Wednesday, January 28, 2015

The story behind "value" shopping.



In my last post I wrote about how the argument around the minimum wage is tied to our consumption habits. I argued that paying less for stuff isn’t as inherent as we might think. This post, let’s look at the story behind why we want to pay less.

One of the fundamental reasons we want to pay less for what we buy is that we want to be able to buy more with what we have. We are constantly barraged with media pushing us to buy more. From television commercials, to ads on Facebook (and now Twitter), to the billboards along the freeway and in our bus shelters, and to the Coke machines in our children’s schools, we are encouraged to spend money; to consume. We are constantly, and continuously, barraged with messages about consumption. And consume we do.

To better understand how we consume, look at the self-storage industry.  According to the Self-Storage Association, self-storage businesses like Public Storage generated over $24 billion in revenue in 2013. We consume and accumulate so much stuff that we have propelled a whole industry as the things we have accumulated overflows our homes and garages. To put this in perspective, the self-storage industry generates more revenue than the national economies of 88 of the poorest countries in the world. It is quite apparent that we are a nation of consumers. Coupled with the fact that most of us, as employees of someone else, have relatively finite financial resources, spending less on what we buy in order to buy more has a certain kind of logic. But what if we choose a different path? What if we choose relationships and nature and experiences over consumption? What if we choose to value something other than more consumption in our purchasing decision?

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