Kids Really Just Want to Play with the Box

I admire the imagination behind this idea, although I do have to say that you could create the same gift package yourself instead of buying a kit. Just need some ribbons, and construction paper, glitter, glue and maybe make up some instructions for a few different box toys. Voila!

Quote of the Day: Alan Lightman on the Diminishing Returns of Wealth

“Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...But this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.”
― Alan Lightman, Reunion: A Novel

Is Modern Culture One Big Commercial for Consumerism?

Thought provoking article by Justin Lewis on Our Kingdom on the power of advertising when taken collectively.

Advertising has became our dominant creative industry – what Stuart Ewen calls ‘the prevailing vernacular of public address’. It sucks up our talent for art, design, creativity and storytelling. It has become such a routine part of everyday life that we rarely stop to think about its significance.

...the prevailing orthodoxy is to treat each advertisement on its individual merits. The larger question – the cumulative impact of this deluge of commercials - is rarely asked...

For all their diversity, advertisements share one basic value system. Advertisements may be individually innocent, collectively they are the propaganda wing of a consumerist ideology. The moral of the thousands of different stories they tell is that the only way to secure pleasure, popularity, security, happiness or fulfilment is through buying more; more consumption - regardless of how much we already have.

USPS and Consuming

Bloomsburg has an article on the dire financial prospects for the U.S. postal service which compares postal practices in the U.S and elsewhere.

This should be a moment for the country to ask some basic questions about its mail delivery system. Does it make sense for the postal service to charge the same amount to take a letter to Alaska that it does to carry it three city blocks? Should the USPS operate the world's largest network of post offices when 80 percent of them lose money? And is there a way for the country to have a mail system that addresses the needs of consumers who use the Internet to correspond?

My thought on reading this was why the American people are always referred to as "consumers?"  Is shopping all we were born and bred for?  Are there not some services or systems that we relate to as "citizens?"  How would we frame the problem of how the postal system is run differently if we were viewing it as serving the "needs of consumers" or "the needs of citizens?"

Watching their Commerical Intake

"Let’s convince our friends and family, our neighbours and our classmates that the mental environment is as precious, and as vulnerable, as the lushest stretch of rainforest. Let’s get people thinking about their mental health in the same way that they think about their physical health—two sides of the same tarnished coin. Get households banishing TV pollution at the same time they banish toxic detergents. Get parents watching their children’s commercial intake as closely as they watch their sugar intake. Challenge students to say no to corporate curricula with the same fervor they say no to oil spills. Let’s train people with mood disorders to reduce their mental burdens, in the same way that people with allergies reduce their chemical burdens. Let’s turn psychologists into mental ecologists, pioneers of a new and vital social science, In other words, let’s get into detox before there’s no turning back.”

—	Adbusters, January/February 2006 (as found on Tumblr with no link to original article)

I Am Woman: See Me Shop?

There is one of those "tell me about you" quizzes zapping around the social networks.  (The checked answers of the version pasted here are not mine, just the ones filled out by the person whose post I copied.)  What struck me about this little quiz about your masculine and feminine sides is that a full three of the choices for the "girl side" are related to shopping.  You lose three points on your "girl" side if you do not check "you love to shop," "shopping is one of you favorite hobbies" and "you love shoe shopping."  There are also a few answers that are marginally about shopping such as "you own more than 10 pairs of shoes."

YOUR BOY SIDE/YOUR GIRL SIDE.

YOUR BOY SIDE
[x] you wear hoodies
[x] you wear jeans
[x] dogs are better than cats
[ ] it’s hilarious when people get hurt
[x] you’ve played with/against boys on a team
[ ] shopping is torture
[ ] sad movies suck
[ ] you own an XBOX
[ ] you own a Wii
[x] you played with Hot Wheels as a little kid
[x] at some point in life you wanted to be a firefighter
[ ] you own a DS, PS2 or Sega
[x] you used to be/are obsessed with Power Rangers
[x] you watch/watched early morning cartoons
[x] you watch sports on TV
[ ] you go to your dad for advice
[x] you have played sport at a state level
[x] you used to/do collect collector trading cards
[x] you have worn baggy sweatpants
[ ] it’s kind of weird to have sleepovers with a bunch of people
[x] green, black, red, blue, or silver are one of your favorite colors
[x] you love to go crazy and not care what other people think
[x] sports are fun
[ ] you talk with food in your mouth
[ ] you sleep at night with your socks on
[ ] you have fished at least once
TOTAL = 15

YOUR GIRL SIDE
[x] you love to shop
[ ] you wear eyeliner
[ ] you considered cheerleading
[ ] you wear the color pink
[ ] you go to your mom for advice
[ ] you hate wearing the color black
[x] you like going to town
[ ] you like getting manicures and/or pedicures
[ ] you like wearing jewelry
[x] you cried watching The Notebook
[ ] skirts are a part of your wardrobe
[x] shopping is one of your favorite hobbies
[ ] you don’t like Star Wars     
[ ] you are/were in gymnastics
[x] it takes you around a half an hour to shower
[x] you smile a lot more than you should
[x] you have more than 10 pairs of shoes
[x] sometimes you care about what you look like
[ ] you like wearing dresses sometimes
[x] you like wearing body spray or deodorant
[ ] you wear high heel shoes
[x] you used to play with dolls as a kid
[ ] you have put makeup on others
[ ] you like being the star of almost everything
[x] you love shoe shopping
[ ] pink is one of your favorite colors
TOTAL = 11

How Architects Design Space to Encourage Buying

Threatened by Beauty?

I have posted an article on my sister blog "One Writer's Thoughts."
I make the argument that not only does a consumer relationship to beauty make us insecure, it also robs us of the ability to enjoy the simple aesthetic pleasure of physical beauty.

Our deeply held assumption is that we are not only meant to look, we are meant to look like the beauties we see in media. Who said that? Who told you that someone else’s beauty is something you should strive to “attain?” My guess is that they were trying to sell you something.

The problem is not that models are beautiful. It is not even that they are impossibly beautiful—extraordinarily young, skinny and photoshopped. It is only our relationship to the images that is unhealthy and dangerous. The danger is in our unshakable belief that our beauty ideal is aspirational, that perfection is something we should always strive towards.

What marketing does that museums do not is to transform our natural appreciation of a beautiful form into a push to buy a product. A model is presented with a call to action—buy my make up, buy my jeans. Advertisers create the implicit promise that not only can this beauty be contemplated, it can be imitated. And it is easy to do so, just buy the jacket, the perfume, the deodorant, the car. If it is so easy to become beautiful, if all you have to do is buy a shampoo, then it really is a personal failing if you don’t make the effort.

The real problem is not that the physical form of the model is “unobtainable” by most of us, but that we think of beauty as a product, as something we should “obtain.” We tyrannize ourselves with the belief that we should possess anything we see that pleases us. "I see physical beauty, it pleases me, I should have it."

That is a shame, not only because of the way it makes us feel about ourselves, but also because it robs us of the joy of simple aesthetic appreciation of rare physical beauty. We should celebrate the capricious twist of genetic fate that creates a Heidi Klum, and be grateful that it occasionally happens.

You can read the entire original article by following the link above.

Are Marriage and Consumer Culture Incompatible?

This is the thesis of the book Why Love Will Always be a Bad Investment by Kurt Armstrong. The book has been featured in Sojourners. Reviewer Brittany Shoot writes:

Through a series of vignettes from his life, he posits that covenantal love is at direct odds with modern consumer culture, which sells the idea that life is competitive, sex is a commodity, and love is scarce. Most of all, consumerist ideology is rooted in the notion that we must abandon what we have the moment something better comes along. As our larger narrative about everyday life becomes inextricably intertwined with the consumerist mentality, romantic comedies, diamond jewelry commercials, and sex selling products as diverse as deodorant and fast food can force the most happily wedded couple to reconsider what constitutes happiness, what it means to live in marital bliss.

Do These Crystal Goblets Make My Kitchen Cabinets Look Cheap?

So you decide to splurge and buy the new recliner you've had your eye on. You bring it home and suddenly your sofa looks like something that you picked up at the side of the curb. (Maybe because you picked it up at the side of the curb.)

Rather than improving the "look" of your room, the new piece creates disharmony. Everything looks wrong.

You could take the recliner back to the store and start scanning Goodwill shops for something that is more in line with your previous decor. You could do that. But you probably will not.

Instead, one purchase leads to another. Eurekalert reports:

...consumers who were surveyed said they would make more purchases in an effort to try to surround their designer purchase with other luxury items and restore aesthetic harmony, according to marketing professors Vanessa Patrick of the University of Houston and Henrik Hagtvedt of Boston College, whose study is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research. In fact, this additional string of purchases may represent a far larger expenditure than the initial purchase...

"When we buy something with unique design elements and it doesn't fit, it frustrates us," says Hagtvedt. "This is because design has intrinsic value. So rather than returning the item, we actively seek ways to make the item fit, often by making complementary purchases. This has financial implications that may have been entirely unforeseen when the consumer made the initial purchase."

The Great Pumpkin as Anti-Consumer Propaganda

The blog Postconsumers has gotten into the holiday spirit with a review of the Halloween children's classic It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.   Here is their take from the article How Linus Van Pelt Found the Satisfaction of Enough.

... we realized that it’s also a statement about how little Linus Van Pelt and his security blanket find the satisfaction of enough among a sea of consumerism...

Is there any message that could be more apt to the postconsumer movement? Sure, at the end of the night, Linus hasn’t seen the great pumpkin, but he’s made a choice. What’s that choice? That simply collecting things (or in this case huge bags of candy) won’t lead to true satisfaction or happiness. He chooses instead to find another activity that may eventually lead him to happiness. In this instance, it doesn’t pan out exactly as he hoped, but at least he recognized that it wasn’t “more, more, more” that would make him happy. And we like to believe that, some day, Linus Van Pelt really would find his great pumpkin!

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Frugal Tip for Ladies: Stay Away from Stores at "That Time of the Month"

It appears, according to an article in Miller-McClune, that the likelihood a woman will engage in a bit of over the top impulse spending depends a lot on the rhythms of her monthly "visitor."

The researchers, who are with the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a study of 443 women between the ages of 18 and 50, who were recruited through “an editorial piece in a popular monthly women’s magazine.” After providing information on the length of their menstrual cycle and their last menses, the women filled out a survey regarding their buying habits over the previous week.

Specifically, they rated on a 1-to-5 scale (from strongly agree to strongly disagree) such statements as “In the last seven days, my spending has been out of control,” and “I have bought something I am unlikely to wear or use.”

These reports were matched with where they were on their cycle during the week in question. (Forty-eight percent were premenstrual, 34 percent were menstrual or post-menstrual and 18 percent were mid-cycle).

“Spending was less controlled, more impulsive and more excessive for women … the further on they were in their cycle,” the researchers report. Strikingly, almost two-thirds of the premenstrual women reported they had bought something on impulse.

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Consumerism vs. Creativity

The premise of Broke is Beautiful is that the cash strapped life is the creative life. Further support for this concept comes from the blog 99% which has an article Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity. The article argues that we're using up our creative impulses in the pursuit of bargains and stuff.

The consumerist search capitalizes on the same “seeking” part of the brain that fuels the creative rush. Of course, while consumerism can serve as an addictive substitute for the stimulation of creative activity, it offers nowhere near the same reward in the long term.

...No external thing can prompt creativity, and there’s no substitute for just getting down to doing the work. In fact, it’s been proven that hardship – being deprived of things – stimulates creativity more than being well-off. A recent Newsweek article on America's declining creativity reported:

“Highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.”

For more on the subject of creation and consumerism, see my article from last week: Is Art What You Do or What You Consume.




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Defining A Meaningful Sense of Prosperity

Is Art What You Do, or What You Consume?

For most of human history artistic production consisted of telling stories or dancing or singing songs within a community, around the fire, at church gatherings. Anyone who wished to participate could, and stories evolved in the telling, music gained verses as it moved from community to community. Tales took on a collective richness and who they "belonged to" and exactly who had "created" them was fluid and a bit vague.

As I wrote in Broke is Beautiful:

These days we’ve become accustomed to the idea that entertainment is something you consume, not something you make. We buy records, we rent DVDs and generally leave imagination to the professionals. Much of modern life, in fact, seems to be a rebellion against daydreaming. We listen radio on the way to and from work; we switch on the TV the minute we get home. There are now even screens to entertain us in restaurants and at the gas pump, as if we would become so bored in the five minutes it takes to pump gas that we would just give up and go home. They should know that’s never going to happen. That’s what iPods are for.

How are we ever to find a moment for quality daydreaming with the CNN airport network and the CNN grocery store check-out line network and CNN monitors at the post office? Recent surveys show that children everywhere now spend up to 80 percent of their free time outside of school watching television. Not surprisingly kids who are heavy TV viewers are less imaginative than children who watch only one hour a day. We no longer value our own fantasies; we pay other people to show us theirs.

I came across another example of this in a fascinating article in The New Republic, Ellen Handler Spitz reviews a new collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales called "The Grimm Reader." She points out that the movement from stories as oral tradition to written form made them static.

Fairy tales were originally recited aloud, and that format gave the listeners considerable power. They were able to exercise a direct and partially controlling effect on each recounting. If attention waned, stories were modified. They could be spiced, embellished, or curtailed. But contemporary American adults rarely tell fairy tales to children anymore. We read, slavishly adhering to a text. Such reliance denotes a diminished narrative inventiveness among us, even a dereliction in regards to the sacred task of passing on our cultural heritage.

We have internalized the idea that art is a product created by talented professionals, and forgotten about the community tradition in art so thoroughly that we think of Internet media that allow broad amateur participation and two way and collective communication as new and novel.




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Handy Money-Saving Tip: Stop Bargain Hunting

"A bargain is something you can't use at a price you can't resist."-Franklin P. Jones*

In the past year or so magazines, newspapers and television programs have been full of features about how you can save money “in these difficult economic times.” (My retirement plan is to copyright the phrase “in these difficult economic times” and collect a royalty anytime a news announcer says it.)

Invariably these features tell you where to shop for the best prices. Rarely do they advise you not to shop. Not shopping, it turns out, is the only thing that is 100% guaranteed to save you money.

So if you want to really save money, here is my advice: stop bargain hunting. Don’t scour the coupon inserts, don’t “friend” your favorite brand to get a special discount feed, don’t rush to the store on double coupon day. All of these activities are simply giving you new ideas of things you could buy by exposing you to constant marketing messages and shiny new products. That’s what they’re designed to do.

You, of course, are too smart to be fooled and will only buy things you’d be buying anyway, right? Just like you never carry a balance on your credit card. Good for you!

But just on the off chance that you are not smarter than the rest of us, you’re probably better off keeping your hunter gatherer instincts in check by not exposing yourself to the hum of a constant shopping mantra. Let’s face it, the credit card companies would not be in business if we all did what we intended to do with their cards when we got them.

A number of studies have shown that we are prone to idealize the future. We are time, energy and money optimists. For some reason we all think we’ll be richer and less busy tomorrow than we are today.

We picture our work and the income from it as if nothing else will come up in our lives. We forget we’ll still have to fix the car, that there will be weddings and funerals and holidays (somehow those manage to surprise us every year, don’t they?) and your spouse or partner will still want attention. All that carefully budgeted time and money goes out the window when confronted with the shocking reality of every day life.

Since I wrote Broke is Beautiful, personal finance reporters have started to ask me for my money-saving tips. "How do you avoid impulse spending?" My flip answer is, “You max out your credit cards.” It’s a sure way to curb impulse spending. Although I say it with my tongue firmly in cheek, it is not entirely a joke.

When you have no access to funds, you simply cannot shop. After a while, you stop listening to commercial messages. They are for someone else-- those strange beings out there with money. It's a similar feeling to turning the radio dial and landing on a Spanish language radio station. “I can hear it, but it's not for me.”

The real trick is to get to this point before you max out your cards. Tell yourself “I don’t need new consumer goods right now, thank you very much. I have a thing right here in my house I can use.” (As all the news features about “decluttering” your home would suggest, most of us have more useable stuff than we know what to do with, yet we go shopping anyway.)

Stop categorizing yourself as a “consumer.” Imagine that there is a nation out there called Consumerica. The residents of this land are called “Consumers” and they communicate through commercials and branding messages. You don’t speak that language. Saving the entire price on an item is a bigger bargain than 50c off any day.



*Thank you to "Ultimate Cheapskate" Jeff Yeager for sharing this quote on Twitter (@JeffYeager)

Are You Paying a Brand Tax?

According to professor and author Juliet Schor, "many consumers do not understand why they prefer one brand over another, or desire particular products. This is because there is a significant dimension of consumer desire that operates at the non-rational level."

Think you could tell your favorite brand of cereal from a competitor in a blind taste test? Chances are, you can't. Schor, in an essay The New Politics of Consumption, notes that in tests of favorite beer brands, cosmetics, clothing and many other categories of goods, when there are no labels, consumers find it hard to distinguish among brands and often fail to select their "favorite."

"It seems we love our brands," she wrote, "but we often can't tell which brands are which."

The Spiritual Dimension of Consumerism

Back in 2005, Sojouners Magazine published an article titled When Enough is Enough, that has an interesting take on the consumer phenomenon. William T. Cavanaugh argues, "The problem is that consumerism is already a spiritual discipline of detachment, though one with a very different way of operating than classical Christian asceticism."

How can an attachment to stuff be detachment? Consider:

Consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else. It is not buying but shopping that captures the spirit of consumerism. Buying is certainly an important part of consumerism, but buying brings a temporary halt to the restlessness that typifies it. It is this restlessness—the moving on to shopping for something else no matter what one has just purchased—that sets the spiritual tone for consumerism.

In other words, we're not really attached to the stuff. We're obsessed with the hunt for the stuff.

What has happened in consumer society is that dissatisfaction and satisfaction have ceased to be opposites. Pleasure resides not in having but in wanting. Insofar as an item obtained brings a temporary halt to desire, it becomes undesirable. This is why shopping, not buying, captures the spirit of consumerism, and why shopaholism is being treated as an addiction. Consumerism is a restless spirit, constantly in search of something new. Consumerism is typified by detachment, not attachment, for desire must be kept on the move. Consumerism is also typified by scarcity, not abundance, for as long as desire is endless, there will never be enough stuff to go around. Being consumed.

The entire article is worth a read.

Fashion Gone to Waste

Fact of the Day:

Call it the Forever 21 effect, or fast fashion. Americans are buying, and discarding, clothes more quickly than ever. The average American throws 54 pounds of clothes and shoes into the trash each year. That adds up to about 9 million tons of wearables that are sent into the waste stream, according to the Environmental Protection Agency — a 27% increase in a mere eight years.

Source: The LA Times, Yes, Even Clothes Can Be Recycled

The Problem with the Economy

"I think the problem with our economy is that most products are complete and utter crap."-Scott Adams.

Read the whole article that spawned this quote on Scott Adams' Blog.






Photo Credit:

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