I like stationery, too. Even now I have two small children and therefore zero disposable income, I still scrape together enough pennies each year to treat myself to a Smythson Soho diary, the wondrousness of which is unparalleled. Add my extensive collection of sunglasses, my unshakable belief in the beneficial powers of reflexology (£30 for a snooze while someone fiddles with your feet: bliss) and my addiction to childcare on Saturday mornings (£25 for a lie-in and a bath without any “help”, sweet as she is, from my three-year-old: bargain) and you could say that, while my shopping has not quite reached WAG proportions, I’m an enthusiastic consumer.
Let’s just think, then, what would happen if all that had to stop. If, instead of reaching for my wallet in times of emotional, spiritual or aesthetic need, I had to stay my hand and make my own entertainment. If, instead of saying yes to going to the cinema with friends, I had politely to decline and make do with whatever dross was on offer from the TV schedules. In other words, if, for the first time since puberty, I ceased to consume at all but the most basic level.
Judith Levine, a 50-year-old social commentator and writer from New York, has done just that. For a year — a whole year — she stopped shopping. She and her partner Paul bought only the essential (and therefore boring) items: food, fuel, washing-up liquid.
For a whole year, Levine deprived herself (well, almost) of the thrill of retail. The resulting book, Not Buying It, is a fascinating account of her experience. “Until I stopped, I considered everyone else to be a shopper except me,” Levine says. “If this year has taught me anything, it’s that I, too, am one of them.”
When the British think of American consumers, we tend (unfairly) to visualise vast shopping malls filled with equally vast people shovelling huge bags of Krispy Kreme doughnuts into their mouths. That is not Levine. Her consumer desires are not the excesses so cruelly mocked by Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock. She doesn’t eat junk food, she doesn’t have a vast, overstocked refrigerator, she isn’t the owner of an obnoxious, gas-guzzling SUV.
If she’s a cliché at all, she’s a comfortable middle-class cliché, the sort who, were she British, might spend her Saturday mornings buying expensive cheese at a farmers’ market and her evenings discussing the Middle East in worried but reasonable tones. “Just because I don’t crave those things (the SUV, etc), it doesn’t mean that I’m above consumerist desires,” she says. “I don’t buy many clothes but those I do buy are expensive. And is it any less materialistic to spend four dollars on a bottle of milk?
“The trouble is, there is no other way to express yourself. There is no civilisation that is not glued together by the exchange of goods and businesses. Trade is the way the world communicates — it always has done.” Levine’s response to this reality is not to retreat to the moral high ground or deliver sanctimonious lectures about the iniquity of commerce. Instead she puts her money where her mouth is, stripping back her life (and, by extension, Paul’s life) to what she considers the bare minimum (although Paul maintains throughout, entirely reasonably, that good wine is a necessity). She observes her reactions and those of friends and family (“when someone isn’t shopping, it’s as if a vacuum forms. You feel you have to rush in and fill it,” says one) and bolsters her responses with facts and figures so that you never once stop questioning, searching, thinking.
Her message, and her conclusions, are not straightforward. There is no simple solution, no good and bad, no right and wrong. Sure, she is critical of her Government and in particular George Bush’s tax policies — she is not, needless to say, a fan — which she believes encourage inappropriate profligacy; and she points out in her introduction that in New York, just one day after the destruction of the twin towers, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani “counselled his trembling constituents to ‘show you’re not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping’.” But all this forms part of a bigger picture, one in which a pragmatic approach is seen as preferable to a Utopian ideal of non-consumerism.
“I don’t believe in some pure, authentic, non-commercial self,” she explains. “Of course there has to be some sort of Utopian ideal, and all ideals need their radicals. But in real life, ideas are cobbled together. As long as we are socially constructed in capitalism, we are commercialised.”
Shopping is not only what keeps the wheels of our economies turning. It has also become as much a means of self-expression as, say, the theatre or dance. It can, for example, be a cure for boredom, as many rich Buckinghamshire Blondes will testify. Without it, life can seem colourless. Levine describes the feeling of helplessness when, having found nothing on television, she is forced to devise entertainment according to her self-imposed rules of living, ie, without financial outlay. “The idea of one more home-made, edifying pastime makes me yawn,” she writes. “Shopping defeats, or at least circumvents, boredom. But not only because it fills idle time. Consumption is an exercise in hope — hope for more happiness, more beauty, more status, more fun.”
Like junk food, shopping may fill the void temporarily but it won’t fill you up. In fact, part of the trick is that you can never be truly sated. Levine is clearly aware of this but is no less susceptible to the siren call. Halfway through the book, when this cool, rational woman has endured six months of retail deprivation, she finally snaps. She is in a second-hand shop. The items that she wants are pitifully cheap, $9 (£4.84) worth of stuff. But she is gripped by desire, pure and irrational: “I’m like a soldier tasting my first home-cooked meal. I could weep.” And, like all desire, hers is heightened by the knowledge that shopping is verboten. “I want to break the rules,” she writes.
Shopping is socially sanctioned “bad behaviour”. “The job of consumer capitalism,” she says, “is to make things both resistant to possession and irresistible; both distant and attainable.” But while Levine recognises the detrimental effects of too much shopping, she is not entirely sold on the benefits of adopting a “good life” ideology. In its way, anti-consumerism can be just as obnoxious: the competitive home-made cards, the ostentatiously home-grown vegetables, the sanctimonious thrift-shop junkie and, most absurdly, the rise of “shabby chic”, a design movement that has brought a consumerist spin to recycling old junk. Some of the funniest passages in the book concern her experiences of the Voluntary Simplicity movement. “Fortunately,” she says, “for every disease, real or invented, America creates a self-help group.” This lot preach frugality, ecological awareness and personal growth. Naturally, it costs $10 (£5.50) to join.
“Wanting more is human,” she says. “The Fall was all about desiring knowledge and fun. Over the years, desire has been raised to a high art. Modernism, for example (she has just spent the morning at the V&A’s Modernist exhibition) used things to achieve equality and happiness. I have just seen a stackable chair from Fascist Italy whose stated aim was to teach children about the benefits of Fascism and heighten their appreciation of architecture. Incredible, if you think about it. Technology was the great naive promise of Modernism. It was both Utopia and dystopia. The same is true of consumerism today.”
And so, in the words of Levine’s friend and fellow cultural critic, Ellen Willis, you reach a point where “getting and spending is everything”. And yet, while there is to be no shortage of luxury consumer goods, the supply of everyday essentials is dwindling. We are hounded by “a culture of scarcity, the idea that there is no money for healthcare or pensions, no time for leisure, no affordable living space.” People struggle to find affordable housing but it’s only too easy to get hold of a Lexus on interest-free credit. In other words, if you can’t get what you need, then you can always buy what you want. While stocks last.
OUR ESSENTIAL NON-ESSENTIALS
Allegra Hicks, designer
Haircuts. Of course one could live without it, but having my hair styled a certain way is part of who I am; it is part of how I project myself. If you are changing your lifestyle to a more meditative, slower-paced one, then your appearance wouldn’t matter as much. But if you are intereacting with other people, you want to maintain the image of the self that you project to them.
Matthew Pinsent, athlete
Radio. My parents always have it on all night and in the past ten years it has become so much part of my life. I have an earpiece in bed and listen to Radio 4, 5 or 7. My wife can’t understand why I need to hear the news all night and neither do I, really.
Joan Bakewell, writer and broadcaster
Taxis. I have a busy schedule and I can carry on reading or taking notes in the back — it’s an extension of working time, whereas going by Tube is just dead time.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes, explorer
My essential non-essential is a tube of anti-bug-itch cream called Anthisan. I hate being bitten by bugs.
WHAT THE AVERAGE BRITISH HOUSEHOLD SPENDS ON ...
Restaurant and café meals: £12.40 a week (£644.80 a year)
Women’s outer garments: £8.30 a week (£431.60 a year)
Men’s outer garments: £4.70 a week, (£244.40 a year)
Hairdressing and beauty treatments: £3.10 a week (£161.20 a year) Books: £1.60 a week (£83.20 a year)
Games, toys and hobbies: £2.30 a week (£119.60 a year)
Cinema, theatre and museums: £2.10 a week (£109.20 a year)
Magazines and periodicals: £1.10 a week (£57.20)
Accessories: 70p a week,(£36.40 a year)
From the Office for National Statistics Family Spending Report 2004-05
