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Thoughts
Thoughts


Shopping as a Hobby
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Several days ago a friend told me that, unsatisfied with the local bar scene, he decided to try his luck on an online dating service. He showed me the profiles of a few girls that seemed interested in him. Browsing through these I was struck by how a great majority of them listed “shopping” as “one of the things I like to do most.” Here I saw proof of the greatest, most wide scale brain washing in history. Never mind hanging out with friends, never mind reading, or writing or taking walks in the park; what these American girls apparently want to do most in their spare time is take a walk through the mall. Shopping hasn’t changed – It is simply a process, like going to the dentist, or tearing the weeds out of our garden: a means to an end. Yet here it was, seemingly the end in itself. This widespread perception of shopping as a past time got me wondering about the implications of what, as a culture, we value, and about what makes us happy. Some theories allude to a sense of internal emptiness which the accumulation of "material status symbols" temporarily remedies. For me, the need to buy is an indication that as a society we are vastly insecure and unfulfilled, and compulsively clutter our lives with material possessions in a misguided effort to live life to the fullest.

As children we follow our parents as they push the shopping cart through the aisles, and ask “Mom can you buy me this? Mom can you buy me that?” and when she invariably shakes her head no, we feel distraught. The popular kid at school comes in everyday with something shiny and new, and everybody looks up to him. We cry, and dream of the day we won’t have to ask – the day when we’ll be the ones coming into class everyday with something shiny and new – the day when everybody will look up to us. When that faithful day arrives we feel elated. We buy the things everyone wants and for that reason everyone notices us. The shopping experience becomes an expression not just of our freedom, but of our value as human beings in the eyes of others. In this sense, it’s no surprise that many of us truly live to buy. The me that buys is better than the me that doesn’t; the me that buys has more self respect - its the me that believes, like L’Oreal says, I buy “because I’m worth it” –

There is this undeniable commercialization of life: Toshiba tells me to buy in order to “choose freedom” – Diesel tells me to buy their jeans “for successful living” – Coca Cola tells me to consume it’s soft drinks so I can “live on the coke side of life” – Mars Candy tells me to buy because “a mars a day helps me work, rest and play”. Such corporate slogans have been around from the moment we were pushed into the world. It would be foolish to think we’ve managed to grow up unaffected by their ceaseless effort to hook us – especially not if we grew up watching after-school television. Schopenhauer once said that in life a man may do what he wants, be he cannot want what he wants. I think that shopping has become a manifestation of the extent to which we cannot, as Schopenhauer said, want what we want, but instead want what we are told to want.
Our own psychological well being aside, consider the social/moral implications of mindlessly shopping simply for the pleasure of it. Wal-Mart says “Save Money. Live Better” but at what moral cost? You’re more affordable, comfortable consumption means that you’re contributing to the closing down thousands of independently owned business, and instead supporting a business that consistently violates human rights. The coca-cola company is guilty of reselling its industrial waste to Indian farmers as fertilizer, despite its containing hazardous chemicals. Mars Bars (along with Hershey’s and Nestle) make their candy with cocoa purchased from Farms on the Ivory Coast and Ghana which use child labour (and in some cases child enslavement). When asked to purchase a greater percentage of their cocoa from fair trade farms, these corporations responded by saying that it is not their responsibility to change their practices since they did not personally own the farms from which they bought the cocoa. I find this kind of attitude prevalent, and not only within the corporate circle, but more generally dispersed among the population.

These are just a few examples, but the truth is that a vast majority of big-shot corporations are guilty of some degree of human rights, and environmental violations all in the name of getting you to spend your money on their crap. Scary thing is that their tactics have been working on us all along – they tell us what is desirable, and we believe them. Diesel Jeans owner is quoted as having said, “We’re not selling a product, we’re selling a life style” – and I believe this is the philosophy behind most of the brands we are compelled to buy. But the life style they’re trying to sell us is just a packaged fantasy of what’s supposed to make us happy – a fantasy that keeps us buying, and all too often ignores the cold reality of its pursuit for profit. By choosing to shop till we drop without a single thought to the moral actions of major corporations we buy from, we are thereby guilty of contributing to their human rights violations. On the other hand, within some corporate circles I’ve seen the word “awareness” ironically morphed into “aWEARness” as a marketing strategy which attempts to inform the public of various social issues, while simultaneously urging them to buy the product associated with the given social message. Kenneth Cole is one of these, and his (in)famous advertising campaigns have a distinct socially conscious flavour, bearing slogans such as “we are all potential [AIDS] carriers” over the latest trends in hand-bags. Now, admittedly, this approach is highly preferable to corporate, and public indifference to such issues, but at the same time I can’t help thinking that such ads, in the process of directing our attention to important social issues (and by default their products and services) they are in the process commodifying philanthropy, and compassion itself.

September 1, 2008 | 6:16 PM Comments  0 comments

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