Consumers and Wage-Earners: The Ethics of Buying Cheap — Text and Context

The Prize-Bag as Moral Microcosm

The opening chapter uses a child’s excitement over a prize-bag to frame the ethical problem of cheap goods. Ross notes that the same “gambling instincts” that drive spending on horse races also animate a boy’s purchase—but the real gamble is borne by the young women who assemble the bags. He cites a factory where girls work ten-hour days at tables, “with boxes before them, from which they take peanuts, candy and prizes with quick automatic motion.” The wage: four cents per hundred bags. Even at maximum speed, they cannot earn a living wage. Ross does not merely condemn the employer; he implicates the buyer who demands the lowest price.

Tables That Tell a Story

Ross reproduces detailed wage-and-expense tables from a Bureau of Labor study of women workers in seven cities. One table shows that among 236 women keeping house, nearly 17% had weekly costs exceeding their earnings. Another lists how many dependents these women supported: 46 had one or more persons wholly dependent on them, while 101 had partial dependents. Ross calls these figures “pitiful stories of making ends meet.” He quotes a department-store girl who claimed she was “dieting” while eating only a dish of tapioca for lunch—her worn shoes and skirt told a different tale. The data is not abstract; it is attached to specific, vulnerable lives.

The Consumer’s Complicity

Ross repeatedly insists that the consumer who buys cheap goods shares responsibility for the conditions under which they are made. He challenges the notion that low prices are an unqualified good, arguing that they often depend on “ill-lighted, ill-ventilated rooms” and workers who cannot afford proper meals. The book does not offer simple solutions; instead, it asks readers to weigh their own convenience against the human cost. Ross’s tone is measured but urgent, blending economic data with moral reasoning. He avoids sentimentalism, letting the statistics and the workers’ own words carry the weight of his argument.

Ross’s book is not a dry economic treatise but a pointed moral inquiry. Readers should pay attention to the way he weaves together personal vignettes, statistical tables, and ethical questions. The excerpts suggest that the full text likely deepens this pattern, examining wages, health, and morals in successive chapters. For those interested in the history of consumer ethics or labor conditions in early twentieth-century America, this work offers a contemporary voice—one that holds up a mirror to the buyer as well as the seller.

I kept thinking about how we rarely see the hands behind the price tags, and that quiet unease stayed with me long after finishing. Something similar happened with The Phantom World; or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. — Reading Companion. It lingers less as an argument and more as a presence, like an old question we once half-believed, still resting somewhere soft in the mind.