Living in the age of ‘affluenza’
As shoppers spend millions on Black Friday, Richard Denniss tells Rachel Cocker our buying power can be a force for good
Will anything bought in today’s Black Friday sales last half as long as Sydney and Rachel Saunders’ old tumble-dryer? The 80-something Exeter couple made headlines on Monday for finally replacing the vintage Burco they have used every week since it was bought for £52 in 1963 – one of dozens of vintage appliances that have seen them through five decades of married life.
Modern British shoppers, meanwhile – fingers at the ready! – are expected to spend £1.8million a minute on the latest gadgets today, despite Which? research confirming what we already knew: that Black Friday is less of a bargain, more of a marketing gimmick. Originally used to lure shoppers after the Thanksgiving holiday, it is now growing faster in the UK than in the US.
“Most people think they are immune to the effectiveness of designated shopping days, but most people are wrong,” says Richard Denniss, chief economist of the Australia Institute and author of a new book, Curing Affluenza: How to Buy Less Stuff and Save the World; aptly timed for publication amid this period of particularly conspicuous consumption.
“The best and highest-paid psychologists in the world work in advertising,” adds Denniss, “and those who profit from selling stuff work tirelessly to make people feel like they are missing out on the opportunity to save money when, of course, the whole point is to get them to spend more if it.”
If there’s nothing revolutionary in his definition of our affliction – “affluenza is that strange desire we feel to spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t know” – perhaps there is in his unlikely antidote: distinguishing between consumerism and materialism.
“I conflated them myself for years,” he says from his home in Canberra. “It was only when I sat down to write this book I realised they were actually polar opposites. Consumerism is the love of the purchase, the act of buying. Whereas materialism is the love of the actual thing, the physical object. Now, if you love something, if you cherish it, then replacing would cause you pain, not joy.”
Instead, he says, we in the West find ourselves fixated on the idea “that the faster a country imports stuff, throws that stuff away and buries it in the ground, the richer the economy is.
“Thirty years ago, you’d never hear a politician saying: ‘Get out there and spend money on stuff in shops to create jobs.’ Now we’ve turned private consumption into a form of social contribution: ‘I’m propping up the retail sector with my £1,000 boots.’
“I’m not saying don’t buy the boots,” he clarifies. “But keep them, maintain them, look after them. Cherish them.”
Instead, the race to replace everything from smartphones to white goods with the latest model has led not just to an avalanche of environmental waste, but a widespread lowering of expectations. “My parents are beside themselves if something less than 10 years old starts to rattle. They grew up thinking a fridge would literally last for 40 years, which the fridge I grew up with did.”
Of course, anyone who has tried to get just about anything fixed of late will know that replacement is often an easier, and less expensive, route than repair. “But there’s a chicken-and-egg argument here,” says Denniss. “When everyone thinks that buying new stuff is cool and no one tries to get anything repaired for years, guess what, the repair men figured this out a while ago and they shut down. But if this is what we want, the market will provide it.”
If this all sounds a bit abstract – and quite a lot of pressure to place on the shoulders of the average shopper – he refers us to the “brunch-culture boom”.
“Twenty years ago, no one in Australia, and I suspect the UK, was willing to pay a couple of quid for someone else to make them a coffee. None. I was 24 when I first paid someone to make me coffee. I made it through my entire childhood without ever paying someone to make me breakfast. I was middle-class, it wasn’t like we couldn’t afford it, but in the first 24 years of my life neither I nor my parents ever thought it necessary, or even fun, for someone else to scramble my eggs at the weekend.”
Now, more people are employed in Australia’s cafés than its mining industry – Britain can’t be far behind, given recent research suggests we collectively spend £76 million a day going out for breakfast.
“What I’m trying to do is say you have more influence over this than you’re being led to believe. It wasn’t the global economy that invented brunch culture, it was people who felt like brunch.
“Just as your demand for coffee drove creation of all those cafés, your demand for services instead of stuff, repair instead of replace, will drive the shape of the British economy in 20 years’ time,” says Denniss.
Similarly, if we all stopped buying presents at Christmas and gave, say, French lessons or singing lessons
‘I’m not saying don’t buy those boots – but keep them, look after them, cherish them’
instead, the retail sector would shrink and the service sector would grow.
“We won’t damage the economy, we’ll change it’s shape – and massively reduce the amount of environmental damage that we do.”
Denniss hasn’t gone as far as Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, who have apparently instigated a “no-presents” rule for their children this year – “I’m not the Christmas grinch” – but, at 44, he admits it was only when his eldest son was born, 10 years ago, that he began accepting presents from anyone else.
“Throughout my twenties, I was pretty adamant that I didn’t want any – I was not an excited recipient,” he says. “But I had this epiphany that sometimes it’s selfish to want nothing. There is a joy in giving.”
So what will he be getting his wife? “Whatever she wants,” he says, wisely.