To think consumerism has ruined this country? Long, sorry.

[CatthiefKeith]

There is virtually no manufacturing left in this country.

Years ago, the academically bright went to Uni, and those that were less so still got jobs without higher education. Whether it was in management, the canteen, on the production line or doing the packaging, factories provided massive employment. Now we buy cheap stuff from amazon without a thought for the working conditions of the people abroad that make them.

People with learning difficulties were still able to go to work, I can't remember the name of the scheme but there were government subsidies for factories that gave equal employment opportunities back in the 70's, one of my uncles was employed through it. He used to repair things like toasters and kettles. I think he changed the elements in them. Now we just throw them away and buy a new one.

Clothes. Made here, and made to last. Handily that provided a side line for anyone that could sew. My gran was a seamstress, and opened a little business doing alterations, changing zips etc.

Now we just buy a new pair of jeans from Primark (made by kids in sweat shops) instead of getting a new zip put in when the old one goes.

My mum used to work for a high end jewellers. As a child I knew two watch repairers, both polio victims, trained by Rolex, who earned a really good wage. Now people buy cheap watches. Some people just get a new one when the battery goes, let alone pay for a repair!

The steel works have gone, most of the pottery firms have gone bust, as have the companies that produced long lasting crystal. Crystal goes cloudy in a dishwasher and who wants to pay for expensive and hard wearing bone china when Asda living do entire dinner sets for £20? If it chips, just buy a new one!

I can remember television engineers, washing machine engineers, even people that made a living selling pop from a van in glass bottles that you paid a deposit on. And milkmen. That must have been better for the environment and it kept people in jobs.

I'm not having a go at anyone, I do exactly the same. I would love to be able afford to do it differently, but I fear it is too late to turn the tide.

Aibu?

Agree with ghostly.In the 70s britain had a terrible reputation for manufacturing because of the unions and low productivity.
Having to walk home in the dark from school because of the 3 day week the street lights were turned off.
I was using a milkman tecently and stopped because i was always running out and the bottles took too much space in the fridge and it was expensive.

I really hate the amount of 'stuff' we all have now but I am guilty of going along with it a lot the time because it's what you do or because it's easy/cheap. My pet hate is Xmas/birthday presents - every year I rack my brains for ideas of what I'd like (my family always ask for them) while trying to decide what to get them. None of us really needs anything but we buy because it would seem mean and joyless not to.

I work in the giftware industry and sometimes feel guilty about the products we produce, many of which I'm sure will be laughed over on Xmas Day then quietly sent to the charity shop :(.

I'm not sure if this is what you were asking OP but I do think the availability of cheap everything makes us value what we have much less.

I think you mean quality over cost is not valued. People can buy a dinner set from ASDA for £20 and it last a year or Denby for £160 and it last 15 years.
The same as clothes, supermarket clothes last around a year, actual clothing retailers a few years at least.

And by the way dh goes to works in a manufacturing facility with a canteen etc.
Our local tesco employs people with learning difficulties.
And Dyson now employs more people in the UK than he did when he manufactured here. We lead the world in high end engineering although in 10 years time thete is going to be a problem when a high % of engineers retire

We have a milkman at work. My boss is wealthy enough that he can 'buy British' he also has a very expensive British built car.

Our milk is over £1 per pint. I fully understand why people buy it from the supermarket, so do I.

Apparently the reason glass bottled milk is so expensive now is that when everyone bought it there were lots of processing plants, but most have gone now, and the cleaning process is therefore more expensive. So says my boss, anyway. I haven't googled to see if this is actually true but it makes sense.

I accept that I probably do have rose tinted specs on about it. Factories under this government would inevitably be run by the poor sods on workfare for £2 per hour anyway.

I own a business. We make our product here in the UK. Consumers have responded to the fact that it's a British product as opposed to our nearest competitor which is US made. We also try and source everything we use with in the UK.

Our product cost more and people are willing to pay it. We are nowhere near the large scale of the US competitor. Which means we can't produce as cheap either. However it's about 15p difference.

We done just stick a much higher price on it, just because it's made here. And the market has responded. It can be done, people want to buy stuff made here. However when it's so expensive (as in the polo shirt example) it's not going to work. Especially given the finaciall situation the majority of people are in....which is shit

Ooh, what is it Teabag? Do I need one?

And we pay our staff above minimum wage as well. They also get lots of paid holiday and of we want a week off (small business can't really run without us) we pay tem and let them have the week off in addition to their holiday weeks.

Not all business are run by dickheads

If I say I will put myself as we are the only British company that does it. We also make most of this product for other companies to sell as their own. It's a food product

MardyBra correct, it was globalisation which undercut industry in developed countries, and the availability of ever more, cheap goods leads to greater consumerism, encouraged by advertising and the media.

Milkmen were rendered obsolete by domestic refrigeration. You needed bilk delivered daily because you had no way to keep it. But in a fridge, milk lasts a week, just like any other perishable good, and fits into a weekly shop.

I have my milk delivered by a local farm, partly to support local industries, partly because it's nice, partly because I don't have room in my fridge for a week's milk and partly because it makes the weekly shop easier to carry. But even they only deliver twice a week, in a minimum of four-pint containers.

So do you expect people to spend their money in ways which you somehow think keep jobs going?

of course you keep jobs going - whereve goods are made

My dm's best friends son is my age. Undiagnosed learning difficulties, and very probably autism, again undiagnosed. He wants to work, he really does, he worked for his father painting corridors in schools and other LA properties until his df died a couple of years ago.

For the last two months he has been strimming council owned woodland and parks for his jsa. Less than £2 per hour. He frequently gets sanctioned for not sending off enough job applications, and recently for not being at the job centre because he was out strimming, like they had told him to.

A job in a factory would be a dream come true for him, but not everyone's cup of tea I know. (I did it for a year when I left school, very boring but I loved the money)

Teabag, fair enough, but I love food. I'd almost certainly buy it!

As a child I knew two watch repairers, both polio victims,

Which is more out of date, polio as a UK problem, victim as a noun like that or watches that need repairing? Why would anyone need to repair watches? Quartz watches will last a lifetime if you just change the battery, and the only reason why Rolex (TAG, etc) have a presence for "repair" is that if you're a poseur and want to bang on about how your watch is waterproof to 200m (even though you take it off to go in the shower) the seals slightly complicate changing the battery.

1960: lots of local garages because cars had 1500 mile service intervals, needed different oil in winter and summer and (usually) different coolant as well. Tyres had tubes that were easy to puncture, exhaust pipes rotted every three years because of sulphur in fuel and cars needed welding back together to get past five years because of corrosion. A car with 50k miles on was knackered.

2015: cars have 12000 mile service intervals, don't rot, don't need exhausts replacing more than once a decade, punctures are a rarity to the point that spare wheels are fading away and running a car to 200k miles is just a matter of servicing and the occasional replacement of larger consumable like clutches.

Cars are better now. Less embedded carbon, less waste, less unreliability. Fewer jobs for mechanics.

YANBU OP

Much of what you describe is long gone.

There is still scope for Remploy to be rebooted, though.

I will dm you OP

There is virtually no manufacturing left in this country.

I think I read somewhere that we manufacture more cars in this country now than at any other time in our history. Of course the firms are mainly foreign owned (Nissan, Toyota, Jag/Landrover, Bentley, Rolls Royce and BMW Mini) but we manufacture the cars here.

Well I repair most of the things we buy, even the cheaper items as I can't even afford to replace those.

I was given a denby dinner set for my 21st which I'm still using now as well as the cheap ikea dinner set because if you drop anything on our tile kitchen floor it will shatter and I'd rather a £2 mug was obliterated over a £12 mug. My kids will move to the denby set when they're older and less likely to knock something onto the floor.

Most soaps and cosmetics I buy are UK made.

I also try to buy UK made clothes. I mainly shop in NCT sales for kids clothes and charity shops for everything else.

I use my pathetic £60 a week for food, cosmetics, nappies, cleaners and cat food in Waitrose I can buy losts to keep us going but the trade off is I cook and make everything from scratch.

I think most things I buy are British. Not sure about any tech we buy but we don't buy much of that we usually buy it second hand too so I'm not sure that counts.

The only things I don't buy that are British are toys most toys I buy are made in Germany or America because they make some fabulous hard wearing toys that are repairable. Some toys like puzzles and games are British.

It would be lovely if we had a stronger manufacturing industry but if you wanted you could support the one we've got. We have very little money but I still try to shop contentiously.

It is a difficult one! I do think the waste we produce nowadays is shocking, especially as so much of it is shipped off to developing countries to poison and pollute them instead of us.

The trouble is, the alternative is for people on low incomes to go without things they need in this society. I can't afford bone china dinner services or expensive watches and nor can most people on an average wage, let alone benefits. Ages ago there was a link on here for a site where you could buy clothes made in the UK, the poster mentioned the prices were very reasonable... I eagerly clicked, to find even the most basic pieces were pushing 3 figures. That probably is very reasonable for what they are, but if we could suddenly only buy clothes in the UK, most of us would be walking around naked- or else, more realistically, the sweatshop culture would return to the UK.

I agree people are too quick to throw things away. My husband is severely visually impaired, but despite that he can mend virtually anything- mechanical, electrical or furniture. It's a real gift and 50 years ago he would have been able to run a successful small business despite his disability, which in this era renders him unemployable. On one hand, when things are so cheap and often manufactured with the intention of breaking after x years, why would you bother to pay for a repair that might cost more than half the price of a new, upgraded item? But on the other, do we want to go back to the era when washing machines and watches are luxury items for the well off only?

The PP who pointed out that the best thing to do is change how we live and try not to add to the piles of cheap crap all around us probably has the best outlook. It is certainly how I try to behave.

Round our way almost all the supermarket chains have some employees with obvious learning difficulties or disabilities of some sort. This only seems to have occurred over the last five years or so. Don't know whether there is some scheme facilitating this.

There's also a fair number of people, including a few clients I have with significant MH issues earning money either full time or as a side line running micro-businesses - both service & non-service orientated in addition to their factory, retail or office jobs.

Apprenticeships have been expanded and certainly round here there is a resurgence in teaching trades & skills.

I would say that there are definitely more opportunities now for the non-academic and for people to have more interesting jobs and lives.

My husband is severely visually impaired, but despite that he can mend virtually anything- mechanical, electrical or furniture. It's a real gift and 50 years ago he would have been able to run a successful small business despite his disability, which in this era renders him unemployable It depends who he pitches his business at and what he fixes. No point in trying to fix a cheap £15 quid iron but I'd pay out to get the mega bucks super Swiss steam contraption fixed that I can't bring myself to throw away, or all the other supposedly built to last a lifetime and that's why they were so expensive appliances that lie gathering dust in the garage. There's things too that are sentimental value and not expensive that need doing - re-wiring old lamps, fixing old furniture.

I regularly wistfully bemoan the fact that someone doesn't drop in a card offering to fix stuff.

Also all that cheap stuff from Amazon has led to deployment of workers in warehouses and distribution instead. I think Amazon are just about to open another UK fulfilment centre. Working conditions may not be great, but doubt they are any worse than the 'good old days' of mass factories producing the same goods. Anyone can sell on Amazon too, so they provide significant opportunities for self-employment. We might not be making the stuff, but a fair number of ordinary people are buying it in and selling it on and making a decent living.

Mistress i have lived in our area for 20 years and our small tesco has employed people with sen for all that time, so it doesnt seem to be a new thing.
We also have a local repair shop that you get parts or repairs. Dh is an engineer so has repaired our fridge and oven a few times. Most major electrical companies have repair centres

I think you'll find most of the things you describe owe more to globalisation and twentieth century industrial policy than 'consumerism', whatever that means.

At a time after the war when manufacturing worldwide started to become increasingly more attractive to business owners, and containerisation made international shipping far more cost effective, British post-war industrial and union policies stayed stuck in a protectionist and highly unionised bubble that left Britain an increasingly unattractive location for manufacturing. Thatcher made terrible mistakes and caused a lot of suffering, but she was only responding to the union' destructive stranglehold over already badly run and moribund nationalised industries.

She was absolutely right to take on the unions, as they had brought the British economy to its knees by the late 70s; but she was incredibly short-sighted and mistaken in making no efforts to ensure skilled manufacturing continued to thrive in Britain. Instead we had all this guff about a service economy while the old industrial working class languished on benefits. We're still paying the price for those decisions now in the debates about low pay, 'benefit scroungers' and the welfare state.

The death of skilled labour and domestic manufacturing in Britain since WW2 (which is what you're talking about really) has its roots in bad post-war industrial policy, short-sighted union obstructiveness and the way these were addressed politically and interacted with globalisation.

I agree 100%, OP. I have become an anti consumerist. It's ridiculous that shopping is a hobby, I don't think we value our money enough, we work to spend and place too much value in owning stuff. If 25% of the country stopped spending on stuff we didn't need, the country would be screwed. It seems like we are needed to spend our money to keep the country afloat. I work in retail so get to see the consumer trap every day. Advertising and marketing is incredibly efficient at making us believe we need the latest whatever. There's no easy resolution as the labour costs in the UK mean manufacturing is too expensive compared to importing.