> Why can't we have a consumer organization that protects us from having to buy stuff that we don't want.
You don't have to buy stuff you don't want.
You just can't buy the stuff you do want without it being bundled with stuff you don't want - the manufacturers have decided there's no market for it.
Evidently it's more profitable to persuade a large fraction of people that they are “consumers”, whose lives are a series of branded commercial experiences, than it is to cater to the unlucrative number of people who object.
We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice. Especially for the rich who you rightly pointed out are the source of the problems we are trying to ameliorate.
It's not ignorance, it's way too willful for that.
We know about local taxes, safety standards, patent and trademark licensing and the human and ecological damage caused by irresponsibly sourced materials... but happily ignore all of it because we save 30% off the co-branded resale imports, and 80% off the branded original.
It's not ignorance, it's the unadulterated marriage of consumerism and capitalism. Calculated greed.
> So it comes down to this: If everyone is able to convince me that their product is a necessity, then I'll end up acquiring all of those products, but only some of them will be paid for.
Wait, you're saying 'only some of them will be paid for', even though you've been convinced all the products are 'a necessity'. A more succinct way of putting this, that I believe loses none of the intended meaning, is 'I want I want I want.' Of course, this behaviour is not to be blamed on you, poor consumer, for you live in an awful society which has bombarded -- yes, bombarded -- you with vile and shrill marketing in order to trick you into thinking you need it. The horror, the horror!
I agree. It's important to direct wants of the consumer into frequent use. The real value in marketing is creating cultures where people must consume to participate.
Consumer needs are path dependent, so it's important to not allow avenues for countercultures or ways to avoid traps.
> Pay attention to what you buy, especially when you are changing from an old well understood product to a new, more convenient, equivalent.
Key phrase: more convenient.
We haven't been sold products as much as we've bought into convenience matters above all else. Marketers can market all they want. Some times they do well, others not so well. Evidently they've been most successful selling the idea that we as individuals aren't responsible and/or accountable for our (consumer) decisions.
Blame the razor manufacturers. Blame Walmart. Blame Amazon. For what exactly, meeting a need in the market? I'm certainly not in favor of these outfits, but they're not making our collective decisions either.
> Like the owning of the object itself is more important than what you're supposed to do with it
Welcome to the world of consumerism. Where we've long produced more than we need and without manufactured desire the high-gear economy would collapse. Companies can't market products anymore cause we all have too much. Instead the market "an experience".
> when every single product you bought contains 10 smaller products individually wrapped in plastic
I never asked for this, noone ever did. Lets place the blame where is belongs, shall we?
You have swallawed the corporate propaganda of 'consumer is to blame' line, hook and sinker. We know that oil companies have spent billions on disinformation campaigns, we know they falsified scientific studies, villified nuclear power, and lobbied against every solution that would get us off oil.
We ripped out electric trams and trolley busses out of our cities. Sacraficed public walkways for cars and made our cities dangerous
We invented the crime of Jaywalking, something so stupid it still boggles my mind.
It was not the consumer that came up with the genious supply chain that ships shrimp caught in America to phillipines for processing, and then ships it back. A pair of jeans travels around the world three times before it arrives in the store. It's not the consumer that burns unsold fashion items to maintain artificial scarcity.
Its not the consumer that uses copyright to keeps repair manual under wraps, refuses to sell spare parts and makes products unrepairable.
These are the same people that encouraged children to smoke, added cocaine into a drink for kids, added lead to oil, dumped nuclear waste in the ocean and PTFAs into drinking water. They use child labour in every country where they can get away with it.
> Even the people that could buy ethical don't do.
Because it's exhausting, and it's made to be that way on purpose. Brands within brands within brands, shell companies within shell companies, producers selling to distributors selling to distributors selling to distributors.
Forget shopping ethically, I think most people would be hard pressed to tell you where anything they've bought, regardless of prior thought, actually came from.
Impartial consumer advocacy groups comparing products on open, fair and repeatably measurable factors, for one.
> If advertising were illegal then how do people find out about products?
Same way people found out before advertising existed: word-of-mouth, trade fairs, product catalogs... and the question is always, does the world NEED the new product?
Is it beneficial for society if supermarkets carry literally dozens of different brands of simple plain white yogurt, of which half goes to waste because people mostly buy the cheap white label stuff?
Do we actually even need brands as a society? For many common goods the brand is actually irrelevant already. Think HDMI cables - as long as it carries a legal certificate that it conforms to HDMI specs, I don't care if the cable is from Amazon, Mediamarkt, or whatever the name of the Alibaba or ebay shop is. And I won't have any benefit from shelling out 10k bucks for a 20m cable over one that costs 20 bucks.
As societies, we definitely need to have a proper democratic debate and vote on how we want to (re)shape the relationship between consumers and producers. The current way is unsustainable.
> consumers have chosen with their wallets on this one.
There are plenty of situations where we do not simply let the default selection made by consumers stand, because often that choice is suboptimal or intensely shortsighted. Particularly when economies of scale often push the preferences of a small number of early-adopter consumers onto the rest of the market, whether they have the same preferences or not.
More generally, expecting a consumer operating with very limited information, limited time, and limited interest and incentives, to make a purchasing decision that may have substantial unaccounted (and unpriced!) externalities is foolish.
We should stop treating the consumer's off-the-cuff decision of what to purchase as holy writ, given the many examples of consumers happily trading away the "right" to purchase shitty products in an unregulated market for higher quality products in a regulated one.
> This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is trying to stamp out.
Yet again modern capitalism is blamed for its users' lack of taste: people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old items. This is the same with Tik Tok algos, tailors being unpopular compared to fast fashion and even overpriced luxury brands, fast food vs cooking, etc.
Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the former.
Capitalism merely holds up a mirror to our preferences. As it turns out, we really don't like it.
Which 'this' do you mean? There is the 'this' where other people buy stupid things (meaning 'smart' things, in the marketing terminology we've had foisted upon us), and there is the 'this' where I can't buy what I want. Phones and TVs are examples of both, to be sure; but, as I mentioned in the comment to which you are responding, these two phenomena seem different, though linked, and it's not clear to me that the former is inherently bad.
>This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term.
I think it's more that the principles of competition in capitalism ultimately tend to lead to converging on one or a very few solutions. In some cases that's good. We want things that are cheap and highly abundant, especially in cases where it works for most the population. Having affordable groceries works very well (let's ignore recent trends of inflation).
But I don't think we always want converged solutions, I think there are many cases where as a society we want a lot of diversity, we want a wide selection to choose from, we want that sort of natural redundancy with some variance that occurs. It both helps make life interesting when it comes to things like the arts and in some cases I think having real choice of selection (not the illusion of choice where there are 10 options that are basically identical for all practical purposes) is very useful.
There are many cases when things dictated by the mass market aren't what I want/need. I still want an easily swappable battery in a flagship phone as a simple example and expandable memory in the form of SD slots but alas the market has spoken and I'm stuck with poor alternatives if I want those functions. Or on a more practical note, I'd love to select from various airlines, there's dozens and dozens of them but the fact is I often ride coach and they're all just as crappy and customer hostile as each other. It doesn't matter if you pay just a little more for a ticket, you're out of luck. The tendency for markets to converge on the same price points to remain competitive makes them also converge on the same or similar solutions and that tends to lead to a lack of choice.
Maybe consumers need to be willing to not always pay the lowest price for everything but I argue the issue isn't just there, it's systematic because the average consumer is also the average person producing the consumables and the way in which they get resources to consume which dictate to some degree what choices they have and so on and so forth. We seem to just be continuously converging on optimal solutions that don't fit everyone and are slowly fitting a handful of people in power more than anything else.
> Consumers have become lazy: they expect purchasing and consuming to be the extent of their participation in the long supply chain through which our goods travel
This is a little unfair on "consumers". I don't have a choice in how my local supermarket packages its products. I bring my own containers to the butcher, I bring my own bags for fruit and veg, and we still end up with at least one bin worth of waste every week. That's not counting the packaging that the products are shipped to my local stores in either.
Consumers aren't lazy, companies are cheap. it's cheaper to wrap something in LDPE + friends, and transport it across <insert landmass here>, then force the consumer to pay to dispose of it (and their local authority to bear the brunt of managing it), than it is for the manufacturer to make it closer and get it to me without shrink wrapping.
Until suppliers, manufacturers, retailers are held responsible, consumers are _not_ the lazy ones, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still try.
> I can demand a long lasting, repairable, sustainable appliance (and most products) until I am blue in the face, no corporation is willing to make and sell me one.
I can't tell if this is ideology or a mistake, but this is not true. Firstly, if you demand something that can be reasonably built, somebody will sell it to you for the right price. Remember: corporations are just regular folk trying to make money, like everyone else in modern society.
Second, if your argument is "Well, it would be so much more expensive" then this is kind of your own problem, not theirs. Corporations have achieved incredibly affordable production through economies of scale in massive markets. They cater to the demands of large groups of consumers who are willing to pay what it takes for their needs and luxuries. If nobody else wants what you want, nobody will build it for you except you.
Claiming that corporations won't make you a 'long lasting, repairable, sustainable appliance' means (a) you haven't asked or looked, or (b) you aren't willing to pay for the qualities you demand.
> it requires government to regulate to get corporations to all do their bit.
I agree with you here.
> Lets also not forget ... makes you feel worse.
I agree here too - you're right. Advertising is awful, and I don't know what we should do about it, I haven't put enough thought into that issue.
> We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Markets aren't exclusively driven by consumers and such framing is incredibly naive. You can't buy the fruit that doesn't exist.
> The only way to not be bothered by stuff like this as a consumer is to not consume anything.
It's not very clear, from the above sentence, that you exclude consumption of creative works. In any case, how do you draw a distinction between consumerism and consuming certain works?
You don't have to buy stuff you don't want.
You just can't buy the stuff you do want without it being bundled with stuff you don't want - the manufacturers have decided there's no market for it.
Evidently it's more profitable to persuade a large fraction of people that they are “consumers”, whose lives are a series of branded commercial experiences, than it is to cater to the unlucrative number of people who object.
As ever, the problem is consumerism.
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