we should start living like the Amish. But maybe we should ask ourselves how much we’re “saving” by buying more than we need.

I’m looking to the past, when Americans weren’t so bent on consumption, for inspiration.

Take old quilts for example. Women used to take old clothes, drapes and other remnants of lives, and remake them into something useful. They found purpose in something we’d probably toss today.

Or, in reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder series of autobiographical books to my daughter, I recall finding it humbling that young Laura was thrilled by the birthday favor of--an orange. She savored the peel, the smell, the taste of each sweet section.

What happened since? As a nation, did we get too comfortable with our bounty? Did the fact that we could have things perhaps drive us to feel we should have things, and along the way “things” lost their value?

Enter the law of diminishing returns.

It’s time for the pendulum to swing back, for us to return to restraint and moderation. To start scrutinizing our consumption until we’re buying not because something is on sale, but because we love it and it will last. To buy food in portions that suit us. What if we ignored the ads and coupons from our overstocked, over-stored world and started putting our hard-earned resources toward causes worthier than filling our cupboards and closets?

If we can clear the excess, and along the way rediscover the wonder of an orange or the treasure in a family quilt, I believe we’d feel not deprived but enriched.