In The Receipts franchise, SPY interviews influential people about how their cultural intake and background informs their consumer behavior — and what they’ve learned about themselves from the things they’ve bought.
If there’s one thing Mike Schur knows, it’s comedy. After launching his career as a writer on Saturday Night Live in the late 1990s, Schur went on to shepherd into existence some of most genre-defining television comedies of the last quarter century — including The Office (as a writer and producer), Parks and Recreation (as a co-creator), The Good Place (as the creator), and, most recently, Amazon Freevee’s Primo (as an executive producer).
But if there’s one thing Mike Schur thinks about in his day-to-day life, it’s a serious philosophical question: What makes a good person, and how do you go about being one? The topic is both one he addresses in his television work (he cites it as inspiration for The Good Place) and that he tackles head-on in “How to Be Perfect,” his 2022 book about the quest for ethical integrity.
SPY asked Schur how this central question applies to consumerism — and if it’s even possible to have a morally sound relationship to, well, buying things.
SPY: You said that you’ve been preoccupied with ethics and your own morality since you were young. When did you start thinking about those types of questions?
My whole life, really, though I didn’t know that it was called ethics until I was much older. After college, I started thinking about the fact that ethics permeates every aspect of my life and everybody’s life — consumer choices, where you live, what job you have, who you work for. I was sometimes driven to distraction. I would think, “I want to do X and X comes with 5000 ethical questions that need to be answered before I can do X, and if I try to answer all of them to my satisfaction, I’ll be paralyzed.” Caring about it led to a daily struggle [that made it hard] for me to do anything.
That is what then led me to think, “Well, if this is a dominant thing in my life, I ought to read a bunch of stuff to try to figure out what people have said about how to live.” That’s what launched me on the path to learning about philosophy.
Now that you’ve created a show and written a book related to this topic, do you feel like you’re done with it?
I feel like I’ve written about it to some degree of my own satisfaction. After I was done with The Good Place, I felt like I hadn’t quite crystallized everything that I wanted to say. Now that the book has been written, I don’t feel the same itch to write about it. I don’t think about the questions any less, though.
It reminds me of when the reboot craze was happening and a lot of people asked me if we were going to reboot Parks and Recreation. I had this feeling of like, I think that show was making a very specific argument at a very specific time and place — I don’t feel like there’s more to be said. I think I feel the same way about ethics that I feel about Parks and Rec. We said what we wanted to say, and now we would just be doing more of it just to do more of it. And that’s never a good idea.
SPY covers products and consumer trends. Given your exploration of philosophy the last few years, how do you view spending money? Is there an ethical way to spend money, to buy things?
This is the biggest question we face on a day-to-day basis. The book and the show both made an argument that if you want to ignore ethical questions, you probably can. A lot of people do. But if you choose not to ignore them, you realize that they are everywhere — there’s no escaping them. And I think the number one place that they crop up for the average person is in consumer choice.
For example, when you buy a chicken breast from a grocery store, you’re making seven ethical choices, right? What was the animal humanely treated? Is the company that makes it a good company or a bad company? How far away was the chicken from the processing plant, which means what’s the carbon footprint of the chicken? How much plastic is used in the packaging? Every single choice, like it or not, comes with 12 ethical components. So is it possible to be a good, ethical agent in the world while buying things? No, frankly, it isn’t. There are better and worse choices, but there are no good or bad choices.
Say someone wants to make better choices about their approach to consumption. What’s the first step you’d advise they take?
The decision to care one way or the other — it’s the most important step and it’s like 90 percent of the battle. The great majority of people tend not to care. I get it — there’s a lot going on in people’s lives. It’s asking a lot of people just to give a shit one way or the other.
[Once you decide you care], you get into like, ‘Okay, how much research can a person be asked to do about this stuff?’ Like, if you go to the grocery store, and you have a list of 25 things. Is it unreasonable to say, before you go to the grocery store, do a half hour of research on each of the 25 things on your list to determine which brand is the best brand to buy? No one has the time for that.
Overall, it’s the extent to which you can learn about the things you’re buying and learn why they might be better or worse to buy. Grocery shopping is one thing, but there are other things. How often do you fly? Jet fuel is an enormous polluter. The big purchases: your house, your car. The companies that you bank with. These big macro-decisions can be prioritized over the small ones. If you’re like me, or like Chidi from The Good Place, you will drive yourself to the brink of insanity mulling over every possible choice you ever make. I don’t think that’s a good way to live. I don’t like that I live that way!
You still feel like those questions are always in your brain?
I think I’ve gotten better. I think actually writing the show and writing the book was therapeutic for me in some way. It felt like a confessional, almost — like, this is what happens when you worry about everything.
What is something you’ve bought that you’re happy you’ve bought?
It’s something I bought for my daughter recently. My daughter is 12 years old and she has the soul of a writer. Both of her parents are writers; she is a creative person. And she really wanted an iPad with a stylus. She wanted to draw and make notes and just be a person who’s interacting with the world in an artistic way. And I was like, ‘You know what, yeah — that’s worth it.’ She loves it. She carries it around everywhere. She’s constantly doodling and writing. I was like, ‘This is an argument in favor of letting your kids interact with technology.’ I think most of the discussion around kids and technology is that it’s going to rot their brains and destroy them. This is the flip side of that. It’s the good version, where she has a tool that she uses to express herself in different ways.
This is a pivot, but have you ever shoplifted?
When I was seven years old. I was driving with my grandmother, and steam started coming out of the engine area in the front. She pulled over to a gas station. While she was talking to the guy about the car, I went to wait in the little cash register area. I saw all the gum on the racks and had this overwhelming desire for it. I wasn’t allowed to have a lot of sugar.
So this was forbidden fruit.
Absolutely. So I took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, which was 25 cents, and I put it in my pocket. No one else was around. I went outside, got back in the car, and we drove home. I was so scared. I was the most scared I’ve ever been in my life to this day. I was like, “I’m going to jail.” I ran up to my room and took the gum and chewed all the pieces really quickly. I threw them all away. I remember burying the wrappers really deep down in the garbage can. I lived in fear for a couple of days that I was going to go to prison for stealing the gum.
It was like [Edgar Allan Poe’s short story] “The Tell-Tale Heart” when I would lie in bed at night. I remember hearing my mom walk around downstairs thinking she’s looking in the garbage can — she’s going to find the wrappers. I’m going to jail. She’s going to turn me in. It was so awful and I hated it so much. So, the answer is yes, I shoplifted a pack of Juicy Fruit gum when I was seven, and then no for the rest of my life. Never again.
Who is the first person you told about this?
You, right now.
