To think that buying "stuff" is getting out of hand?

[LunaLoveg00d]

Let me preface by saying I am not a lentil knitting vegan eco-warrior. I buy stuff, I drive, I fly abroad on holiday and we don't grow our own food.

However. Since I have had my first child - only 13 years ago - the culture of buying "stuff" seems to have boomed and I don't think it's positive. Supermarkets and other shops are full of (mainly plastic) tat which people are encouraged to buy for every festival imaginable - Valentine's, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Easter, New Year, Christmas, Halloween - the list is endless.

You can't just have a pumpkin lantern for Halloween any more - you have to have fairy lights, cupcake cases, scary decorations, glow in the dark skeletons, adult AND child costumes, bunting, paper chains, etc etc etc. And nearly everything sold is poor quality or designed to be used once or twice and thrown away.

Clothing is the same - chains like the supermarkets, Primark, New Look or H&M are all about churning out clothes as cheaply as possible, designed to be worn for a few weeks or months and then chucked.

It's just all so wasteful and crazy. We are filling up landfills at a rate of knots with all of our plastic crap and disposable clothing and teaching our kids that celebrating festivals and special days isn't about being nice to each other or spending time making or finding a special gift, it's about buying as much "stuff" as you can as cheaply as you can and then chucking it out when you're finished.

All a bit depressing really.

Ragwort me, too. I have tops I've had for more than a decade which still look fine.

T-shirts and jersey tunic tops do fade quicker, but I've had some of them years, too. They progress as they age and fade from "respectable" to "under a jumper" to "slobbing around the flat when I'm not properly dressed" to "rag for cleaning the bathroom" as the years trot on! And the "under a jumper" stage I can keep going for a very long time. I don't think I've bought a pyjama top or a cleaning cloth in years.

I am wearing a jumper that cost about £12 approximately, from ASDA. I wear it a lot as it is black and warm and washes really well. I got it about 4 years ago, and will be gutted if it doesn't last another 4 years.

It's not always possible to tell in the shop which top is going to be the amazing, still looks like new ten years on and which will be relegated to rags within the year. It's not always proportionate to cost (in fact some of my most expensive things are the ones that need the buttons sewing back on soonest, or the hem re-stitching).

I agree that some of my most expensive things are the clothes that have not lasted. With the exception of a winter coat I bought 20 years ago and still wear every year.

Don't get sidetracked with clothes which last or don't last though - that's just the tip of the iceberg. It goes so much deeper than that - just look through the thread and see how much discussion there is about other sorts of waste or compulsive consumption. Buying things as a hobby, replacing Christmas decorations annually, revamping your home decor every few months, cake smashes, christmas eve boxes and mountains of presents..... It's SO much more than whether a jumper lasts or not.

It's astonishing, Luna how many toys kids have these days. I don't want to sound like a wet blanket but is it really necessary to have quite so many? My niece must have about 20/30 dolls/soft toys cluttering up her bed. In fact I'm surprised she can get in it.

Last Christmas she got a large box of Disney dolls, each around 6" tall, there must have been 15 in the box. I didn't have that many dolls during my entire childhood. It seems too much and in only a few years they'll be discarded as she'll grow out of them.

Even aside from the waste, cake smashes utterly bemuse me. If the aim is to get a photo of your small child cutely covered in cake, couldn't you achieve the same aim by just, like, letting them eat it?

Loving this thread and too much stuff is definitely not great for our mental health. But I agree with others about clothes not lasting these days - I have garments from a certain shop which cost £30-50 each and fade/shrink/become misshapen after only a few washes. The number of times I've had to return children's clothes for shrinking is ridiculous. There was a thread on here a while back where an industry knowledgeable poster said that the quality of the cotton used by all manufacturers has reduced and shortcuts in the production process have also resulted in below par products. It's hard to find quality these days!

Id be really annoyed if I paid £30 and something didn't last. Then again I bet they try it on more with kids clothes than adults because of kids growing out of them.

I'm surprised by comments on towels going threadbare tbh. My parents wouldn't spend much on them either and they've probably got towels that are fine to use after 20 years!

Btw with tops etc getting faded, I've often found dyeing them gives them loads of extra wear, usually I do a few items at a time.

I wish more companies would do refills like Body Shop used to. I'm not much of a one for toiletries but I'm pretty sure no one does that. It would be a good way to reduce the mountains of plastic tat.

The other thing I don't do any more is Xmas cards.

This thread really resonates with me, and has made me resolve to not get sucked in to tat buying at halloween, to give edible Christmas gifts (apart from the DC) when a no-present-rule doesn't work, and to only buy second-hand clothes for myself. I'm going to take a load of toys to the charity shop tomorrow that the DC won't even miss - hopefully they will be useful for christmas presents for other people.

That's part of it though buzzards. The huge scale of production of poor quality goods. When I was a child, you wouldn't have got 15 Disney dolls in a packet unless you were the child of a mega wealthy celebrity or some such. These days, that massive pack of dolls is available in supermarkets, priced so thousands of people can afford to buy it. It just ruins everything for everyone. 15 dolls won't all be special to her. I know someone with two dds and she accumulated so many of those plastic dolls over the years that they were stored in a container the size of an old fashioned bin .

lorelei we use a company called splosh who send refills for household products. Perhaps beauty products are next?! Recommend splosh on the whole. Www.splosh.com

I don't really like Lush -but reducing packaging waste was one of the aims of the guy who set it up. He said that for eg shampoo most of the cost was actually the bottle - eg say you paid £1 - 50p of that would be for the bottle, 10p ingredients for the shampoo and the rest would be profit/transport etc. And the weight of the plastic and water added to the transport cost...
Toiletries are part of the too much stuff too - we 'need' body wash and liquid handwash, different moisturisers for our bodies, hands and face -night cream and day cream, shampoo, conditioner, hair treatment products etc etc -all more plastic into landfill. And those silly bottles of hand santiser. And cleaning products ...
I use environmentally friendly cleaning products. I clean the toilet with white vinegar - actually concentrated condiment - sold to make fake vinegar in chip shops etc. It is acetic acid and needs diluting before use - something like 1 in 16 to normal vinegar strength (used to be 1:20 even more concentrated but apparently it was counted as too dangerous to sell) . I buy a 5L plastic tub of that (about £8 - ask the chip shop to order me one) and dilute it into two other 5L bottles - one normal vinegar strength and one stronger to use a splash down the loo - the concentrated 5L lasts me years.
Cleaning products I use Ecover mainly - and buy in bulk - 7.5kg bags of washing powder and 15L (bag in a box) washing up liquid. I have refilled bottles countless times. I have some liquid cleaner (bought 5L) but actually I mainly use washing up liquid for everything...bathroom, kitchen surfaces, floors etc. I buy through a local cooperative now (at trade prices) but before I used to get from health food shops and they often would do ecover bottle refills - so for cleaning stuff might be worth asking... I think ecover listed places on their website
I can't understand why people have different sprays for eg bathroom and kitchen etc etc - can't really be bothered with sprays any more you still have to wipe. (And don't get me started on disposable wipes...)

But I do have a couple of half decent garden spray bottles too (not flimsy £1 jobs) that I fill up and use if I want a cleaning spray - rather than buying a disposable spray bottle.
(I saw an 'organise your under sink cupboard' tip the other day that involved a rail to hang all your spray bottles from ...not only is it consumerism gone mad but it actually making our lives harder - needing to remember which one you need to buy, how to store them, the right one for the right task...)

I'm quite interested in the towels point. Our main towels were wedding presents so 14 years old and still doing well. I have 2 sets and wash once a week at 60 degs a whole other thread They were from Marks so pretty much mid range and there is nothing particularly wrong with them. But I do wonder if I bought today if they would last as well.

My clothes do fare quite well, even my older items. But I am quite fastidious in my washing and drying, I wonder if current items aren't really up to the continual use of dryers that many favour.

I was persuaded into buying new towels by a friend who said mine were threadbare. The thing is I don't actually use towels to dry myself, only to wrap around myself and my hair so it doesn't really matter if they're thinning out. I regret buying the new ones.

I have some towels that I 'inherited' from my grandparents...they are really 1960-70s prints and absolutely fine...although they probably didn't have a lot of use as they had so many to rotate...I wash them weekly and alternate between two sets and so far after 3 yrs they are fine.
The other thing I 'inherited' are sheets - thick cotton - slightly fluffy (can't remember what it is called - brushed cotton?) and I have been using them for about 3 years...and they are still fine -probably will last for a good few more years (always think about how people use to cut sheets in half and sew the hardly worn edges together down the middle -noone would do that now). They replaced my sheets from 1991 -bought from John Lewis, Egyptian cotton -also really thick... not cheap but worth every penny.
DDs have been through a few sets of sheets in the last 15 yrs - also cotton just nowhere near as thick...even Ikea ones - which I am convinced are thinner than they used to be (bought some for a guest bed before DDs and gave them to my parents when I didn't need them any more...)
Duvets and pillows aren't made to last either - I had the duvet I bought in 1991 -a summer/winter one but I had lost the summer one moving between flats. Bought a new one in 2000 when I started living with DP as he said it was too cold. After a couple of years it was bumpy, lumpy and thin -ended up using the old winter duvet with the new summer one. And in fact have replaced it altogether with one we inherited when we bought a house - I recognised it as being a less used version of mine from 91 - so paid the price of a new cheap duvet to get it laundered.
DD2 has a single duvet from the new house too - I can tell by the label it is older. It replaced her first duvet that was about 4years old and past it.
DD1's duvet was 13 yrs old - has been washed etc at least once a year and had become thin - so I bought her a new one last year - it is already lumpy etc.
Microfibre pillows - no matter how much you spend last no time at all - they become flat. DDs have two in one washable pillow case now.
DP and I have one buckwheat pillow each and I have an ancient feather one (from my GPs) and he has a flat microfibre one - said he didn't want the feather one and now he keeps nicking it...

I have towels I have had for years. I am sure eventually i will have to replace them, but towels should last 15-20 years at least. I also have duvet covers that we use for guests, that I had on my bed as a teenager. I am in my fifties.

Interesting about the towels. I have quite a few of similar age (9-15 years) and whilst they are okay, some of them are not a state to give to guests, and I suspect not as well preserved as some of yours. They were mostly from Ikea, supermarkets and Argos. They aren't still fluffy but they are in about the same condition as some of the towels we had at home when I was a kid.

I'm another one who has cheap clothes that have lasted for years. But then I never tumble dry clothes which probably has something to do with it. "Falling apart" is really rare, it's usually just a hem that can be repaired in a few minutes, though bobbly fabric is a nuisance on many cheap jumpers and cardigans.

This abundance of stuff has produced some things that are genuinely useful (eg when someone finds that product that finally sorts out that skin problem) but there is so much that is pointless and wateful and purely "decorative". It's kind of horrifying sometimes to look at all the plastic "tat" and think that it's made from such a finite resource as oil. And stuff is displayed almost everywhere unless you're out in the countryside, you can have a hobby or interest that's nothing to do with shopping, you read about it and there are always suggestions of new things that might be useful.

I have reservations that the class issue is as clear cut as some say. My own family is from different point on the class spectrum and not all of them British, so probably not a good guide to any of this, but other people I know from clear-cut working class families have different attitudes. Some could teach Martin Lewis plenty about how to be frugal, others have philosophies like never buying the very cheapest version of anything (because it evidently feels too downtrodden, like the PP's sister who wouldn't go into charity shops).

I still have the Snuggledown duvet I had for boarding school over 30 years ago, and apart from coffee stains, it's good as new. It's on a spare bed now. The ILs gave us supermarket single duvets and they are lumpy in a couple years, but until dn stops weeing on everything, duvets that fit in the washing machine are the priority.

I still have some childhood polyfill pillows (the feather ones suddenly clumped about 10 years ago), from Woolworths. Again, ones we got about 10 years ago don't last.

We keep all our Christmas decorations and only get maybe a couple new strands of tinsel each year. Though our friends on the street who have 2 children in a 1-bed flat with no loft or outside space have to get rid each year - the alternative would be no tree or decorations for their kids.

I don't think the class thing is entirely cut and dried either, I come from the sort of traditional working class family that have never stopped getting a million meals from one chicken and a dozen kids per coat. But even growing up in the 90s, there were people on our estate who'd have found the habits of my parents circle weird.

However, we do know that humans have status signifiers. And its undoubtedly true that people who clearly aren't poor and/or low social status, and don't have to worry about being taken for such, won't feel the same pressure to ensure their consumer behaviour doesn't make them look badly off. The best thing is to try and free yourself entirely, but its hard, and not equally hard for all of us.

My towels aren't fluffy, but they are nowhere near threadbare.

penny my family were pretty frugal (at least my dad's side) but they always bought the 'best' - quality - because it would last. But now I've come to the conclusion there is no point for things like technology as it will be outdated as soon as you get it home.
I've just put a new hard drive in a laptop I bought in 2002 for DCs to use as a homework computer - it was a 'business' computer - a lot of money - easily over a thousand (can't remember exactly!).
I replaced it 4 years ago as it couldn't cope with all the stuff I need it for, it had a 40GB hard drive -I upgraded to the largest it could handle - 100GB. (New hard drive is back to 40!) -it also has max RAM - I couldn't update it any more.
Its running XP and it is really clunky but fine for the internet and word - so homework for now - and quite sturdy...aluminium frame etc - will withstand knocks etc.
My new laptop was around the £300 mark - already dated now but fine but can see me needing to upgrade in the next few years to keep up with the software -but I can buy 4/5 of these for the price of my old one.

(I've just put a new screen on a Hudl 2 for someone - cost £45 quid for a screen unit and dead easy - whilst I was looking into I found out you can replace the battery too... )

I work from home and use a laptop all the time - they seem to have a lifespan of about 2 years, 3 at the most before they start to go wrong. And repairs are difficult - a key came off the last one's keyboard and the computer repair man said he coudln't replace just one key, it would have to be the whole keyboard. Similarly when another laptop's screen developed lots of vertical lines up and down it that was an expensive and tricky repair job too.

Luckily we have a good repair shop not far from us which charged £50 to take two old Dell laptops, take the good screen from one and the good keyboard section from the other, cobble them together and hey presto, new laptop. Delighted.

Luna - MacBook. Dh swears they never die, we both have newer ones (1-5 years old) but he still has an ancient model that works fine still as well 10+ years.

Luna my eyebrow (left one) raised a few notches when I read what you said about the computer man not replacing just one key - such a lie! My DP is an I.T engineer and he replaces one or two or however many people need, as and when.

My desk top that I'm typing on is now 11 years old. With good care, and yearly service it will keep going for a long time yet.
So glad you went to the repair shop......all this wastage has just got to stop.