Conscious Choice Seattle: Buy the Way

May 2006 | Conscious Culture

Buy the Way

Too many Americans shop to feel better or feel alive or both. In her new book, author Judith Levine isn’t buying it

By Judith Levine

Too many Americans shop to feel better or feel alive or both. In her new book, author Judith Levine isn’t buying it

Imagine a year without shopping. That is exactly what author Judith Levine dreamed up while skittering over the slippery terrain of holiday debt. The result is a new book, “Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping” (Free Press, $25) that has won rave reviews from the likes of the Seattle Times, Washington Post and the Oprah Show.

What follows are entries from Levine’s project, one is a short entry for December when she cemented the idea and the other longer take hints at the ardor of going a year without buying most goods we all take for granted. If you have thoughts about shopping or consumerism, let us know.

December: Panic

The idea occurs to me, as so many desperate resolutions do, during the holiday season. I have maxed out the Visa, cracked open the Citibank debit card that has lain in a drawer for years, and am tapping the ATM like an Iraqi guerrilla pulling crude from the pipeline.

Convinced I am picking up no more than the occasional trinket–a tree ornament for Howard and Nanette, a bar of French soap for Norm—in just two weeks this atheist Grinch has managed to scatter $1,001 across New York City and the World Wide Web. I am not in the spirit, but somehow I have gotten with the program.

And what a program it is. Through three years of lusterless economic reports and rising unemployment, consumer confidence has barely flagged. The coffins are returning from Iraq: by Christmas, the U.S. body count is near 500. Still, this month America’s good guys caught Iraq’s bad guy, several employee-starved companies hired several workers, and a “hoo-wah!” rose from the malls of America.

Interviewed on the Saturday before Christmas, Everyshopper Barbara D’Addario chuckled as she told CBS, “Today, [I spent] about $75, and I’ve been here 20 minutes.” What is the source of her generosity and glee?

“[I have] great hopes that the economy is improving and we caught Saddam Hussein,” says D’Addario. “We’re very happy.”

We are very happy, and when we are happy, as when we are sad or angry or bored or confused or feeling nothing in particular, we shop.

February: Consumer Psychology

I’ve lost my SmartWool socks. They’re not in my drawers or [my partner] Paul’s drawers. Not in the laundry basket or under the bed. My socks are lost. So am I.

I discovered SmartWool while buying new boots at the Ski Rack in Burlington two years ago. Over my silk sock liners, I’d pulled on the thick, pilling purple polyester $3 tubes that had served me for a decade. The salesman, whose tanned face and snow-pack abs told me he was a Super-G racer when not selling shoes, looked away. He seemed embarrassed, as if catching his mother wriggling into a girdle.

Then I asked to see the Rossignol X-ium Classic cross-country racing boots, which run about $250. He became confused. How could this purple-polyester customer be interested in these high-end silver boots? (Answer: by not fitting into any other boots). He became attentive, almost respectful; he explained the X-iums’ technology, the plastic liners that are heated up and cooled to the contours of the wearer’s feet.

"You want them as tight as possible," he said. "You’ll want a thinner sock. A real athletic sock." On the word athletic, I thought I heard a note of skepticism as he looked me over again.

I mustered my self-respect. Naturally I will want a thinner sock, I thought. I will need a thinner sock. We athletes, the kind who buy $250 boots, do not wear purple polyester tube socks.

And that was when I met SmartWool. The salesmen took a pair off the rack. They were a cool gray, not exactly thin, but lean; they were hard-working but efficient, sleek but muscular—yes, these were some truly athletic socks. I skimmed the user’s manual hanging on a plastic tab from the sock’s edge. It told me how SmartWool wicks moisture away from the skin, keeping it dry and warm in winter, dry and cool in summer. SmartWool, said the testimonials at the end of the care instructions, delivers consistent "high performance."

They cost $15, about $12 more than I’d ever paid for ski socks. I did not hesitate. Along with the boots, I bought a pair of SmartWools, brought them home, put them on, and went skiing. I couldn’t wait.

Within days I developed an unwholesome relationship with the new socks. The old ones were rolled in a ball at the back of the drawer, not to be withdrawn until spring, when I needed something to protect my feet while pickling the upstairs floors. Pimply as a teenager’s face, purple as the Sixties, the old socks became more than expendable. They were despicable.
Which brings me to the current crisis.

I am barreling through the house, throwing small pieces of furniture out of my way and myself onto larger pieces of furniture, crying out in exasperation. "I can’t find my SmartWool socks! Where are my SmartWool socks?!"

Paul tries to help. "Are they in your boots?"

I ignore him.

He presses on. "Maybe they’re in the laundry. Did you look in my drawer?"

I turn on him. "Did you do something with my SmartWool socks? Are you wearing my socks?"
He ignores, then reassures me. "Don’t worry. You’ll find them later."

When this doesn’t work, he hectors. "Come on. Just put on some socks and let’s get out of here. Look at that perfect snow!"
I am immovable.

He threatens. "Okay, I’m going without you." But he doesn’t.

I am as bummed as he is. I mean, how can I look at the perfect snow? Its perfection only renders me, in my sockless state, even more imperfect. Without my socks, how can I ski? How can I expect high performance, or any performance at all? I sit on a pile of flung clothes and sulk.

If you ask a neoclassical capitalist economist, the free market is the epitome of Intelligent Design. Yes, investors fall prey to occasional paroxysms of panic or irrational exuberance. The indicators sometimes behave weirdly and must be interpreted by the oracles at the Conference Board.

Interest rates or currency supply want a little nudging by central bankers now and then, and prices and wages may ask for a little bullying by legislators and regulators. But these are adjustments around the edges. For the most part, Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand supposedly guides itself.

Inside this rational system, claim these economists, the consumer— Homo economicus— is also rational. He is well informed and good at balancing his current needs and desires against those in the long term, then deciding where to put his money. Homo economicus lives in the economy, not in, say, a San Fernando Valley suburb or a neighborhood of Delhi. That is, he is abstracted from the social: he is not exactly a person, but a consumer, and as such he is motivated by one thing, self-interest.

Neoclassical, or utilitarian, economists argue that all these individual self-interests, working together and in conflict, keep prices low and wages reasonable, demand in balance with supply, and an economy that prospers, enhancing everyone’s lives. It may be a system based on greed, but, many theorists say, greed is natural. The system works, they say.

Back at our house, the day is waning. Paul stares at me. He is out of ideas, out of time, out of what could have been a glorious ski. He slouches into the kitchen and makes the motions of starting supper. I follow him and flop down at the table.

"I don’t know what could have happened to those socks," I mumble, redundantly. "Why can’t I find them?"

Paul closes the refrigerator and turns to me. His face is blank, then sympathetic. Now he offers consolation: the one obvious shortcoming in SmartWool’s perfectly consistent high performance.

"If they’re so smart," he says, "why can’t they find themselves?"

The same question might be asked about me.

And here’s another question [about going a year without shopping]: you call this rational?

From NOT BUYING IT by Judith Levine. Copyright (c) 2006 by Judith Levine. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York.

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