Are You a Consumer or a Person?

You can't answer both. That's cheating.

Photo by Hana Oliver on Unsplash

Your government doesn’t see you as a person to be served, they see you as a consumer to be prodded into consuming 2% more each year.

What if you didn’t?

This isn’t new.

Although a lot was made of a recent Wall Street Journal report about the “buy nothing”, the buy nothing movement has been around formally for over a decade. Those who are pledging “no buy 2025” may be disappointed to learn that they aren’t the trend setters they thought they were. They are welcome all the same.

The Buy Nothing Project is a Benefit Corporation, started by a few friends in Washington State in the US in 2013.

BuyNothing has 7.5 million members worldwide, and 850 thousand people have downloaded the BuyNothing App to help people connect locally and build sharing communities all around the world.

If you are ever feeling down, go read the BuyNothing Principles. They are pretty great. It’s as if kindergartners started a company based on sharing.

We don’t use by nothing a lot, but we have used it plenty to share kids clothes, toys and other items that we don’t use anymore and don’t need to go to the landfill. We have also picked up pieces of furniture, items our kids use. BuyNothing doesn’t advertise, so they have grown through word of mouth over a decade to over 7.5 million users. With the recent publicity about buy nothing pledges, I hope their influence grows. Buy nothing is a great little tool that can help local communities help each other and connect with each other. It is also a great degrowth tool that has thus far pushed gently back against hyper consumerism and planned obsolescence.

So please, check out buy nothing and sign up yourself and get those in your community to do so. I would imagine when BuyNothing reaches a couple 100 million users, national governments may have to try to shut it down. They can’t have citizens of their countries treated like people before consumers, and people that help each other not be consumers. That would be terrible.

What if we did this on purpose, at a larger scale?

The buy nothing pledge got me thinking. What if citizens used the buy nothing ethos to exercise their power?

Consumer consumption is the main driver of economic growth in most economies around the world, and in aggregate global consumer spending drives about 60 percent of global GDP. That is a lot of power that consumers have.

Consumer attitudes and habits don’t change overnight. We have been trained to be consumers first and citizens second. Remember, about 100 years ago in America executives realized that they had to train us to believe that our wants were our needs:

“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

• Paul Mazur, an executive at Lehman Brothers back in 1927 in an article from the Harvard Business Review. Mr. Mazur is no longer with us, but he’d be pleased to know, that he succeeded. Just look at this next quote.

If we as consumers … excuse me, citizens … organized around withholding our consumption, well, the sky’s the limit. We could tell our leaders “That’s a nice economy you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”

But wouldn’t we just be hurting ourselves?

If all consumers went on strike and stopped purchasing goods and services, the impact would be devastating for the economy, but for those consumers … I mean, citizens as well. Here's what any good economist will tell you would happen.

1. Economic Disruption: Businesses across all sectors would face severe losses due to the sudden halt in revenue. Small businesses and industries reliant on daily consumer spending, like retail and hospitality, would be particularly hard-hit.

2. Supply Chain Chaos: With no demand, the production and distribution of goods would be disrupted. This could lead to overstocked warehouses, spoilage of perishable goods, and eventually, a slowdown or halt in manufacturing.

3. Job Losses: As businesses struggle to cope with the loss of income, layoffs and furloughs would become inevitable. Unemployment rates would skyrocket, further exacerbating the economic downturn.

4. Government Intervention: Governments might step in to stabilize the economy, potentially introducing measures like stimulus packages, subsidies for businesses, or temporary social safety nets for unemployed workers.

5. Social Impact: The strike could raise awareness about consumer power and potentially lead to lasting changes in consumer behavior, business practices, or even policy reforms. However, the immediate social impact would likely include increased stress and hardship for those directly affected by the economic fallout.

6. Potential for Innovation: Some businesses might pivot to new models, such as offering essential services or finding ways to engage consumers without direct purchases. This could drive innovation and lead to the development of new industries.

In essence, a consumer strike would be a powerful demonstration of the interconnectedness of our economic system and the critical role that everyday consumers play in sustaining it. It would hurt the economy, but it would hurt the people too, as we are the economy.

I can see targeted buyers strikes having a positive impact. If millions or tens of millions of people began to organize to not buy products or services for companies that threaten our future, I can see that moving the needle. For example, if people put together a list of the top 25 companies that are most responsible for the breaching of our planetary boundaries, and there was a serious and prolonged campaign to not invest in those companies, I can see those efforts making a dent in the bottom lines of those companies.

But what if you don’t have a choice?

In such a scenario, many of those companies would be oil and gas companies, and the way our lives are structured now, it would be hard for tens of millions of people to change the infrastructure that has most of us hooked on oil and gas, even if we don’t want to be.

But you have to start somewhere. If something like what I described above exists, let me know. I didn’t find it.

But we should start as individuals, gathering with other individuals to promote a type of BuyNothing ethic that builds community while building resilience. The more our lives can be structured around sharing communities, the less we will be at the whims of those in power that only see us as consumers, and not as citizens, or even people.

So here’s an idea.

What if the population of a country, say America, dedicated to become independent in egg production. By independent, I mean most Americans wouldn’t have to get eggs from the grocery store, but got them from local communities, either through a co-op or similar organization, or direct from local farmers or friends. That increase in supply from the people would ultimately lower prices for those who couldn’t raise hens or weren’t close to a place that did.

For American households to become independent in egg production, several factors would need to be considered:

1. Space and Environment: Each household would need enough space to house a small flock of laying hens. This includes a coop for shelter and a secure outdoor area for the hens to roam and forage.

2. Number of Hens: On average, each hen lays about 300 eggs per year. To meet the average annual consumption of eggs per person (around 287 eggs), a household would need about 1-2 hens per person.

3. Nutrition and Health: Hens require a balanced diet to produce eggs consistently. This includes grains, protein, and calcium.

4. Time and Care: Raising hens requires daily care, including feeding, cleaning, and collecting eggs. It's a commitment that requires time and effort.

5. Local Regulations: Some areas have regulations regarding backyard poultry, such as limits on the number of hens or requirements for coop construction. It's important to check local laws and ordinances.

6. Economic Considerations: While raising hens can reduce grocery costs, there are initial setup costs for the coop, feed, and other supplies. Over time, the savings on eggs can offset these costs.

Yeah, I cheated and got that list from an article on raising hens, but I knew most of that already.

My family has chickens, and for most of the year we don’t need to buy eggs. I’m pretty sure what we spend on chicken food and chicken protection outweighs the “free” eggs we get, but chickens offer other services as well.

Pest-control. Chickens walk around the property eating bugs and grubs all day. The year before we got chickens, we had a huge Japanese Beatle infestation. Two years into our chicken ownership, and not Japanese Beattle grub has survived. We also have less ticks and other insect pests.

Garbage disposal. Chickens will eat merely any food scraps you don’t. Don’t give them anything rotten or poisonous, but we have likely save thousands of pounds of food waste going into the landfill over the years due to our chickens.

Eggs from you backyard taste better than store eggs. The eggs we have are healthier and taste better. I’ll eat store bought eggs, but now I can tell the difference. I guess I’m an egg snob.

You have to invest in feeding the chickens and protecting the chickens. The foxes, bears, racoons and every other predator will win sometimes, but we have learned to protect our girls pretty well, and now most of our chickens die of old age, not predation.

If individual families don’t have enough land for chickens, people can form co-ops to invest in chickens as a resource for the community. Yes, people will have to take care of the hens, and feed them and give them water, but chickens are pretty low maintenance. If you keep them safe, provide them with water and some food - half of which may be your food scraps, they should be fine.

If enough communities invested in chicken co-ops, or enough individuals invested in chickens, Americans wouldn’t have “the price of eggs” as an election issue ever again. That “the price of eggs” was an election issue last year shows that we aren’t resilient enough. A country as big and rich as America should be more fucking egg resilient. This is embarrassing.

If we were more resilient on this one issue, we wouldn’t see ourselves as just consumers, but as individuals in communities that take care of ourselves by coordinating on the things that we can control.

If American citizens wanted to, we could be self sufficient in egg production. It would free us from just being seen as consumers, by ourselves and by the powerful. We call them the powerful because they have power over us.

What if we took that power away?

Eggs are just one of thousands of examples, where building community at the local level can take away the power of those who see us only as consumers.

So let me know if anyone is building an app to organize consumers. I’ll be happy to share my chicken husbandry tips.

Rule one is don’t get a rooster. Roosters are the worst.