crapification

i have never head one feeling or another about the handbag company Coach. but lately i have been noticing an alarming number of Coach bags that are fabric, with the Coach logo someone printed all over the bag. as in, not leather. irritating because of the logo trend in general, but a symptom of something far more insidious. i've looked them up, and dammit if those non-leather bags cost the same as their leather counterparts. (between you and me, i think that the women carrying $400 dollar non-leather purses look like complete suckers.)

i take it to be an objective truth that an all-leather purse is better than a fabric one. but it's part of the trend: things just get crappier and crappier and we buy more and more of it--partly because we have to because the crappy stuff doesn't last long, and partly because of planned obsolescence/trend changes/what have you re: The New. charles fishman calls this the "wal-mart effect," in which to power to underprice your competitors works hand-in-hand with seeking ever-cheaper (read: exploitative) labor and ever-cheaper (read: flimsy) building materials. ah, the good old days, when bookshelves weren't made of particle board. and purses were made of leather and you could carry them for a decade. and there was no polio vaccine and women couldn't vote. oh, wait. crap.