/ 3 August 2011

Buying too much of what we don’t need

Yesterday I was in Woolworths when I came across weird fluffy toys called YooHoo & Friends at the till point.

These stuffed toys look a bit like bush babies and come in all different colours. I can only assume this is some new kid craze but it got me thinking about all the useless stuff our kids spend their (actually “our”) money on and how this is where it all starts.

Fortunately my sons have not been bitten by the YooHoo bug but I imagine if they did they would use their pocket money to buy one, play with it for a week and then discard it for the next craze. I don’t think they could tell me where their Go-Go’s are (to people without children, that was a craze around a year or two ago).

Marketing gets us when we are still young and impressionable. We are told that this is the latest thing and we must buy it, and once we have bought it we are told that now there is another latest thing that we should be spending our money on.

Those really expensive shoes we bought six months ago are now so last season, we absolutely have to have the latest smartphone or gadget otherwise we will be left behind in the technology game, or be “uncool”.

My niece who is still a student justified the purchase of a new BlackBerry because BlackBerry Messenger makes it so much cheaper to keep in touch with her friends — how many messages does she have to send to pay for the phone?

And so the cycle goes until we are in debt or have deferred savings so that we can acquire stuff we were told we had to have, even though we didn’t really need it.

I guess the solution is to try and explain this to our children at a young age — but honestly, what chance do we really have against those massive marketing machines and basic peer pressure?

The only solution I can think of right now is to keep my sons away from the shops and to cut off all communication with other children!

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