Smartphones to yoghurts – did we ever need so much consumer choice?
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Version 0 of 1. This is not a rant about choice (or yoghurt, which I love). Choice is clearly a great thing. The choice of whether to be nice or nasty; go for a walk or watch TV; decide where to take your summer holiday. But when did we ever need such a huge array of products to choose from? There must be a limit and it was, I suggest, breached years ago. The rot probably set in when supermarkets and shopping malls were invented around the 1950s. The resulting infinite choice of processed foods, phones, cars and so on is a chronic affliction we can’t escape. And it’s reached heady heights. Looking for a new phone recently I had a choice of no less than 48 Samsung Galaxy phones – just one brand. Why? And why so many yoghurt types: endless shelves loaded with basically the same product? Does the huge choice on offer in supermarkets, shops and online make us any happier, any more fulfilled? Tim Jackson of Surrey University notes that UK consumer-spending has more than doubled in the last 30 years, but life satisfaction has barely changed. Recent work shows that “consumption for identity” – buying products to boost our sense of self – has gone too far and does not deliver contentment. Consumption is not the same as choice, but these days the two are so close that you couldn’t put a low-fat, tar-lite, sugar-free cigarette paper between them. Of course many shoppers may disagree. For them, such choice means that life has never been better. In reality, this a complex issue, embedded in values, identity and marketing. But whether you’re for or against such high levels, we should all be aware of the effect it can have on our mental wellbeing and crucially, our environment. These four ideas provide a good starting point, if you want to try and better understand how we tackle the issues of our consumer-based society. Happiness aside, I know for sure that choice is putting a huge strain on people and planet. This is well covered elsewhere but suffice to say that if we buy more than we need and throw away perfectly good products – be it food, clothes or phones – we’re not making efficient, or fair, use of finite land, water, energy, raw materials and labour. We’re putting more greenhouse gases into the environment and polluting the planet so that people are finding impossible to live in some parts of the world. I’m not about to suggest the removal of product choice to help to save the planet. But just imagine if we were free of the problem of choice. Imagine a world where a writer Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were adapted and applied to our everyday products: 1. A product or service must do no harm or through inaction allow no harm to be done This could work out pretty well for the natural environment, workers, and our general health. Anything else would be edited off the shelves by responsible businesses and/or a government that regulates to put people and planet first. 2. A product or service must be left to function of its own accord without advertising (unless this conflicts with law one) Essentially we’re talking about a marketing-free world here. New curbs on advertising would mean that any new product would have to prove itself via word of mouth. The packaging would include basic facts about its contents or carbon footprint, but nothing else. No exaggerated claims about what the product is capable of or devious manipulatory claims designed to tap into your own sense of self-worth. 3. Independent retail must be protected (as long as such protection does not conflict with laws one and two) By their nature independent, non-chain trading options (high street, direct, web and so on) are smaller and so have less choice. Collectively they employ more people than the big names, can be centres of innovation and enterprise, and ideally they would eventually sell stuff only under law one. And there could be a fourth law about repairing and sharing – it could become illegal, or very expensive, to throw away non-perishable goods. It was wretched to see the vacuum repair shop finally die on my high street earlier this year. But repair is making a comeback – the Restart project being a great example. Repairing and sharing and with your neighbours could become the norm. Would such laws be an unacceptable limit to our freedom? You choose. Either way it seems unfair to me to always place the responsibility on shoppers to work out if they are making a sustainable choice – for items like electronics and clothes, such information often simply isn’t available. Thanks to Friends of the Earth, a new legislation really is coming into force, to help to improve company accountability. The Make It Better law will help to ensure products are made in ways that protect people and the environment. It’s a step towards being able to feel happier about the things we do buy. Yet governments must still do more. In the meantime choosing to source sustainably; to buy green, buy FairTrade, locally and healthily can still help. But before you weigh up quality and cost, I think it’s worth asking yourself, at least twice, do I need to buy this at all? Do I need to eat meat every day of the week? Could I make do with one big yoghurt pot instead of four small ones? Can I repair this phone instead of getting a new one? Sometimes the answer will be yes. Vicki Hird heads the land, food and water programme at Friends of the Earth. Interested in finding out more about how you can live better? Take a look at this month’s Live Better challenge here. The Live Better Challenge is funded by Unilever; its focus is sustainable living. 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