Products… do we have too much choice?
The Nurse has been watching a lot of telly recently. And she’s been amazed by the sheer choice of products available for consumers to choose from.
She’s wondering whether there’s a connection between all this choice and climate change?
Here are two off the cuff examples. Do we really need:
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hundreds of different kinds of shampoos, conditioners and hair products?
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countless different car marques?
Viewed objectively, all this choice seems pointless. But is it also immoral, damaging to our environment?
Back in the olden days The Nurse remembers having a choice of just a few shampoo brands. After all, despite what manufacturers claim, shampoo is just shampoo. However much they fiddle with the formula, it does the same job. The ’science bit’ is all bollocks.
The same goes for cars.
A car’s job is to get you from a to b. As such you either need a big one, a medium one or a small one. In a sensible world that’d be your choice.
As it is, the core function of cars is the last thing manufacturers use to sell their vehicles. Instead they focus on empty, glib things like ego, taste, wealth, status, lifestyle and - whether you’re male or female - how big you want people to think your dick is. Figuratively speaking.
The Nurse wonders how far and how fast our collective carbon footprint would drop if there was simply less choice across a whole load of core product sectors.
The only problem is that having less stuff means fewer people are employed making stuff. But surely we can’t carry on consuming all this rubbish like there’s no tomorrow?
The Nurse dreams of a simpler world where consumer priorities make sense in the context of the global climate issues we all face.
Boring? Probably. But she’d rather be bored on the moral high ground than have her ego stroked while the planet fries.
Jez from Mobile Phone With Free Laptop wrote,
Couldn’t agree more with your views on shampoo. Personally I find it ridiculous that there are so many different products in supermarkets today. I mean, all these different products, for blondes, for brunettes, for redheads, different conditioners if your hair is oily or dry, or combination or damaged or brittle, and yet the conditioners all look (with the exception of maybe a yellow liquid for the blondes and a brown one for the brunettes) and smell the same. If these shampoos really do ‘improve your hair in 10 washes’ like the adverts suggest then I’ll eat my hat.
Link | November 30th, 2009 at 12:46 am
Herb Shallcross wrote,
No one is stopping you from living simply but yourself. The market gets what it will pay for. We could have more durable products that don’t have to be replaced so often, but we love shopping and getting new stuff. We’re easily bored with the old stuff, and don’t want it anymore. Stuff that lasts, while cheaper in the long run, would cost more initially, and price point is one of the only things we look at when buying. Crap drives real stuff out of the market. Look at Tiffany’s jewelry. They used to make wonderfully designed artistic objects that, when you find them as estate jewelry are worth more, correctred for inflation than their original purchase price. Now they sell hearts stamped out of plate with T & Co. punched into the back, and kids love it. A buck and a half to make, Ninety bucks retail.
Be discriminating. Don’t buy crap, especially from the People’s Republic of China. If it will be worthless next year, it’s already worthless now. All the shiny trash hung about your body doesn’t make you worth more. If you want to validate yourself (“I’m Worth It!”), read something, learn a useful fact or a skill. Be there for someone who needs it. If trivialities annoy you, don’t be a trivial person.
Link | December 31st, 2009 at 2:49 am
Herb Shallcross wrote,
Incidentally, I’ve told the Nurse several times that the planet isn’t boiling, or even getting any warmer in the last decade. The Hadley Institute at East Anglia is busted. They have been fudging the data, trying to get their fraudulent computer models to somehow show that black is white. They finally gave up and destroyed their original data.
Yes, pollution(something the developed nations take very seriously already) is important. We do have to find a way to transition to a sustainable energy economy. We must do that without sacrificing economic development. Poverty is an affront to human dignity, and the only way out is to increase wealth generally, as we have done for the past two hundred years.
The man-made global warming scam was trumped up to get a lot of otherwise well-intentioned people to buy into a systematic attack on prosperity, offering instead more and more centralised control of every aspect of people’s lives in order to achieve an equal distribution of poverty, subjection and misery.
Link | December 31st, 2009 at 3:13 am
Herbert L. Shallcross III wrote,
The Nurse is right! We don’t really need all this superfluous new stuff! We got by just fine without paved roads and antibiotics.
Let the market do it’s job! There is almost nothing we actually need that it doesn’t supply admirably. If companies scuffle for market share, that just keep them efficient.
The alternative is government issue uniforms in a nice light stone grey.
By the way, Nurse, manmade global warming is a fraud, so you don’t really have to concern yourself about it. You live in the developed world, where pollution control is taken very seriously. The market, given the chance, will work out the renewable energy resource problem, since pretty soon there will be a nice profit to be made doing it.
Link | January 9th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Manhattan Condos for Sale wrote,
In NYC we have more choices than anywhere else in the world; it creates ADD!!!
Link | March 5th, 2010 at 6:27 am
patrick from goedkoop weekend weg wrote,
Yes I think we have to much choice, but I think it’s our own fault. When we get a great product, we are always looking for a problem. Yes thats right, people are looking for problems and disadvantages. And the product developers are using those “problems”.
I mean “Wow shirley, I have this great shampoo, only the bottle is to big.”
And a few weeks later you will see a commercial “The best shampoo, now in a more handy small bottle”
You see what I mean?
Link | March 11th, 2010 at 7:54 am
Miguel from PC extender wrote,
Well I feel its us who create a demand for these products in the market so why are we now pointing our fingers towards these companies for making the products as per our choices…
Its we humans who have created this need and only we can put it to an end.
Link | June 4th, 2010 at 8:15 am
Tom from Acad training wrote,
Yeah I feel all these same kind of products are so confusing and they try to confuse us more by adding more products in the market day-by-day. We have so many choices and yet we hope for something more exciting or more reliable.
Link | June 8th, 2010 at 1:18 pm