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.

I agree totally that when you are poor, you want nice things. It is totally different when you are really poor, making sure that others don't see your kids as neglected.
However I am not talking about that, I totally understand that dynamic.

But I am amazed at how many toys kids get these days. I feel like the equivalent of an old person in my childhood saying - we got a stocking with an orange and bar of chocolate and were happy with that.

I do wonder how much of it relates to people not having been able to buy as much as they liked when they were younger. In my own family, I can definitely see a link between grandparents not having had much when their own kids were young and being able to get loads of toys for cheap now.

My youngest son never touches his toys, he has an iPad from his older siblings and tbh that is all he plays with, we have the odd game of snakes and ladders or operation together and a bit of home made play doh but that's it really and it's great

Hyacinth - it's a huge part of it. DH and I went crazy when DS first arrived, just because we could and never had that in our childhood. Same with our parents...now they can afford to spoil their grandchildren so they do.

There's so much emotion tied up in shopping. I really have to battle with DH to point out that DS has more than he'll ever need so I've just bought him a Playmobil treehouse for his upcoming 5th birthday, and if he moans that he's only got one present, I'll be far more upset about his lack of gratitude than his lack of presents!

I am the queen of charity shopping, so much so that I rarely buy anything, although I trawl religiously in the best areas..
I still find this thread kind of icky..I dont need telling that you can have a walk in the park and feed the ducks, or go to the library. Believe me, when you are on the bones of your arse with a 2 year old, you do little else. I know you don't need to be constantly buying new stuff.
Its just that when people who are comfortably off say things like "oh we really must stop the endless consumption" I think "who's we?"
And, no, experiences don't have to mean spa days and trips abroad, but the kind of people I know who are vairy parsimonious about "plastic tat" manage to spend thousands on skiing trips, so it's what I see.

ifnot I agree with your points. I have just looked at zoo passes for a particular zoo that I know my sister goes to (as that has been suggested numerous times as a prsent idea for others) and one pass for one child is more than I spend on all 3 children combined. So buying experiences is a great idea if you have the money.

Last year I got my parents an afternoon tea (this is less to do with 'stuff' in the world more about 'stuff' in their house) but it was really really difficult to find one that I could do as a voucher that was in my price bracket. Even afternoon tea was 3/4 times more than I would spend.

The 'older' generation thing is interesting though. My MIL is over 10 years older than my Mum and was a child in the war - whereas my Mum was born near the end. My Mum was and still is very much nothing gets thrown away, everything has another use and was the queen of recycling even before it became a thing (would take bagfuls on the bus to the nearest bank for example) My mil on the other hand is very much everything is new, at one point she was buying a relative new bedding every year regardless if it was needed or not. She can't understand when I say no to something because I already have 1. Her attitude is that you need multiple things of the same (she has 2 irons for example and has about 10 toothpastes in the cupboard) - Maybe her views comes from 'I'll get it in case you can't get it when I need it' as opposed to my Mum's that is you just use something until it falls apart.

I recycle christmas wrapping paper (as in save it for the next year) the first year MIL told me she would buy me some for next year, completely missing the point of what I was trying to do. (I use it mainly for the children's stockings) This is just something my Mum did I thought it was what everyone did tbh.

I can understand her 10 toothpastes. I grew up very poor and still feel insecure if I don't have too much non perishable food in the house. When something basic has been very scarce, the fear of not having enough can make you over stock, when you can afford to.

I agree that often those who talk about experiences, are those with money. But when I look back at my childhood, the happiest times were doing things. Playing in the rain, baking with my dad, digging for old bottles.

I agree that the experience gifts are expensive and then the times you can do the "experience" are limited and restrictive.

Theatre vouchers are quite a good idea

I think people would rather have the cash if you asked them. I got to go to the theatre when I couldn't actually spare the bus fayre really to get there. You can't enjoy it under those conditions

But 'experience' gifts can be of any value.

Family London zoo pass - £150
Gift card for costa coffee -£5
Gift card Sainsbury's -£10/20 (would be very useful to someone you know shops there and is tight on money)

brasty I tend to stockpile food for exactly that reason (and then have to have periods of eating slightly-out-of-date tins as I realise how long I've had them...), but I don't see that as "stuff" in the same way as buying a new vase or replacing all my towels when the old ones are still ok. Perishables are different!

I meant, food is different! (Pesky perishables, though I suppose even tins are eventually perishable.)

I know people who won't give gift cards because they say it's like giving cash

I don't agree with that actually, I think if you're really unsure what someone wants a gift card makes a lot of sense

this in turn makes me wonder even more why they don't just cut back on the gift exchange....

I think part of my perspective comes from never having had money to spend in some of the places/on types of things mentioned here but I do look at all the consumer credit and wonder if people don't worry more about a rainy day.

bratsy I guess that makes sense, My Mum has gone the one way of you only buy it when you really really need it, and then never throw the old stuff away and mil has gone the other way of having it there just in case. Their attitudes might goe some way to explaining why people have stuff though.

With mil it isn't just perishables (she has enough loo roll to stock a public loo block though) but other things as well, she will buy dh a pair of slippers don't ask every Christmas even though we tell her that he has 2 pairs unused, so maybe some habits there as well with buying things.

It has reduced somewhat now that she is unable to get out and about as much, but if she was she would probably still be buying, lots of shopping habits are pretty ingrained and it takes a lot to change them.

"DeadGood H&M are a recommended high street store according to the Ethical Buying website."

The thing is, you have to use your common sense. Where, in a garment that's retailing for £6, is there room for the garment worker to be paid a fair wage?

Here's an article from earlier this year

broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/women-making-hm-clothes-factory-fired-pregnant?utm_source=broadlyfbus

As I mentioned upthread, we give cash, but the fact is that buying experiences is not inherently expensive. It is if you're going for something dear like a zoo of course, but that's hardly compulsory. It also doesn't have the expense that giving an item they have to store does, because there's effectively a cost to having to keep something in your home. Especially when you have limited room.

DeadGood - the thing is, in a garment that costs £60 there's every chance the worker has been treated just as badly.

Also, with the big stores and the £6 items you don't know what they might be using as loss leaders, subsidies etc. H&M are one of the shops that do those designer hook ups aren't they? (I only know this because of my friends went and queued!) So it's quite possible that some of those ranges, where a sweatshirt will be £100+ are subbing the £6 tops.

just like perfume subs catwalk shows for designers.

Ultimately, the way big clothing factories are run, it's so hard for anyone to know how people are being treated - another thing I really hate in fact.

another thought re experience vouchers and so on
I don't know if anyone else has this issue but sometimes people don't want to contribute to buying stuff that way because it shows how much they've spent

so for example, some of the friends who were okay to drop Xmas gifts - we would get a couple of bits from the Pound shop. They don't want to then give theatre tokens or something because it would be much more obvious that £3 has been spent. It doesn't matter to me at all how much someone spends, I feel much sadder at binning tat (sad for the envronment, not for me!) or taking it to the charity shop on 27th Dec but I think that's one reason why people won't do stuff like zoo or theatre or garden vouchers.

hyacinth "As I mentioned upthread, we give cash, but the fact is that buying experiences is not inherently expensive."

ooh cross post. I don't know of any experiences I could put on my wish list that wouldn't be at least £10 so I think they are expensive. Most would come in at more than that.

The way I see it, if a few people gave £3 theatre tokens - can you even buy so little, I don't know - that would at least get me one thing I'd use but I do get why others don't see it like that.

There's been at least one thing mentioned that's less than £10 just in the past few posts! But as I said, when people talk about experiences being more expensive, what they don't take into account is the cost they transfer onto the recipient of having to store something. I have a house and a loft, unlike a lot of people of my age, but every big daft pile of tat someone purchases for my offspring is, unless and until it can quietly be spirited off to the charity shop, taking up space I can't then use for anything else. This becomes an increasingly important issue as the average living space for each generation gets smaller.

Hyacinth, if you mean the Costa Coffee I was actually a bit befuddled by that but I work in Central London so the idea of visiting a coffee shop is my idea of hell anyway. So it's not something I could put on a list or say to my mates "can we just go for a coffee".

as I say, it doesn' matter to me but they couldn't face showing up with a £5 voucher for anything I think. Shops like Tiger and Poundland mean people can look as if they are spending more.

sorry OP I'm conscious I'm crossing over "spend" and the "plastic tat" issue.

Loreli - no I wouldn't go to a coffee shop for fun either. But if you know someone commutes and is short on cash, a £5 coffe ship voucher might be nice as they could get a coffee or two at a train station to go

Art yes - it would - I agree it's a good gift for some but I still think that some people are more inclined to "stuff" because it doesn't show how much they spent.

I might out myself with this story but as it annoyed me so much, I'll take a chance to vent. In an old workplace we used to do birthday gifts in a small team. One woman was on the bones of her arse and couldn't afford to get her boiler fixed that winter. She discreetly asked me to ensure the others bought supermarket vouchers. I tried really hard - they knew about the boiler - and they still insisted on buying her some posh toiletry thing that was useless - they said to me "if she feels strongly she can put it on ebay".

I was so annoyed. I refused to contribute and just bought her supermarket vouchers. It was weird though - like they were somehow ashamed to acknowledge she was in dire straits and I'm convinced it made her feel worse. She did put it on ebay but of course got less than it was worth.

oh wait, I should say "less than they paid for it"!!