OCCUPYXMAS - Shop Local

A permanent boycott of television programming and its associated advertisements might be a very nice start.

 

Buying nothing seems kind of arbitrary and counter productive, trade makes the world go round. Instead of buying nothing one day, spend every day trying to buy as much as possible from locally owned businesses, especially ones that sell things that were made locally(or at least in the US)

 

Ah. Sonnova...lost again.

Buy local or buy nothing! I like it.

 

Buying nothing won't be hard for me. I probably only buy anything (including food) three times a week or so anyways. But it sounds like pleasant alternative to "Black Friday".

 

But you will never be able to avoid all advertising (such as the banner ad at the top of this page) so it will always be important to be able to see advertising messages for what they are. Knowledge is power, at least in this case.

I'm not even going to say that all advertising is bad. If an ad lets you know that a new business on the other side of town has started providing a product or service that you have been looking for, that's a good thing for both parties. That simple situation is light years away from the mass social manipulation that works so well on naive and uninformed consumers. Most legitimate and ethical businesses could not survive without any form of advertising.

I record all my favorite shows on DVR so I can skip the commercials and avoid fitting my life to the TV schedule. And when we watch a game live at home, we turn the sound down during commercials and talk to each other.

In every family or group of friends, somebody has to be the first to say, "I'm not playing the game anymore". Maybe the idea will spread. Middle-aged women are terrible about socially pressuring each other to play competitive, petty, materialistic games, and not just at Christmas. Sometimes all it takes to break the cycle is for one person to stop playing along, and not make any excuses for it.

:cheers2:

 

It's not just commercials anymore...
Increasingly TV programming is being infused with exactly the kind of social manipulation you previously mentioned.

As corporations have gained more control of the broadcast airwaves they've started building in more "product visibility". Without actually showing the name of the product, you'll often see one of the characters drinking a soda or a beer. If its a hugely advertized product like coke or Budweiser, the color scheme alone registers instantly in your mind the product. If that character/actor happens to be good looking, thin, or somehow the viewer thinks they're cool, objectivity could be blurred a little....

This is a just a gross example, there are more subtle marketing influences in these programs. I don't know what TV shows you watch, but I'm sure you're objective enough to see through all that shit, right?

:love:


ZW

 

"Product placement" is the business term for it. Fictional characters have been using branded products on the screen for decades, as a part of filming realistic scenes about ordinary life. Eventually, somebody realized that there was no particular reason to give that advertising away for free. But the practice has become much more commonly used in recent years.

Well...I'm not exactly a typical viewer. I know what to look for. I have had some professional involvement with advertising in the past. Not at the national level, where there is enough money to pay for serious cultural propaganda, but I do keep up with what those guys are doing.

Most of the tricks work better on younger people. You and I are old enough to have developed a good bit of natural cynicism about corporations. :cheers2:

 

i like to dissect advertisements to see what subtle message(s) they are trying to convey. for instance:
a hybrid car parked in front of a steakhouse. hybrids are already sold to sandal-wearing, vegetarian, captain earth types. so, lets try to make the war monger, big belt buckle wearing, beef eating, middle american type feel like they can own one too.

 

Well- to be totally honest my TV decision was a result of taking charge of where my money went... and it had the positive effect of freeing up a tad more time for me to do other things... not being exposed to advertisements is a bonus. Avoiding the monumentally insulting political ads is like a bucket load of cherries on top... I almost dispatched a lead crystal candy dish through my cathode ray tube in 2010 when it really began to hit me just how stupid the candidates have taken us to be... by the content of their messages.

Banner ads I can ignore- or block. I ignore the huge ads on the sides of buses... billboards are unsightly- for the most part...

So much of the economy is built on a foundation of impulse buying and debt spending that we could get into a lively sidebar on what constitutes a legitimate business... but I still see so much dependence on an artificial cash flow even in the midst of the so-called "great recession" that I'm beyond convinced that the mother of all "other shoes" has yet to drop- but is destined to. The people in government are hardly stupid- as much as they try to perpetrate incompetence in the staged debates with regard to economic issues here... otherwise they wouldn't have made a killing in the investment markets betting against the recovery they so solemnly pledged to be tirelessly pursuing on our behalf.

Most consumer advertising is a corporate lure for us to abandon common sense and security on the premise that we're somehow entitled to get the latest shiny trinket that has obsolescence built right in to ensure that we're back at the cash register within a year or so to get the next latest thing.

Hell- I'm not immune- here I am typing this on my computer.

 

Man, you guys took this (thread) and ran with it. I don't know where (or if) to begin.

Some pretty hip cats populated this thread, I'm humbled.

Damn. :2thumbsup:

 

I buy nothing most days...

 

If you have kids in the house, that's another big factor to consider. Watching a lot of TV can have multiple, unpredictable effects on children. I'm sure it made me more materialistic when I was a teenager, but it also made me want to travel and learn more about other places, especially big cities. My sister had a very different reaction. When she saw cool and interesting people, places, and things on TV, it made her think our parents were fools for choosing to live in a tiny Southern town in the middle of nowhere. It made her mad as hell that she was stuck there, when there were so many other places with so much more to offer; or so it appeared to her. Our deal wasn't as bad as she thought it was. And we weren't obligated to stay there for life.

Americans are great at taking a legitimate business concept and ruining it by inflating it beyond the point of absurdity. I have no problem with the idea of selling a variety of items in a nice, modern store. I have a huge problem with almost every aspect of Wal-Mart. We tend to apply the same "more is better" philosophy to everything, which leads to monstrous organizations that do more harm than good.

I see that risk also, and I worry about it. A further collapse would not be in the best interest of most wealthy investors, but neither was the failure of multiple big investment banks in 2008, so I don't trust their ability to steer the ship away from the rocks. They know how to make money by taking short positions in the market, but they still stand to lose big when trillions in equity vanish into nothing. The economy may already be so destabilized that nothing can save it.

I once had a professor who made analogies between our economy and a goose that lays golden eggs. He said that if you like golden eggs and want more of them, your first and highest priority always has to be keeping the goose alive. The goose is obviously very sick now. Maybe too sick to recover. When we moved millions of manufacturing jobs to China and tech jobs to India, that was like taking a meat cleaver and whacking off goose body parts deemed nonessential to egg production. Not a smart idea.

Don't forget the cola wars! Plenty of corporate ads are aimed at stimulating overall demand, but a lot of big companies like Coke and Pepsi spend their advertising dollars mostly on bashing each other. That's a perfectly legitimate free speech activity, as long as they don't cross the line into slander and libel. The beer wars have produced a lot of entertaining commercials over the years, but have never influenced my preferences in beer. Apparently they influenced somebody.

Smaller businesses mostly go in a completely different direction. They advertise specials and promotions to increase foot traffic. They want to get you in the door one time, in the hopes that you will like what you find enough to become a regular customer. They rarely have enough money to pursue any other strategy.

Me too.

 

i have buy nothing day every day we have home grown food i dont care about how i look,... i think that i didnt went to shops for about 3 months

 

Even more so on adults, sadly.

Therein lies the difficulty... I can dissect the workings of lets say, Wal-Mart, and find many practices that at first glance make good economic sense. Savings passed on by volume distribution. A wide variety of products to choose from in one location. All the things they are known for.
But then at some point the whole thing is perverted into some sort of brain-washing, consumerism-run-amok, employee abusing, small business, entrepreneur and community destroying monster.
It challenges the belief systems I grew up with.

And there were so many people warning against outsourcing our country. Again, "freetrade" sounds great on paper, but what we were sold has been anything but free, we traded our strength and security for cheap bluejeans and ipods.

Exactly the struggle small business is in anymore. If you can't "pay to play" you have to do it the old fashioned way. Which while quaint and nostalgic, almost ensures you can't effectively compete with the big boys.

The idea of carving out a niche, providing a good service for a fair price and earning a respectable living has gone out of fashion.

Another sad facet of inflating a legitimate business concept to absurdity is going public with a company. Barnes and Noble ran countless small bookstores out of business because they had this huge pile of cash from their IPO. Built flashy stores with coffee bars. Joe bookseller goes under, the community has lost another important contributor. B&N's greed and mismanagement finally implodes and what's left? Nothing.

Raising capital in the public markets has enabled wonderful things, but all too often anymore greed takes over in the name of "capitalism".

See what I mean by cynicism? That's why it's hard for me to post on stuff like this.. :bigcry:

 

With everything made today being CHEAP GARBAGE,this is not really hard to do!!

If black friday was a CLASSIC SALE (80s and earlier stuff being sold) I WOULD BE THE FIRST IN LINE!

 

In my experience, BND is primarily about activism. It's a day where you actively demonstrate your beliefs to Buy Nothing.

I've organized a couple BND events on campus, and it's pretty interesting all the tactics you can use online to hold your own BND event at a Wal-Mart or a Mall. People who are interested should definitely check out their site.

 

On campus, we created a Consumer Awareness Week during BND to help educate students about their looming student debts, etc. We had High School workshops where we went into their schools to talk to young teenagers about consumerism, we had fair trade gifts exchanges, craftsmaking sessions, and foodshares.

Here is our logo we made up:

[FONT=&quot][/FONT]

 

Seeing as Adbusters was one of the major pushes for the Occupy Movement, and given they are also considerably involved with the Buy Nothing Day campaigns, can we assume there will be a cross-over this year??

 

^^^I love it.


...Oh yeah, your logo's pretty cool too!
ZW

 

Those are awesome, Aristartle!