Biscotti Jars and China

I went out shopping today. It's one of life's pleasures, as long, that is, that I can find things that I want to have in my life. It didn't take long, however, before I began questioning whether the things on offer would really meet that criteria. In other words, were the things being offered for me to buy really the things I wanted to have?

There's a bit of a story here. A few weeks ago, I met Kimi in Las Vegas to celebrate our August birthdays. Beides the slots, one of my favorite things is to go see the garden display at the Bellaggio Hotel. It's always artistic and dramatic and once we've taken pictures, I like to browse the shops around it. This time, I went into one that specializes in Italian imports. I fell in love with a biscotti jar. It was terra cotta and showed the Tuscan countryside with a villa, cypresse (cypress trees), and farm implements--very traditional. I debated for a long time and the only thing that prevented me from buying it was the problem of getting it home on the plane. If I'd had my car there, it would have been a done deal.

Back home in Denver, I regretted my decision. So, I trekked off to Park Meadowns Mall (one of our upscale shopping centers) today, looking for a biscotti jar made in Italy or Portugal. I couldn't find one. Oh there were biscotti or comparable jars all right, but invariably, they were what I consider to be fakes. They were made in China. There was no way I would buy one of them. And I'm not talking about Penneys or Sears here. I'm talking about Dillards and Sonoma-Williams. The latter did have things from Portugal and France, for which I commend them, but there were all too many things that were mere imitations, and not always the best.

This led me to consider the larger meaninng of my quest to find something authentic.What does it mean to us as a society? All I can conclude is that for every thing we buy made in China, we deprive someone in Europe and the US of their jobs just so we can buy cheap imitiations. I suppose I should say someones plural because it takes a lot more than one person to make something of lasting value. I can see cheap-o stuff flooding the discount shops like WalMart and Kmart and even Target, but when it invades even our upper scale shops it means that these store also condone peddling this stuff to us. I have to wonder not only about them but also about the corporations supplying them.  Have we become so addicted to accumulation that we don't even care what we collect?

The corporations with their bottom line of squeezing every penny are no small part of this. They slap their names on things they have made outside the country, claiming they need a sweatshop workforce to be competitive. What they are really doing is sending our jobs overseas to get things made more cheaply, and I do put the emphasis on cheap. In going offshore, I think they underestimate us seriously and they run the risk of us boycotting them, which they will deserve.

Today, I went out looking for beauty and quality. I found mere imitations, a cynical assumption of the style of another country to be paraded as real because our corporations have equally cynically assumed we will satisfied by it. From what I can gather, imitation has been China's method--copy the work and design of some other county and sell it cheaper. I, for one, do not see buying cheap stuff as satisfying anymore. In the future, I will look for where something is made and choose accordingly.

I can't be the only one feeling this way. I have to believe there might even be room for a new set of stores called Made in the USA or Not Made in China. Maybe the choices in them would not be as numerous. But I would feel much better knowing where my money is going.

In the meantime, I guess I will just have to go back to Las Vegas and hope they still have the biscotti jar.