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 think things do happen in people's lives where they have replace everything, I've had to do it twice, not for fun but necessity. Had some amazing bargains off gumtree etc though

People seem to think they 'need' more though. For example baby stuff, when people came to visit they would ask where baby bouncer was, did we want a baby swing, a jumperoo thing, etc etc, why when baby was happy laying on a blanket or us until they crawled. Even if it was free, we wouldn't have the space for all that

Xmas decorations - we have a few, but the all fit in a small present box. Some engraved with children's names etc. Everything else we get each year from outside. We spend a day in park where kids make a wreath from sticks and Ivy, and pine cones or whatever is around. We make paperchains from plain white paper and ink stamps ( passes another xmas afternoon with them). We do by a tree each year as no space to store

Thank you OP, this is something I need to think about. I really have too much stuff. During a recent week off I took four large bags to a local charity shop, yet my home is still bursting to the seams. I moved ten years ago and my current flat is far larger than the previous one. Bit by bit I have accumulated more things. I am not a serious shopper, going by the standards of my group of friends, yet still it mounts up. I feel hemmed in by it. There is a great book on this topic called Not Buying It by Judith Levine. She tries to go one year without buying anything non-essential. It is time that I re-read it. Today I went shopping for a bra and came home with four. Yet I think I am non-consumerist because my sofa is 35 years old. I have double standards here which I need to examine.

Yes I like clothes and beauty products and things for the kitchen but at the moment I just want to de clutter. Have any empty nest.

Love a bargain

I'm reading all this and nodding along. I know I buy too much even though I consider myself to be frugal, I re-use what I can, buy second hand etc but it's still too much.

I've aleady started my Christmas shopping and I'm going too do a stock take and see if the DC really need anything else. If not then I will not buy any thing else. we also have outside pressure to contend with. E.g at the DC school the parents have to buy the present that Father Christmas brings them when he visits school. So that's an extra present for each dc, plus when we visit Santa as a family. argh! it really feels like fighting a battle we can't win!

I'm going to watch Hugh's war on waste tonight as I missed it when it was on. hopefully that will give me and dh some inspiration not to be sucked in to buying yet more tat.

Mrs, I think the bargain thing is often used to "justify" purchases. I don't think there needs to be a justification, I think it's a word that crops up when people are trying to feel better about a purchase, whereas I think if you really wanted it, you wouldn't feel the need to justify it, does that make sense?

I appreciate that living in a small flat skews things a bit because I don't have storage but I always remember that guy who did a tv show about paying the mortgage early. He said that loads of people would end up with houses full of stuff they couldn't recall buying and didn't want, and they'd wish they'd paid down the mortgage.

I'm seeing that among a few people now. I see that the certain labels do well on eBay but others don't, I have a colleague ebaying virtually everything atm and she's not doing well. She loves to shop but now she and her partner are mid 40s and struggling with the knowledge that they could have saved a home deposit but spent it on stuff. I never know what to say to make her feel better! ((It's a big thing for her right now).

Pisssssedofff I don't think anyone has a problem with that, people emigrate or worse have suffered flood or fire damage or have had to flee their home, that's perfectly normal to need to replace the stuff you lost.

FrenchDucks At least you're mindful - it's a step in the right direction, I can't imagine many people don't have blips, I know I have. My problem is not chucking out things, it wasn't a problem before DC but it's the well meaning gifts for the DC that has accumulated, slowly I've been either ebaying, giving away or taking it to charity shops. Just looking around the room I'm in now, other than furniture (which we've had and will hopefully have for years) a good 70% is stuff bought from family - plastic tat toys (parents and in-laws still have the big is best mentality) or nic nac ornaments I feel guilty getting rid of. This Christmas I'm going to extend the magazine subs/experience vouchers to the DC in the family as I know the parents are sick of the tat too.

MrsDeVere They're any eye opener aren't they! The thing is it's not an overnight thing, and most of the time is tied up with a emotional compulsion to hoard. It's the fire hazard thing that scares me - could you imagine being a fire fighter and having to navigate your way through all that stuff! It's so dangerous for them and the person they're trying to save, plus half of that stuff is basically kindling (old piles of newspapers) and you've got a recipe for disaster.

You make a valid point, and I certainly feel a bit assaulted by the amount of unnecessary cheap crap people seem to want to fill my house with as a parent of small children.

However, I think you also need to acknowledge the role that money plays here: specifically, lack of it. Put simply, buying infrequently and high quality and storing things is not accessible to everyone, because it requires having the cash to buy the more expensive thing initially and the room to put it.

I think there are two main things that need to be said here:

a) You talk about Primark et al churning out cheap clothing designed to be worn out quickly and then chucked. It's all very well saying pay £30 for something that lasts 5 years instead of £6 every year. But even if we assume paying out more necessarily correlates with quality, you still need to have the £30 in the first place. If you need a new pair of jeans and you've got £6, you aren't going to go bare arsed for half a decade to get the better quality pair. I'm familiar with the saying buy cheap buy twice, but what a lot of people actually have to do is buy cheap and manage.

b) Decreasing dwelling size is a huge problem, and it's generational. The homes in which we're expected to live and raise families get smaller with each generation. One poster has already mentioned buying new Christmas things each year because she doesn't have the space to store them. I can well believe it. Housing space is phenonemally expensive. It's actually considerably more cost effective, for a lot of people, to chuck it out and replace. Personally I store things, but then I have a loft. I considered myself very fortunate to be able to clothe my second child in a lot of what my first had worn, but had we been squished into a teeny flat there might simply not have been the room. I passed a lot on to my sibling who's recently had a baby and who does live in a small flat, and the only reason they were able to make use of the extensive second hand contributions from family and friends is because people stored it free for them. They couldn't have used it otherwise.

So I think you're right about consumerism getting out of hand, and there's no reason at all why bloody everything has to be an extravaganza of consumerism. However, a lot of cheap stuff is bought by people whose income dictates their purchasing and storage habits.

This is a really good thread - I find Christmas and birthdays really hard as basically we and the DDs have eveything we could need (we're very fortunate and try to keep an awareness if this) but the extended family see these as great opportunities to give lots of Stuff. Partly because we live down south and they're all in Scotland so wedon't have the chance to do things together much, I think they make up for this with gifts. Mainly lits of small things that take lots of unwrapping but aren't really suited to the DDs interests (we try to make suggestions, they're usually over-ridden ). What's a tactful way to says Actually it would be great to get a membership of the zoo or tickets to the theatre? I know these aren't very exciting for an 8 year old to open, esp as previous years we have had the huge (stage managed by MIL) present opening, but would have much longer lasting value esp as by the end of a session opening 10 pressies from GPs, 5 from great aunt, 5 from each auntie, even with us frantically writing down they've forgotten who gave what within a few days.

I think most of us could do without half the stuff in our houses and although there are usually serious mental health issues relevant in hoarding, it's easy to see how it happens. my inlaws have wardrobes full of clothes they'll probably never wear again because they won't donate to charity as they paid good money for them. My grandfather was the worst - he'd lived through the War and knew real hardship so kept everything - when he died we chucked about 1000 yoghurt pots. Goodness knows what he planned on doing with them.

But I agree that it's just too easy to buy more - I was in Waitrose earlier picking up one of their meal deals for dinner and caught myself sniffing candle tins and thinking "Ooooh, that's nice! And only £5! What a bargain" then caught onto myself and gave myself a wee shake as we really don't need more candles.

Hya - but less things shouldn't require storage. We live in a one bed flat with children, so know about storage. We don't have anything that requires storing for years, but format mean we keep rebuy I g either, we just don't buy the itme in the first place. Most our children's toys are toys I expect to last 1year - no longer playing with toys (12-14 years?) everything is used daily, so no mass storing for the future

You can buy and use less, of course you can, but if you want to store and reuse things there's going to come a point when some people don't have the space. I don't see any way round that. I didn't have a particularly massive amount of clothes for my DC1, but it's still a few binbags full. We have the room but clearly some people aren't going to.

I agree with OP that we can do things like not buy a dozen glow in the dark skeletons, paper chains and costumes for everyone for Halloween, but I don't think a couple of witches hats or reused kids costumes are particularly outrageous, and yet they take up room.

What's a tactful way to says Actually it would be great to get a membership of the zoo or tickets to the theatre?

Just say it. My family usually ask what the kids would like and I have already got a few ideas of passes they'd like to the Glasgow Science centre, or tickets to something like Edinburgh Zoo. Also tell them that it spreads the job of Christmas - every time they use their zoo pass or when they go to the theatre they can remember the giver and Christmas.

Freudian slip.

The JOY of Christmas. Not the job.

That's a good point Luna - a way to remind the girls of their family.

I agree with you OP. It reminds me of the Onion article - "Chinese Factory Worker Can't Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans."

I usually wear my clothes until they wear out, and then use them for gardening or painting, but the quality varies and some things seem to wear out very quickly. Things like witches' hats and Christmas decorations seem to have lasted reasonably well. I use a flask on days out rather than getting through lots of disposable coffee cups.

Having said that, I'm ashamed my daughter (3) loves nothing better than a trip to Asda Living or what she calls "the plastic rubbish shop" (aka Poundworld) and the other day I had to play a game with her in which her Duplo ponies ordered themselves some new wings on the computer and the postman delivered them the next day...she also loves the CBeebies type magazines with plastic rubbish attached to them.

Yes I think those are good ideas, and they also have the advantage of still helping the economy because you're spending.

We have a bit of an issue in my family in that those of us of my generation with young children have to contend with the adults wanting to buy quite a lot of things for them, some of which I would consider to be tat. It's linked, I think, to the current grandparents not having been especially well off when their kids were young and perhaps not having been able to buy as many toys and things for them as they'd have liked (I would also say that one of them in particular has hoarding tendencies and would ideally like to use other people's houses for storage as well as their own). So they want to make up for it now, regardless of whether that's always a good idea. And we're now mostly living in smaller houses than they did, as is common for those of us born at the tail end of the 20th century. We twenty and thirtysomethings with little ones have so far agreed amongst ourselves just to give money for the savings accounts, but as our kids get old enough to notice birthdays (all under 5s right now) that might seem a bit mean, not to give them a present as such. We may buy experiences instead.

Hyg " Things like witches' hats... seem to have lasted reasonably well"

Start wearing it to work for max use?

Lorelei - perhaps because they're only required to be in service on a few days a year! At least I'm spared annual Halloween shopping as the plastic Halloween tat seems to be holding out well so far.