Excess: Buying More than We Really Need
“A Big Mac – the communion wafer of consumption” — John Ralston Saul
In a recent issue of the New Yorker, James Surowiecki wrote a commentary about the US defense budget on The Financial Page. He mentioned an analogy about excess where some social scientists did an experiment in an apartment building.
He writes, “One day, they left out a bowl of M&M’s for people to take, with a small scoop beside it. When, the next day, they left a much larger scoop, people took two-thirds more M&M’s. People could have taken just as many M&M’s on the first day; they just would have had to take more scoops. They took more the second day because the larger scoop sent a message that that was what they were supposed to do.”
The above illustrates how as humans we are conditioned to take more than we need just because it’s offered. How many of us used to Super Size when the kid at McDonald’s offered it up? I haven’t eaten fast food in four years, but I’m pretty sure after Morgan Spurlock’s movie they stopped doing the upsell. But B-I-G and E-X-T-R-A L-A-R-G-E are still pushed on us almost everywhere else.
I’ve written before about people buying products that they never used. Much of the blame rests on advertising and bulk buying but really it seems to be more about buying stuff that we don’t need. I wrote another post awhile back about shopping at the grocery store.
One tip I found suggested, “Shop the specials only if you will use the product. Although ‘buy one, get one free’ may sound like a good deal, the ‘one’ is often marketed at an increased price.” If you don’t need more than one and will never use the free one than why do we feel compelled to buy just because it’s offered as a deal?
It’s because we’re a culture sustained on consumption and consumerism. Dawn has written about the term Freegan. She quotes from one website that defines it as, “People who are concerned so deeply with the social and ecological impact of economic over-consumption that they choose to buy and work as little as possible and, instead, to live directly off the massive waste created by our modern society.”
Dawn really is way better than most at what is called: Thoughtful Living. Paula G over at Coaching4Lesbians commented with these thoughts, “I once read in a book – not sure if it was on sustainable living or simply a spiritual take on our interconnectedness ” about how everything we consume impacts the world.”
“Take for instance buying something as simple as a new journal or notebook. In one way, shape, or form, we impact the earth (it took a tree to make the paper, even if it is recycled paper it had to start somewhere at sometime), a business that cuts down the trees and hauls them to the mill, the employees of the mill (and the economy of the towns in which they operate), the manufacturer of the journals, and the distribution chain in between (delivery and transit, maybe a physical or virtual store we purchased it from). Everything we buy, consume, or do has a ripple effect across the globe.”
All good things to remember the next time we’re filling up the cart at Costco’s.
Thanks for the link.
I really like the idea of the scoop. I never really thought of that. Wonder if the same holds true for the size of the paper plates you put out at potlucks.
I know for certain that the big sizes in Costco can be dangerous. 8 years ago when we bought our house we had our first picnic & shopped in Costco. We were still using the same multi-jumbo pack of ketchup like 2 years later. I mean, who needs that much ketchup unless you’re running a grammar school? Yet, people (sucker that I was too) buy it because it’s a “good deal”.
We always try to remember to look at the pricing units- many times, we can do just as well buying something “normal sized” but generic- or a loss leader sale from our usual grocery store. We also try to do the math over the buy one/get one strategy stores try to use to trick us.
Oh, man, Nina, this one hits home…for the last four months, because I’ve been starting up being self-employed again, I’ve had $0 cash for anything but food and rent (and barely that). It’s given me a fantastic opportunity to actually _use_ everything I already own. I can tell you this: it takes an awfully long time to actually run out of plastic and paper bags, makeup, clothes, books to read, cards to send, pens and pencils…we Americans basically tend to buy for 12 rather than 1. I propose that the new criteria for deciding to purchase something should be: am I going to use it within the next 7 days? Anything “just in case,” well…is 99% likely to be waste.