I think we're sort of like starting to butt up against this sort of extreme of what it is that people can be made to do as far as buying things online.

And I'm very interested to see what happens when it sort of stalls.

I'm very interested to see whats, and this week my guest is Amanda Mull.

Amanda is a staff writer at The Atlantic where she writes the Material World column, and she's also a shop steward at the Atlantic Union. Amanda recently wrote a column

looking at how a lot of e-commerce websites are starting to end the policy of free returns. There's

starting to be a fee or some other kind of difficulty that comes with returning a product that you

buy online as return rates have increased, as companies are trying to kind of difficulty that comes with returning a product that you buy online as return rates

have increased, as companies are trying to kind of cut expenses and all these other reasons that

this is happening. But in having Amanda on the show, as I mentioned, she writes a column called

Material World and that looks into consumerism, kind of broadly in American culture, I thought it would be fun to kind of

have a broader conversation about how kind of consumerism develops, how it becomes something

that is expected of people, you know, in the United States in particular as we focus on in this

conversation, but that also kind of extends around the globe to other societies as well.

And I think this conversation gives us a really interesting way to look at it in exploring how this comes about in the late

1800s, early 1900s, how this develops through the 1900s, how it's related to how workers

and how people in society see themselves and how there's

increasing kind of worker stratification between those who are kind of entered into this consumerist

middle class and those who are not, those who are serving them. And also how it relates to these

developments that we've seen in recent years as the tech industry has kind of taken up the mantle

of extending this consumerist mentality into a new era of kind of growth and consumption and

all these other things as consumption has kind of moved on to the internet where we have e-commerce,

where we have these kind of gig companies doing delivery all the time, where we have more people

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