Quote of the Day (Pamela Paul, on the Environmental Price of Online Returns)

“Online returns create 16 million tons of carbon emissions or the equivalent of 3.5 million cars on the road for an entire year.

“It’s often cheaper for the seller to simply throw the item away than to inspect for damage, repackage and resell. Dumping returns (sometimes called ‘destroyed in field’ or ‘damaging out’) is often less costly than reusing them….

“In the United States, 2.6 million tons of returned clothes wound up in landfills in 2020. And that’s just clothing.”—“Opinion” columnist Pamela Paul, “When You Return Those Pants, The Planet Pays,” The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2024

(The image accompanying this post, showing Pamela Paul at the 2019 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, was taken Oct. 26, 2019, by Larry D. Moore.)

Quote of the Day (Amanda Mull, on Opening a Package in the Digital Age)

“Opening up a brand-new purchase is the carefully orchestrated emotional crescendo of the consumer experience, and it has the power to give basically anyone a dopamine hit. These opportunities used to be more isolated—maybe you went to the grocery store once a week and the mall a couple of times a month. Now, if you have an internet connection and a credit card, something new to open can always be on the way. It feels good to dig through all those layers and unearth a little treat, no matter if it’s just hair dye or sweatpants….

“This phenomenon has only accelerated as Americans have shifted more of their consumption online, where they can’t touch or smell or otherwise size things up the way they would in a store. On the internet, packaged products are often judged by how attractive they look in photos, and there’s no shortage of alternatives on offer. As the sheer number of consumer choices has grown exponentially, the purposes that packaging serves have grown more intricate. At this peculiar moment in American consumer history, the experience of opening and handling a purchase can be more important than the thing itself.”— Amanda Mull, “Unwrappers' Delight,” The Atlantic, December 2021

Quote of the Day (Terry Teachout, on the Loss of Browsing in Online Book and Music Buying)

“Everybody knows that browsing is central to the experience of museum-going. It enables the serendipitous, horizon-widening discoveries that are part and parcel of an art lover’s education. Absent such discoveries, you’ll never know more than what you already knew going in. To put it another way, you may deepen your knowledge of art, but you won’t broaden it. And therein lies the problem of online book and record buying: By eliminating casual browsing, it deprives us of the opportunity to grow.” ― American critic, biographer, playwright, stage director, and librettist Terry Teachout (1956-2022), “Closing Our Browsers,” The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2014

The accompanying image of Terry Touchout was taken at the 2013 Texas Book Festival in Austin, on Oct. 27, 2013, by Larry D. Moore.