To buy or not to buy
With the holiday season and Black Friday sale just around the corner, I thought shopping would an apt topic for my first blog. Hi, my name is Nishita, I work as an auditor in London and juggle part-time studies in sustainability on weekends. I liked to think of myself as a conscious consumer, until recently, when I realised most of my purchases were ridiculously unnecessary.
Three months back I decided to audit my spending (yes, being an auditor has side-effects!). I tracked my outgoings on an excel sheet, categorising each purchase as ‘essential’ or ‘nonessential’. All food related expenses (including occasional meals outside and once-in-a-while self-pampering purchases), public transport, medicines, study/work related items and essential retail products (likes shoes, clothes etc. that I needed as replacements to broken/torn ones only) were all categorised as essential. All other purchases (especially random ones from Amazon!) were all classified as nonessential. What I realised was that over a period of 3 months, I spent a staggering 40% of my expenses on nonessential items! When I went through the list of all these nonessential items, I realised that I had used most of these items once (maybe twice!) and they’re now lying in the house gathering dust, waiting to be thrown out during the next spring clean. Can you imagine what a waste of resources! Right from the raw materials needed to make these products, to the emissions and packaging material needed to get these to my doorsteps, and then the damage from the disposal or worse, landfilling of these products!
It seemed straightforward to conclude that this purchasing pattern was a loose-loose for me (and my wallet!) and the planet. But the question changed from ‘What I was buying?’ to ‘Why can’t I stop buying?’ This is the part I had the most difficulty answering. After a lot (a lot, a lot, A LOT) of introspection I managed to identify my shopping triggers. There were:
· I shop when I see someone wearing/using it on Instagram
· I shop when I see sales/deals/discounts flooding my social media (because it’s too good to let it go!)
· I shop when I’m bored
· I shop when I’m feeling low (after seeing so-called ‘picture perfect’ lives of others on social media, that I obviously know are filtered or simply not reflective of their whole reality!)
· I shop when I want to feel happy (the anticipation of arrival and the momentary happiness that comes from when I first use/wear the product)
The slight upside to this was it wasn’t fully my fault. Retail companies spend a fortune trying to influence consumer behaviour — it’s designed to make it an effort to not shop! But rather than feel hopeless about it, I wanted to make small changes to reduce my nonessential purchases. I’ve taken tiny steps like these:
· I maintain a list of nonessential items I ‘feel’ like buying. At the end of the month I choose top 3 things on that list and buy it as a reward for being good for the month!
· I have cancelled my retail subscriptions
· I have unfollowed ‘influencers’ on Instagram
· I am now gifting plants to friends and family for birthdays instead of John Lewis or Amazon vouchers
· I am also reusing a lot more — I bought a sewing machine and am trying to transform my old clothes or my sister/mom’s clothes into ‘new’ clothes. I am also handing down my clothes to my younger sisters (who love them and eagerly wait for me to visit home even more now!)
· I am limiting my time on social media to 1 hour a day. I am also planning to deactivate my Instagram account over the holidays
I know there will be days where I slip and I know this won’t fix the mad culture we have managed to breed around buying incessantly, but I hope it’s a small step in the right direction. And I hope retail companies are taking a note that customers might just be moving away from ‘buy-buy-buy’!
