If more people thought, and shopped, like you and me, I don't think we'd be in the economic crisis we are. Really. Americans are obsessed with buying a lot of crap for cheap, and now - pun intended - we're paying the price for it.

The one thing I don't really understand is that Wal-Mart employees are always ridiculously rude to shoppers (or maybe it's just the ones I've been to).

I get it, the whole oppressed worker thing. I worked at Target. Granted, I was treated *a little, and I stress A LITTLE* better than people that work at Wal-Mart, but I don't understand why you would push that off on someone else and make their day worse. But maybe that's just because I'm a nice person.

I will say, however, that my new Target does not display the best customer service. In fact, for a city where people on the whole are incredibly nice, the people that work at Target are incredibly rude.

In the same sense, I don't get why customers are rude to workers, either. I'm not always a nice person - I just don't understand making a random person's day worse. I guess I just enforce targeted rudeness for myself.

KSigkid, if I don't care to be around certain people, how is that judging them? I just don't like some of the things that I've seen. Having a cashier touch my produce with black stuff underneath his fingernails is gross to me. I'm sure there are certain people that you wouldn't want to be around either.

Uhmm, I don't dress up to go to Walmart or any other grocery store, and I'm not a snob! I just don't like shopping there.

Isn't the problem really the opposite - that Americans wanted more than they could afford, and extended credit to anyone who wanted it to facilitate this?

It's a combination of both.

I agree. We really have become crappy a$$ consumers. But then again, thank goodness we've sent all our money over to China to import their cheap crap, where do you think we're going to get a good portion of these bailout loans from?

Well China has a huge national interest in keeping the dollar strong, too. Most of their reserves are in dollars, and the Yuan is pegged to the dollar as well, although that's a significant lowball on what the Yuan is actually worth.

Here's what I think is going to happen - they're going help to "bail us out" by giving us some of their reserves, then they're going to slowly but surely change their reserves into a different currency (most likely the Euro), and allow the Yuan to appreciate.

But that's all going to take at least 10 years unless they want to toss their own economy into crisis.

If we were culturally different as a county though, it wouldn't have mattered how much credit was extended. ITA with PeppyGPhiB, it's an economic theory I've long held in fact.

For example, credit companies can (and have) dangle as many money carrots in front of me as they would like, but I still don't bite. Because I am a quality over quantity type of person. I actually enjoy my small, super-low-mortgage house. I could have gotten a loan for about three times what I took, and bought a huge property, but I chose not to.

I'm not saying that I'm better than other people, just different. My conservative spending doesn't put as much cash back into the system. But the cash that it puts in is all real, not credit.

I do think it's similar to the way that culturally we want as much as we can have for as cheap as we can get it. My boss mocks me for spending a few bucks more at the local store instead of going to the bargain discount chain store. But, it makes me happier to spend a few bucks more and support a local business. For the majority of Americans it's just the opposite. That cultural push for bigger, better, cheaper drives the market - it's the demand the meets the supply. Were there no demand for all these extra cheap things that we often don't need anyway (but we want them because they are cheap and because we want in general), there would not be the supply of credit.

I truly believe that excess demand drives supply far more often than excess supply drives demand.

Yeah, I just don't see the connection at all - I think you're grasping for a literal connection, although I'll agree with a completely figurative connection if you'd rather just leave it as "people are poor consumers, and both ARMs and Wal-Mart are good examples of poor and uninformed consumer decisions" then I'll agree.

However, the psychology behind both is nebulous at best - the push for lower per-unit cost on goods really doesn't seem at all connected to a lack of understanding of proper income-based spending, the time-value of money and amortization . . . in fact, it seems "penny wise, pound foolish" which is antithetical to what you're saying.

Total trainwreck of a hijack here - my point is that I agree with the forest (so to speak) but not the trees. I see where you're going but disagree with how you're getting there. I'm not catching what you're throwing. I'm running out of hack metaphors - my bad.

However, this:

. . . is true to the point of tautology for almost any system, and actually goes against your point, in my mind.

Not pickin up what they're puttin' down? Not smellin' what they're steppin' in?

Ok, if I seem to be contradicting myself, let me try it this way:

1. Culturally, Americans want lots of stuff we don’t need.

2. We want those copious amounts of unnecessary things to come cheaply, because we are bargain shoppers at heart and like to feel good about the low price we paid for the massive amounts of stuff we don’t need in the first place.

3. Our demand for vast quantities of cheap unnecessary stuff feeds into the supply of easy credit.

4. With the easy credit we proceed to buy vast quantities of cheap unnecessary stuff.

I use myself as an example of someone outside the cultural norm. I don’t want lots of stuff, and the stuff that I do want I don’t want for the absolute best bargain. You can offer me all the credit you would like and I won’t take it. I agreed with Peppy, in that if culturally we were a nation that put more value in quality, maybe we might not value quantity as much and we might not be in quite the scrape we are in now. Of course it's likely the market wouldn’t have expanded as it did, either, so we would have had neither the highs nor the lows.

My last line about demand driving supply goes exactly with my point, which is that we are demanding lots of cheap crappy stuff and demanding the credit to buy it with. There are a LOT of people out there who believe that the Wal-Marts, credit card companies and predatory lenders of the world have caused the problems and consumers are not to blame. In other words, that the availability of cheap crappy stuff and easy credit (the supply) have made us culturally want those things (the demand). I believe it is the other way around, that we are culturally inclined to bargain shop and accumulate stuff, and that our cultural inclinations drove the market to where it is today.

Yes, this is what I meant. You hit the nail on the head.

This is subjective, but I'll acquiesce for the purposes of discussion. Just for the record, I don't really know what this means or why it's important to the current credit crisis, which is based purely on trading debt (which is quite tangible).

I completely disagree with this premise.

Remember that a Lexis is just a Toyota with nicer paneling - if anything, Americans like to feel good about paying out the ass for a watch, boat, car, whatever . . . this is nearly antithetical to your main point, in my opinion. How do you reconcile this belief with the ARM movement toward massive, useless houses for way too much money?

False dilemma.

Begging the question.

I'll leave the rest, because I completely agree with your viewpoint, just not your conclusion. I get where you're coming from, to a point, but I think your premises are flawed. People wanted more, more, more - that's not uniquely American. If you want proof, look at the impending hit to foreign markets.