Prof. Wendy A. Woloson of Rutgers University-Camden is the author of Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, which chronicles how the United States became a country awash in inexpensive (and often poorly-made) consumer goods. She came on the podcast with editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the history of “crap.” The following transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity. 

Nathan J. Robinson

When I was a child, every time I got on a plane, the first thing I would do is look in the seatback pocket for the—now sadly defunct—SkyMall catalog. And I would spend a good portion of the flight gazing at the objects in the SkyMall catalog, which—for those of you who came of age after the SkyMall catalog—was full of different novelties and supposedly useful devices. Everything from the wine glass holder necklace to the glow-in-the-dark toilet seat to lips you can put on your dog to the bird clock that chirps a different bird every hour. And I thought it was strange for me to enjoy the SkyMall catalog. But Prof. Woloson is going to help me understand what drew me to the SkyMall catalog and where it fits in the history of American culture and capitalism. 

Wendy A. Woloson

I love your SkyMall anecdote. It’s perfect.

Robinson

Well, I also remembered another. I don’t know if you came across this in your research. I was briefly a member of the Cub Scouts, and we got the Boys’ Life magazine. It had a bunch of ads in the back. And there was an ad for the “hovercraft kit.” I ordered it, and when it came it was just a set of instructions for building a hovercraft with a vacuum cleaner, one that I never built, that I pretty much assume that no child actually ever built, but that many children fantasized about.

Woloson

It’s all about selling the fantasy, the hope of the future, that gets people to buy into these things—especially kids, who imagine all of these exciting things. But the product is never what it purports to be.

Robinson

Well, I want to start with trying to understand what you mean by “crap” as a category. Clearly, “crap” is a subcategory of consumer goods and commodities. When you use this term, you’re referring to many, many different kinds of things. How do we differentiate “crap” from “non-crap”?

Woloson

First, a disclaimer: crap is subjective. So what I might consider crap is maybe not what you would consider crap. I wrote this book not to be super-judgy about these things, but just to interrogate them more. These are the kinds of goods that we are surrounded with in our lives in often very intimate ways. 

But I do think that there are certain kinds of defining characteristics of crap: Things that are cynically made, things that aren’t made very well or made to fall apart. Things that create more problems than they purport to solve. Things that are dishonest objects that don’t live up to the expectations that the marketers have put forth for them. 

I have several examples of those things in my book. Maybe one of the clearest is mass-produced collectibles. I think mass-produced-collectibles are crappy, because over time they have promised to be investment objects that would appreciate in value. And a lot of people spent a lot of money on things like Precious Moments figurines, thinking that they would be able to resell them in the future for loads of money. Those promises were never true. So that’s the “crappy” part. But by the same token, if you have a mass-produced figurine that, say, your grandmother gave you, and it reminds you of spending time with her, then for you, that’s a sincere, sentimental object that carries another kind of valence of meaning that elevates it beyond the crappiness.

Robinson

So a thing can be both “crap” and “non-crap” simultaneously. For example, a Beanie Baby (which you discuss in the book). I have a couple of leftover Beanie Babies from the ‘90s that I treasure and love. I have a little lobster. It’s very cute. Reminds me of my childhood. There was a period of time when the promise of Beanie Babies was that they were valuable in the marketplace. It was even said to be a safe way to invest your money. Beanie Babies were going to retain their value. But most Beanie Babies became crap and many went into landfills.

Woloson

People cannot give them away. Actually, I often buy Beanie Babies to give away when I’m talking about my book, if I’m talking about the nature of value. I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who’s buying Beanie Babies anymore.

Robinson

One of the things your book makes clear is that in the United States, when you actually start to look at the number of objects that fall into the category you’re talking about, we really are surrounded by crap and have been for a long time. There are things on infomercials and everything in the Oriental Trading Company catalog. On Amazon, I once discovered that there were 13 different kinds of poop emoji pool floats for sale.

Woloson

I’m surprised there aren’t more.

Robinson

These are things you can imagine people buying. At the moment of purchase, it seems like it might be fun. But at the moment of acquisition and use, there is a comedown.

Woloson

Exactly. And there are a lot of crappy things that are very ephemeral. They have very short lifespans. Either the novelty wears off or the thing falls apart with use. But we keep buying them because most of the stuff is very cheap. So there’s a very low barrier to entry and a very low economic risk to buying these things.

Robinson

It’s not just that they’re cheap. You discuss the element of presentation. You talk about infomercials, and the way that there is this theatrical flair to how things are displayed. There’s so much more effort put into the build up of the product than the making of the product.

Woloson

Yes. That’s another thing that I’m getting more and more interested in, this idea of performance and marketing and the role of pitchmen in selling not just consumer products themselves, but the idea of consumption. 

But I’d like to return to an earlier point that you were making about the longer history. We think of this condition as a new condition, one of the contemporary capitalist, or late capitalist, world, because it is a degraded and impoverished material world. But what I talk about in my book is how this has a much longer history. It goes back to the late 18th century and develops over the 19th century. One example is the dollar store, which we really see as the epitome of the cruddiness and crappiness of late capitalism. But there were dollar stores and cent stores—like the five cent store, the 10 cent store, and of course Woolworth’s “five and dime”—much earlier, in the mid-19th century. And to your other point about the performative nature of these things: peddlers fulfill the role of the infomercial back in the 19th century, well before there was television or even radio. These guys would go on the road with their pack of treasures. They would pull them out and sometimes do demonstrations to entice people and really seduce them into buying these petty novelties, or what were at the time called “Yankee notions.”

Robinson

Does crap have an origin point? Can we identify a “pre-crap era”? And who invented crap?

Woloson

Very good questions. The first kind of crappy stuff that I see in American history comes with, interestingly enough, the cheap jewelry trades, or the costume jewelry trade, which starts gearing up in the 1780s and 1790s. That only makes a cameo appearance in my book because I didn’t have time to talk about it a lot. But it really begins with people becoming interested in buying ersatz jewelry made of gold-plated metal, fake gemstones, and things like that. And of course, people of middling means who couldn’t afford finely-made jewelry really loved this kind of stuff. 

But then very soon after that, in the 1820s and 1830s, with the lifting of the trade embargo between the United States and Great Britain, there’s a tsunami of consumer goods coming, especially from Great Britain, to American markets. They’re sold fairly cheaply. Often, they had been set aside in British storehouses for years. And there’s this pent-up consumer demand in American markets along with the rise of what were called “variety” stores. These were stores that sold just lists of all sorts of different things, from gold-plated pens to nutmeg graters to pieces of fabric to magnifying glasses, birdcages, and so forth. And a lot of those stores advertised their wares as “cheap,” meaning low-priced, and coupled that with variety. There was a kind of alchemy in which the combination of variety and cheapness had a hypnotic power over consumers, who wanted to be able to participate in the American market as consumers. There’s a long history of American citizenship being linked specifically to consumption. My ownership in American society is tied to my ability to buy things.

Robinson

If we are trying to identify “crap” versus “non-crap,” as you say, there is the quality of cheapness and cheapness being part of the pitch. We discussed the fact that a lot of the things we would identify as crap have an element of disappointment, or they’re not used for very long. But just because a thing is cheap, doesn’t mean it’s crap. I buy cheap pairs of underwear at Walmart, and they’re pretty great. But you mentioned variety here, and it seems like part of what you’re saying is that, with crap, the experience of consumption, the experience of purchase, is so much more important than the use. Once you get the object out of the store, and away from this incredible display of variety—with all these colors and big numbers and things that say “buy one, get one free”—the object becomes not necessarily useless but simply not what it was when that special alchemy was at work in the store.

Woloson

Right. And that was true back in the 19th century as well as today. In the 19th century, Americans were living with far fewer possessions, and so even these petty luxuries carried much more meaning for them. It was about novelty. It was about having nice things, pretty little trinkets and things that really brightened their days. We can’t understand this because we’re overstimulated nowadays. But we still have this search for novelty. Consumer psychology works by creating desire for things, by turning wants into needs. Then we make that purchase. And then the purchase does not live up to the promise. It cannot live up to the fantasies that we’ve built up in our minds. But rather than saying, “Okay, I’ve learned my lesson, I’m not going to buy anything else,” or “I’m going to cut back,” in fact, we do the opposite. We are driven to turn our attention to the next new thing. Maybe that next new thing is going to fulfill me in a way that I thought that other thing was going to fulfill me.

Robinson

You note in the book that there is an element of manipulation. The selling of crap often straddles the line between legitimate salesmanship and outright fraud. You discuss some of the tricks that were used and have been perfected over the course of a century and a half or more in order to get people to think that they are getting more with the purchase than they really are.

Woloson

There are many examples of that in the book. We talked a little bit about the collectibles market and the artificial creation of value. There was a Beanie Baby bubble at one time. There was also a rage for collectible plates. I have a chapter on the Franklin Mint, and how their selling of old coins and replica scale models and dolls and things like that created this kind of collectibles market that was really artificial. And once the bubble burst, people who had invested their retirement savings in these things realized that they were worthless. 

There’s an anecdote in the book, which is a really sad story of a man who invested tens of thousands of dollars in coins from the Franklin Mint. He believed their sales pitches, which were really tailored to the specific customer and their buying habits. He really believed what they said about value. They would use terms like, Oh, this is the rarest coin on the market, or the most spectacular coin on the market, or the most historically important coin ever issued. These superlative words could make somebody who wasn’t really knowledgeable think Oh, this is a really special thing with a lot of value. But it was really hot air. So there are some really tragic stories.

Another example that is maybe not so nefarious, but more an enjoyable anecdote, is the case of gadgets. We love gadgets. People in the 19th century loved gadgets as well. And in that case, I wouldn’t call those pitches outright fraud, but there was a lot of exaggeration in how well these things would work and what kind of work they would do. A lot of these gadgets promised quick solutions to difficult problems. They would often create these problems artificially. And often gadgets would fall apart or they wouldn’t work as promised. They would create more work for the users. And so they would often be cast aside.

Robinson

This is from your chapter “Gadget Mania.” It’s about your own grandfather. You write:

The Rembrandt Automatic Potato Peeler was one of many devices he ordered, often without my grandmother’s knowledge and never with her approval. … Ever the optimist, his much-anticipated test drive of the Rembrandt did not go as he’d hoped. His raw potatoes transformed magically not into delicate oven-ready morsels but instead into a starchy, macerated spray that stuck stubbornly to the kitchen walls. And to the ceiling. And to the floor. It took hours for him, abetted by his son-in-law, to scrape away the evidence of his trial before my grandmother came home. Certainly, the device did blow the lid off potato peeling, but not in the way he had expected. Also hewing to the nature of gadgets, the offending device was banished to a remote part of the garage and discovered only decades later.

This was probably a common experience among Americans who bought the Rembrandt automatic potato peeler.

Woloson

Yes. I still love watching infomercials. There’s the Garden Weasel that will hoe your garden really easily. There’s the brownie pan that will give you edges on all the brownies. There’s the nonstick skillet where they throw cheese on there. I really love those demonstrations because they make work look easy and they make work look fun. There’s an element of mesmerism and magic in those pitches. They’re incredibly sophisticated and really, really seductive.

Robinson

When I first saw the infomercial for the “Slap Chop,” I couldn’t help but think, “I do want to slap that thing.” I want to slap and chop!

Woloson

You want to do it!

Robinson

Sometimes there is real trickery involved, but also sometimes you get the thing and it’s not crap. I remember watching Billy Mays pitching OxiClean. Being a cynic, I thought “I bet it doesn’t work.” Well, I have to say OxiClean is quite a good product and actually gets stains out really well.

Woloson

For sure. That’s the thing with gadgets: some of them do work really well. But don’t we all have a “junk drawer” where all of our crap goes—the egg steamer or the weird garlic press or whatever it is—that we use once or twice and think, “Oh, it didn’t do what I thought it was going to do”? It’s more trouble than it’s worth. So it’s just gonna get stuck in this drawer.

Robinson

You can actually buy people’s entire junk drawers on eBay. I’ve done this for making dioramas sometimes. A whole junk drawer of vintage crap. It’s wonderful.

I’m in New Orleans, and crap plays an incredibly important part in our local culture in a way that I think you might find fascinating. The Current Affairs office is on St. Charles Avenue, which is where the Mardi Gras parades come by. And in the Mardi Gras parades, essentially for 10 days or more a year, it rains crap. These are the “throws” from the parades. Every one of the float riders has a bag of crap, like plastic cups, Mardi Gras beads, little stuffed animals, light-up plastic swords, toys. It’s the definition of crap. And nobody here uses the crap. After the moment of catching the crap, they store it in big bags. You get your throws, you’re shouting at the parade for a throw. And then when you get it, you put it in the bag, and everyone walks away with the bags, and now everyone in New Orleans has a cupboard full of their Mardi Gras crap that they’ve never touched. It’s like plastic swords. It’s like toys. It’s the definition of crap. And nobody here uses the crap. But it’s that same thing where in the moment, people are screaming at the float, “Throw me something!”

Woloson

You have to have it. That’s another thing I talk about in my book—not Mardi Gras crap, which is a great example—but just free giveaways. There’s a long history of this, too, but today we will give up so much—like our personal information—just to get a free coffee mug or a free umbrella or a free tote bag or a free T-shirt. Or we’ll pay extra to go to a baseball game so we can get the free crappy giveaway there. To me, a really interesting dimension to this is that we know this stuff is crappy. We know it’s not special, yet still it triggers something in our lizard brains—even for me, and I have studied this. It’s very hard for us to turn these things down.

Robinson

At these Mardi Gras parades, when it’s raining down all around you, if it touches the ground, no one picks it up. So you have to catch it. At the end of the day, after the parade, the whole street is just full of crap. There are teams of people with giant vacuums who come and suck up all the beads and all the toys. But the crazy thing is, while I’m at these parades, I want the crap, too. I’m there shouting with everyone else! So help me understand why I am shouting for a light-up headband.

Woloson

It’s a good question. Probably the consumer psychologists can answer this much better than I can. But there is something really, really seductive about free things. And not just that we can get this stuff for free, but especially if we see other people getting these things, too. We want to get in on it. Like you said, you might never look at the thing again. It might become a burden to you, especially if you’ve got a whole drawer or closet that’s dedicated to these things. It’s taking up space in your house. Yet there’s something about it that we can’t turn down, which is why with free giveaways, especially that have brands on them that serve as advertising, we are more than willing to be mobile advertisers for any number of businesses who will give their crap to us. Or sometimes we will pay to get their crap.

Robinson

You point out some of the other ways that companies have gotten people to want crap, such as “collect the whole series.” And you note the ways that children are made to really, really want the toy on the cereal box—which is inevitably a terrible piece of crap.

Woloson

There was a really interesting survey done in the mid-20th century of children and their responses to these free giveaways. What I found was that they were actually incredibly knowledgeable and picky consumers. Children had been waiting for six weeks to receive this thing in the mail after sending in their box tops, and they would complain about the quality. The wallet wasn’t what I thought it would be, or the ray gun didn’t work like it was supposed to. But again, it didn’t put them off the pursuit of these things. It just helped turn their attention to the next thing that might fulfill their desires.

Robinson

When I went to New York the last time, I was quite surprised—although I suppose I shouldn’t have been, because this is America—that there is a gift shop at the 9/11 memorial. There is also a gift shop at the World War Two Museum—no sorry, revise that, there are four gift shops at the World War Two Museum. You can buy rubber ducks shaped like Rosie the Riveter or Winston Churchill. You can buy thermoses in the shape of a bullet. You can buy a chess game where the two kings are FDR and Hitler. Help me understand where the gift shop fits into the history of crap.

Woloson

This I would call part of the “crap-ification” of our culture. We need to have souvenirs to mark our experiences and possibly serve as memory objects. Those objects validate our experiences in a way. Art museums are no different. They just have classier forms of crap. You go to see an exhibit, and the experience of the exhibition items themselves is one thing. But it’s as if your experience isn’t validated unless you can concretize it with something you can take away as a souvenir, as a relic, as a memory object. It also records the experience. It’s the material form of, “pics or it didn’t happen.” 

Robinson

As we know, so much of this ends up tucked away in the back of closets. Some people display all of their souvenirs from different places, but for some people, these things that we amassed turn out to be massive inconveniences. Then we watch Marie Kondo, who asks, “Does it spark joy?” “Well, no, I don’t even know why I have all this crap.”

Woloson

One of the ironies of things like souvenirs is that they’re usually not made in the place where you have purchased it. So if you collect magnets, they might be made in China, or I might get Mardi Gras beads in New Orleans, but they’re not made there by locals. They’re made in China.

Robinson

There’s a documentary, Mardi Gras: Made In China, about the supply chains of Mardi Gras beads that traces them back to China and looks at how environmentally destructive they are. They’re so wasteful, such ephemeral objects. 

This brings us to the dark side of crap. It’s so much fun looking through these old novelty catalogs—you have all these amazing examples in the book of crap you’ve found throughout history. It’s a delightful book partly because of the pictures. You’ve got Hummel figurines and fake turds…

Woloson

Plastic vomit.

Robinson

Plastic vomit. So many things. I don’t want to spoil it for people. But the dark side: the issue of labor. As you point out, there’s a cost to having things that are cheaply and quickly made.

Woloson

There’s a constant churn of objects that are cheaply made or that don’t carry our attention for very long before we turn to the next thing. Fast fashion, fast furniture, and so forth.  I’m going to sound like an old fogy here, but things aren’t made to last anymore. And our relationship with objects is much different now than it was in the past. We’re not really careful caretakers of our possessions anymore. We have become materialistic to the point where we want constant turnover. We want novelty all the time. And that comes at a cost, even if these things are cheap for us to buy. The cost of those things to manufacture is just devastating. It means exploited labor. It means wrecking the environment, both in terms of the natural resources required to make these things and the fact that so much crap ends up in landfills. It’s just really hard to see where it’s going to end. 

As much as I celebrate crap (and I have my issues with Marie Kondo, which we can talk about or not), we have to face the real world implications of all of this rapid consumption which is pointless. A lot of the crap that we’re buying doesn’t really have a purpose. Why are we buying things that we don’t need, we often don’t even want, and that become burdens?

Robinson

As someone who is surrounded by tiny objects, I am repulsed by the idea of minimalism.

Woloson

We are very object-driven people. I am, too. I collect many things. I really love objects and appreciate them. And I think a lot of us do. Objects are really meaningful to us, and they have a really important place in our lives both functionally and symbolically. We need things around us to help us define who we are, help us feel comfortable in our place, and to mark where we are in time and in our relationships. So objects are really important in anchoring us to not just our physical world, but our psychological world as well. But I think we should be more thoughtful about the things that we are buying and interrogate ourselves. Why are we buying things, and what are the costs (even if the price is cheap)?

Robinson

One of the things I like about your book is that, like many of my favorite books, it takes something familiar and makes it strange again. And in fact at one point, you echo what Karl Marx does at the beginning of Capital, where he says “the commodity appears, at first to be a trivial thing,” but then once you actually start thinking about commodities—where they come from, how they’re produced, what they mean to us—the commodity becomes a very strange thing. And in your chapter about “curios,” you say that curios seem, at first, to be trivial things. They masquerade as harmless objects. But they carry subtle and not-so-subtle messages. What are “curios,” and how do they carry messages?

Woloson

I unpack tchotchkes, knickknacks, and what I call “giftware”—these things that aren’t quite collectibles, but things that we put on our shelves and mantelpieces. And I talk about how they signal different kinds of taste cultures, and have over time. So whether you are buying quote-unquote “fine art” pieces of glassware, or whether you’re into “country chic,” or “shabby chic,” or minimalism, a lot of these things, too, are mass-produced. And they masquerade as these unique pieces that signal something about our specific taste culture to the people who might be viewing them in our homes. And they’re often shorthand for “I am sophisticated,” or “I am more traditional.” Like do you have an Amish doll on your couch that has a little denim bonnet and no face? Are you decorating your house with blackface stuff? I talk about blackface in the book. Or do you have more upscale pieces of “fine art” that have still been mass-produced in a factory in China? We fool ourselves into thinking that we are sophisticated connoisseurs when we’re really just buying more expensive crap.

Robinson

As Seen on TV items, novelty catalogs, and all of the kinds of crap that you discuss in your book, seem very American. In many ways, you’re talking about the history of American culture. Crap is obviously not uniquely American, but is it especially American? What is it about our country in particular that makes it the source of so much crap?

Woloson

It’s a really good question. I’m often asked, “Is this uniquely American?” I really can’t speak for other cultures. I think every culture probably, or most at least in the developed nations, have some version of crap. But it is a particularly American story because we have embraced crappy goods on a scale that no other country has. For example, we Americans have devoted more square footage in this country to storage units than any other country in the world. That’s just one among many data points, but that really points to the surplus of the things that we own.I ‘m not saying that all of those things are crap, because maybe certain heirloom pieces are in the storage unit, and you just don’t know what to do with them yet. But basically, we’ve decided we’re going to pay for little apartments for items that won’t fit in our garages or basements or junk drawers. So I think that we have embraced crap more than any other culture. Part of this relates to how we define ourselves as Americans who have the ability to consume. That goes back centuries, this idea of consumer citizenship, that being able to engage fully in democracy includes being able to engage equally in the market with everybody else.

Robinson

Certainly the per-capita carbon emissions in the United States suggest that we’re a little too devoted to crap, comparatively. 

In your conclusion, you raise a series of questions. You ask, “What should we hope of crap? Should we expect it to provide us with anything other than inferior versions of inferior things we’ve embraced in this degraded material world?” I love this: “Our crappy world is populated with people who are not just connoisseurs of plastic vomit, but lovers of breast mugs and Truck Nuts and furniture feet, and hummels and Hamilton collection figurines. It’s as rich in variety and novelty as it is poor in sincerity and gravitas.” So what is your final verdict on crap? Do we need to de-crapify ourselves? Or is this fundamentally who we are and we’re stuck with it?

Woloson

I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive. We would be better off to be more thoughtful consumers. It’s ironic that we’re having this conversation in the run up to the holiday gift-buying extravaganza. Think about all the meaningless goods that are going to be given as gifts and thrown away.

Robinson

Or re-gifted.

Woloson

And then re-gifted, of course, or winding up in thrift stores. So I think we should be more mindful of the things that we purchase. By explaining the history and putting crap into context, I hope to help people think about this kind of consumption in a new way, about these things that have permeated our lives. I think crap is baked into our culture.

Robinson

Now, you mentioned earlier that you didn’t write the book in a tone of judgment, despite the harms—the  environmental and labor costs—of crap. Obviously, we don’t want a world in which people are given endless disappointing things that never make them happy. But you also find some of these things so much fun. Over the course of looking through all of the crap that has been produced and sold in American history, did you discover some favorite pieces of crap?

Woloson

That’s a great question. Plastic vomit?

Robinson

That comes up a few times in the book.

Woloson

It does. I find it really fascinating. Something I’ve been noodling over for a long time is: when did we go from being a culture that did not need plastic vomit to a culture that did? The heyday of plastic vomit is over, which makes me a little sad, for reasons I can’t quite articulate. Plastic vomit is the perfect example of an object that’s really confounding. It’s funny, and it’s kind of cool, and it’s this “trompe l’oeil” puddle of plastic vomit. But what purpose does it serve? Why do we need that? Why did we ever need that? It’s an uncanny and confounding object that is also incredibly clever. I do take joy in looking at a lot of this crap because it’s incredibly clever and innovative in a lot of ways. In some respects, it shows a lot of inventiveness and an expansiveness of imagination.

Robinson

I get a lot of design inspiration from old novelty catalogs and ads—I just think that they’re amazing. You do point out in the conclusion, though, that today’s plastic vomit may be distinctively crappy plastic vomit. You quote some online reviewers of the latest versions, saying “very disappointing, it does not look at all like throw up.” “Fake-looking fake vomit.” “Not as natural as one would hope. Do not waste your money.” So they want that real fake vomit.

Woloson

They want their lifelike plastic vomit, absolutely.

Robinson

Well, Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, tells us a lot about ourselves, and it’s also really fun to read.

Woloson

Buy it for the holidays. It’ll make a great gift.

Robinson

Better than all the crap you could get. This is not crap. It’s not disappointing and it’s built to last.