Have you ever wondered how a pair of jeans can cost $14 or why you can buy a pound of California peaches for 99 cents in Georgia? Ellen Ruppel Shell's "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture" tells the story behind the low, low price — and explains the cost of all that cheap stuff.

The irony, Shell says, is that some of the biggest consumers of cheap are those who can least afford it. They just don't realize it.

The book starts with the cotton gin and runs through the Industrial Revolution, to dime stores, to the modern discounter. It's a span of more than two centuries, and what's surprising is how little has changed.

The cotton gin was one of the first machines to improve upon humans, doing in minutes what dozens of people had done in a day. With the cost of cotton fabric dropping, demand increased. That ramped up the need for cheap labor, the cheapest of which came from slaves.

Whether it's cotton or peaches or jeans, once something is cheap, consumers like it to stay that way. Manufacturers still chase inexpensive labor across the globe.

Steel and aluminum shipping containers made it possible to safely transport goods from places where it was cheap to make them, Shell writes, and reduced the cost of shipping finished products by 90 percent. This expanded demand for cheap labor and reduced demand for U.S. workers, the author says. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other big-box discounters wouldn't be possible otherwise.

WANAMAKER, WOOLWORTH, SEARS

But before those stores came John Wanamaker, Frank W. Woolworth and Richard Warren Sears, retailers who pioneered the tools modernized by today's discounters.

Wanamaker created America's first large-scale department store, in 1875, in a former Philadelphia freight depot. In words that might sound familiar to Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, Shell says Wanamaker was criticized as a "bottom-feeding monopolist, a vulture whose insistence on low prices was putting smaller merchants out of business."

Woolworth opened his store, a five-and-dime in Utica, N.Y., three years later. His innovation was low-wage jobs and presentation. He took the merchandise from behind the counter and displayed it on a table where a shopper could pick it up and inspect it.

To keep prices cheap and profit high, Woolworth had to keep overhead low. Floor workers made about $3 a week, which wasn't a living wage, Shell writes. Low pay created high turnover. It's something retailers still wrestle with.

In 1895, Sears published a mail-order catalog offering prices below those of department stores and putting goods within reach of small-town shoppers.

SHOPPERS VS. CITIZENS

What was good for the shopper was bad for the citizen, Shell writes. She cites John Hargreaves, an early president of the Retail Merchants Association, arguing that cheap prices "reduced the value of labor, and have destroyed the purchasing power of many classes, thereby affecting all classes."

Wal-Mart is the Wanamaker's of our time, and its sprawl has affected the U.S. economy. Shell cites researchers from the University of California-Berkeley who showed that total earnings by retail workers nationally declined more than $4.5 billion from 1992 to 2000, the years Wal-Mart was expanding out of the South into metropolitan areas across the U.S.

Shell, a correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, offers examples of retailers who balance successful business with contented employees: Wegmans Food Markets Inc., a grocer based in the northeast with a loyal following, and Costco Wholesale Corp., a warehouse club that competes with Wal-Mart's Sam's Club while paying its workers an average wage 68 percent higher than Wal-Mart's.

She ends with a call to action that's more hopeful than the history she details so well. We, as shoppers, she writes, have the power to change things by being more choosy about where we spend our money.

All of which, of course, is true and has been since Wanamaker and Woolworth.