Skip to main content

The only place?

Image
By
If there's so much enjoyment from having fewer possessions why do we have so many? Part of the answer is in marketing and advertising. Some ads are tricky and manipulative. Others are just straight out nonsense, repeated so often we begin to believe it.

This ad appeared in my suburb in the lead up to Christmas.


If it is to be believed then it must be a terrible Christmas for everyone around the world who doesn't have access to my local shopping centre - the "only place for gifts".

Not only are there plenty of other shops, but there are plenty of non-shop options. Sites like So Kind have plenty of other ideas for gifts including experiences, the gift of time (like babysitting) or baking a loved one a cake or batch of cookies.

For gifts you could even go to sites like Ebay or Gumtree where people are often selling brand new items that they received as gifts, but didn't want or aren't able to use.

Despite what advertising tells us there are plenty of places for gifts, and gifts can take many different forms. Let's give someone something they'd like rather than what advertising tells us to get.
Read more about:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don't dump on charities

By
Netflix causes mass dumping. Here's an alternative. January is usually a big month for physical donations to charity. In 2019 it's been over-the-top (literally) as charity donation bins have been overflowing with items. The Netflix series "Tidying Up" by famous declutterer Marie Kondo (see her book ) has inspired many to declutter their homes. But in the process they've cluttered the streets. What's so bad about donating? When the bins overflow the extra items are thrown away. Having been in the weather, the rain and on the ground, they are classified as contaminated and cannot be sold. To make it worse, much of what fills the bins is not good enough to sell, and is also dumped. Bad donations hurt charities 13 million dollars. That's how much it costs charities to deal with all the junk we dump on them - 60,000 tonnes a year. Lifeline says half its stores have stopped accepting donations. We might think we're helping, but that's a lot ...
4 comments
Read more

What to do with 128 pens?

By
I never need buy a pen again. Ever. The pen round-up. I searched the house for pens and gathered them up. We had 128. Woah - that's more than I expected. Then it was test-time. (You can get a lot done watching summer sport ;). Good ones went on the table. Broken ones in the box. Pen operations I saved a few 'broken' pens, by taking working insides and matching them with functional outsides. Particularly much-loved pens, for sentimental reasons, were given a life-extending 'ink transplant'. Final Tally We ended up with 67 broken pens and 61 good ones. And about 10 pencils. What to do with 67 broken pens? In my city Biome recycles pens . It's as easy as taking them into the store and dropping them into the giant collection box. Decluttering and recycling together - I love it. A lifetime of pens An average pen writes 45,000 words. So that dedicated shopping list pen on the fridge could write a 20-word shopping list for 43 years. Our 61 pens repre...
2 comments
Read more

Are cooktops a waste of space?

By
Who has ever had four saucepans cooking at once? So why do we have four hotplates on cooktops? Back in the day of all-in-one units, four hotplates were a nice fit on the top of the oven. These days the cooktop and ovens are usually separate but we've stuck with four hotplates. In many homes and apartments it's worth re-thinking. Is this is a wise use of bench space? Two-saucepan cooktops are making an appearance and freeing up some bench space in smaller kitchens. Aldi are taking it a step further with the Induction Cooking Plate . It's a stand-alone single-hotplate device that can be packed away when not in use. Aldi says it has 8 temperature settings, 5 preset cooking functions, a timer, touch controls and overheat protection. Could this be the future of smaller kitchens? Cost-savings in building. More bench space. Less energy consumption with the efficiency of induction cooking. Another great example of less is more. I don't mean this to be an ad, but...
2 comments
Read more