I Was A Consumer Zombie
The first thing I ever bought with my 5-cents-a-week allowance was a bag of marbles. I think it cost 69 cents. After a few weeks of having money for the first time, the burning question for this six-year-old was, "what am I going to buy?" I didn’t even play marbles as a game. It was just to have them. I liked their perfect roundness, their colours inside clearness, the way they sparkled and the sounds they made clicking against each other.
As a teenager it was all about going to the mall. Like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. Until my friends and I discovered downtown, where there were clothing shops that were cooler than the mall and Odyssey Imports had records we hadn’t known existed. It was either you had to have what everyone else did or you wanted what no one else had. An overseas-edition 12" single was the best of both worlds.
At university all I had to do to get a credit card was fill out a one-page form at a table at the student union building. Or maybe it just seemed that simple after filling out the intricate pages of projected budgets and so on for my student loan. I didn’t really need a credit card but it was nice to have. When I moved out my parents gave me their second car. I didn’t really need a car but it was nice to have. Yeah, lots of stuff is nice to have. But is that reason enough to have it? Does having lots of stuff just encourage having lots more? Though I’d been pretty good at saving up for things in the past, before I knew it I had all kinds of debt.
A few years later, I decided to borrow money from my parents to pay everything off and cut up my credit cards. I also sold the car and tried keeping track of every penny I spent. While working with a non-profit environmental group advocating waste reduction I adopted a number of changes to my life to do my part, from getting in the habit of bringing my own bags to the supermarket to eating lower on the food chain.
Wanting to live within my means and be as socially responsible as possible, I found that instead of continuing to be a consumer zombie, I’d woken up. I’d become more aware of how much I was spending and on what and realised that as a consumer I did have choices -- and not just between brands or stores. I could choose reusable over disposable, bulk over individually-packaged, locally-made over sweatshop-produced, and even not buying over buying. Sometimes it was hard to find alternatives to what was offered by the generally-accepted disposable society’s consumer culture, but I was glad to have at least tried to incorporate my values into how I contributed to the economy.
Perhaps it’s due to the market responding to consumer demands that things like organic produce, recycled paper, environmentally-friendly cleaners, fair-trade chocolate, cruelty-free cosmetics, vegetarian menu options, etc. are more readily available at competitive prices. And maybe it’s because of that, as well as being debt-free and at a point in my life where I really have everything I need or want for myself and my home, that I haven’t had to think so much about my choices in recent years and have become a bit complacent. But over the past few months I’ve been confronted with a few choices as a consumer that have woken me up again. And so I’ve decided to make that my first "change" here -- To Be A Conscious Consumer.
