America Is Nowhere Near Peak Stuff

In all the years I’ve spent covering American consumerism, I’ve heard one type of question from readers far more than any other: This can’t go on forever, right?

Maybe they’d learned what happens to the huge volume of online purchases that get returned, or saw one too many questionably sourced mascaras and sunscreens hawked on TikTok Shop, or realized that the newly minted e-commerce behemoth Temu is spending many millions of dollars to urge you, quite explicitly, to shop like a billionaire. Whatever the impetus, the people asking this question tend to regard the consumer landscape with a mix of exhaustion and incredulity. The ever-expanding American closet is already swollen with cheap clothes, and our junk drawers and spare rooms and storage units already overfloweth with everything else. Americans have so much excess stuff that much of it can’t even effectively be given away. Can we—the people who have bought so much already—really keep buying more, and at a hastening clip?

As pickled as I am in information and theories about consumption, I’ve never really known how to answer this. I can’t blame anyone for being tired—of the advertising and affiliate links that have eaten search results, of constant prompts to purchase random things, of clothes made of plastic that fall apart after a few washes. Consumer choice is the animating logic of so much of American life, and buying things is how we are taught to assert our agency or express our political views or embrace our identities. Amazon has been on a decades-long push toward a logical extreme of American consumption capacity. The company’s newest crop of even cheaper, China-linked competitors—Temu, Shein, and TikTok Shop, most prominently—seem intent on pushing further.

[Read: Temu is speedrunning American familiarity]

The endgame to all of this, one might reasonably expect, has to be drawing nearer, if only because the United States is already so full-to-bursting with unwanted junk that entire industries and media genres have cropped up to help people pare down their possessions. Surely, one might reasonably expect, something’s got to give. There must be some sort of ceiling, some point of exhaustion—if not emotional, then financial. This can’t go on forever … right?

By the numbers, Americans still seem plenty enthusiastic about high volume and low prices. As the ultra-cheap internet retailers have sprung up, shoppers have rushed by the tens of millions to patronize them. The biggest ones are already pulling in billions of dollars of sales from the U.S. each year. And even though these retailers primarily draw in shoppers through super-low prices, they’re very popular with people who already have plenty. According to a recent report from Earnest Analytics, a credit-card-data firm, almost half of Temu’s American sales come from people making more than $130,000 a year, and the retailer’s popularity is growing the quickest with that same group of high earners. Wealthier people have more buying power in the first place, but that’s exactly the point: If even they haven’t yet gotten their fix of cheap stuff, we might be nowhere close to the extremes we’re ultimately capable of.

“It may seem like the air is getting thin, but we have not reached ‘peak stuff,’” David Garfield, the global head of industries for the consulting firm AlixPartners, told me in an email. According to Garfield, the underlying phenomena all point to continued growth, especially for inexpensive products: Demand is strong; impulsive purchases have never been easier; and the rise of influencers has made sales pitches even more omnipresent and sometimes more difficult to discern from genuine recommendations. On the supply side, a growing number of third parties that Garfield calls “infrastructure players”—transport and logistics companies, easy-setup e-commerce platforms, contract manufacturers—have entered the market in order to move larger volumes of goods into consumers’ hands more and more efficiently.

Garfield also pointed to one of the less discussed ways that pandemic changes have continued to affect how Americans spend their money: Before 2020, he said, consumers were in a slow, steady, long-term pattern of moving their spending incrementally away from goods and toward services—things such as hotel stays and Uber rides. Pandemic shutdowns reversed that trend virtually overnight, and four years later, a greater proportion of consumer spending is still going to goods than it was in 2019. Population-level spending habits move with all the agility and grace of a container ship; without a pandemic-level force to send them swiftly back where they came from, people just seem to be used to buying a little bit more stuff than they used to, especially online.

Much of that stuff, when bought from American retailers, is now significantly more expensive than it was in the recent past. Since 2019, prices for many types of consumer purchases in the U.S. have shot up. On average, goods cost nearly 20 percent more than they did before the pandemic. This, according to the e-commerce analyst and Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas, is among the reasons that ultra-cheap retailers that ship to the U.S. from overseas have found such enthusiastic audiences. “During uncertain economic times,” he told me, “price tends to bubble up to become the most important variable” in how even greater numbers of people make purchase decisions.

[Read: It’s too easy to buy stuff you don’t want]

Confounding all of this is the reality that price and quality are not as closely tied to each other as they once were. Kaziukėnas challenged a common assumption that the novelty of stores like Temu and Shein will have to wear off eventually: Not everything they sell is as off-putting or low quality in person as you might think. Much of it, according to Kaziukėnas, is identical to what American brands and retailers sell—it is, after all, coming from existing manufacturers—but at a much lower price. Temu and Shein were designed to drive overhead down to a minimum: They’ve bet that lots of people are willing to trade instant shipping and robust customer service for lower prices, and they’ve largely been right. American retailers’ emphasis on speed and variety requires more overhead because they’ve built systems with more steps between manufacturers and buyers. “Amazon and eBay would happily replicate Temu’s ship-from-China model if they hadn’t spent decades optimizing for a different kind of experience,” Kaziukėnas said.

When you look at the data, lots of people who say they hate this phenomenon of cheap, high-volume consumption tend to be enthusiastic participants in it. Kaziukėnas pointed to a recent report published by The New Consumer and the venture-capital firm Coefficient Capital that found that Shein shoppers are considerably more likely to express concern about the environment and sustainability than shoppers overall. “There is a disconnect between what we tell ourselves, what we tell others, and how we behave,” Kaziukėnas said. Dan Frommer, the founder of The New Consumer, echoed those sentiments: “The allure of cheap stuff is universal, almost, to American culture,” he told me. Some people may get burned by junky products and turn away from these types of retailers, which may raise prices on some of their products as they dial back discounting that was implemented in order to lure an initial customer base, Frommer said. But he thinks they’ll stick around in some significant capacity for the foreseeable future, even if their recent meteoric growth cools.

If Shein, TikTok Shop, and Temu are popular even among the economically comfortable and environmentally conscious, the question of what it would take to turn a meaningful number of Americans away from these kinds of retailers gets significantly more difficult to tease out. Frommer mentioned that the same concerns over foreign ownership that currently threaten to bring down TikTok could possibly be applied to many ultra-cheap internet retailers, if lawmakers were so inclined. Kaziukėnas said that he didn’t think consumers were likely to make this choice themselves anytime soon, but that regulatory measures designed to make foreign retailers’ existing business models less viable could harm their ability to compete against American retailers on price. One such measure—closing the de minimis loophole, which, in effect, allows foreign retailers to import goods into the U.S. one purchase at a time without paying taxes or duties—is currently being considered by Congress.

Ken Pucker, a professor at Tufts University and the former chief operating officer of Timberland, agrees that regulation is likely the most efficient way to reform particularly wasteful consumption and production practices, but he sees the looming possibility of a second path. One of the major things that enables American buying habits, he told me, is the separation of consumption from production. Goods are produced far away, and when we tire of them, the trash they create is also swiftly moved out of our field of vision. Rarely do Americans—and especially the well-off Americans who drive this sort of consumption—experience the downsides of plastics production or discarded cheap goods, such as groundwater contamination. “We no longer see the effect of the consumption that we still enjoy,” he told me. We just experience the upsides of convenience and abundance.

Eventually, this separation will be more difficult to uphold. As the physical effects of climate change become more difficult to outrun even for the relatively affluent, Pucker said, the joys of consumption and realities of production are bound to recouple. You can see it beginning to happen already: A recent report found that PFAS “forever chemicals,” which are used widely in the manufacture of stain- and water-resistant products and linked to a host of medical issues, are present in high concentrations in sea spray the world over.

Maybe, one day, buying cheap stuff as a form of entertainment will run afoul of new behavioral norms that a changed physical reality creates. People might begin to feel ashamed, or at least more self-conscious, about buying things they don’t even really want as a salve for stress or boredom. But if we have to wait for wastefulness to become uncool, then we probably have our answer as to whether this will all slow down anytime soon.