The Day the World Stops Shopping Quotes

“The most savage of consumerism's ironies is that those who consume the least offer suffer far more of consumption's harms than those who consume the most.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“There's an old saying: if something's too cheap, somebody is paying. Maher's workers earn $120 to $140 per month to work six days a week-low wages not only globally, but by Bangladesh's standards-to do jobs that are made more stressful with each acceleration of the fast-fashion cycle. Outside of factory gates, those workers endure environmental consequences of a nation cutting corners to keep its industries competitive. The air in Narayanganj, once known as the 'Dandy of the East," is typically an odorous grey-brown and sometimes makes foreign visitors nauseous-the city is one of those where blue skies appeared like a miracle during the coronavirus lockdowns. Bangladesh is one of the nations hardest hit by climate change, although carbon emissions per person there are radically lower than in richer nations.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth.

Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Yet what bothers Maher most is a less tangible harm: the insult of seeing the clothes his company makes sell for prices that show just how little they are valued. 'Generation Z and millennials are really demanding ethical products,' he said. 'But when you buy a fast-fashion T-shirt for four dollars, or two dollars, you never ask, 'How could this have landed in Berlin or London or Montreal for this price? How does the cotton get grown, ginned, spun, woven, dyed, printed, sewn, packed, shipped, all for four dollars?' You've never realized how many lives you are touching, all because your payment doesn't pay for their wages.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Noting that material poverty in the US was matched by an even greater “poverty of satisfaction, purpose, and dignity,” Kennedy decried GDP as a poor measure of the state of the nation. “Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things,” he said. The GDP was buoyed, he noted, by cigarette advertising, ambulances, home security, jails, the destruction of redwood forests, urban sprawl, napalm, nuclear warheads and the armoured vehicles used by police against riots in American cities. “It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile,” Kennedy said.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“Almost everyone has a psychological gap between the way they believe they should act in daily life and how they actually behave. The more materialistic a person is, the wider that gap is likely to be. Knowingly or unknowingly, materialists often feel conflicted over their failure to be better people-they experience a sense of incongruence between their ideal self and their real self. Simplifiers tend to have narrower gaps and greater congruence.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Indifference to growth is heresy among Western capitalists. Yet no-growth business makes up a large part of the economy already. No one expects their local family-run restaurant to endlessly enlarge. That same model is common among the longest-lived businesses, said Tetsuya O'Hara, a product innovation consultant who has worked with Gap Inc. and Patagonia....Japan is a hotbed for them (long lived-businesses) with nearly thirty-five thousand companies that are more than a century old, and dozens that have endured for more than five hundred years.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Consumer research consistently shows that exposure to what can easily add up to thousands of advertisements a day, most of them telling us that money, possessions, and the right image are a path to happiness, success, and self-worth, does in fact tend to make us feel worse about ourselves. In cities, especially (where most people now live), the crowds of other consumers and glut of advertising constantly cause us to doubt our social status. In the words of British economist Tim Jackson, we are persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“It is another of consumerism’s ironies that, although it functions like a mental trap, we often think of it as an escape.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“I make myself rich by making my wants few.”)”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“We can't stop shopping, we must stop shopping. It isn't only that consumption is distorting the climate, felling the forests, cluttering out lives, filling our heads with a throwaway mindset, even stealing the stars from the night sky. The worst is that it leaves us with no idea of what else to do, no belief that things can be different. Whichever way we go, it leaves us doomed.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Fortunately, ideas already exist for how to achieve every aspect of deconsumer society that appears in this book. Lifespan labeling can encourage product durability: new tax regimes and regulations can favour repair over disposability, job-sharing programs and shorter work days or work weeks can keep people employed in a slower, smaller economy. Redistribution of wealth can reverse income inequality, or prevent it from worsening in a lower-consuming world.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Over the past twenty years, Maher watched that pattern play out again and again as major clothing brands made demands on suppliers in Bangladesh to lower their prices while also completing orders faster and constantly improving their workplace and environmental standards. Fakir Fashion has implemented certified projects to treat its wastewater, harvest rainwater, use more solar power, provide meals and child care for workers, hire workers with disabilities, build schools in the local area and more. They have been unable to pass on any of the expenses of these improvements to apparel brands or consumers, who continue to want more for less.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“A large body of studies now supports the theory that people become more materialistic when they feel insecure about meeting their material and psychological needs, and that inequality aggravates feelings of insecurity. Wide gaps between rich and poor also create more opportunities to compare one's own lifestyle with others', which in turn leads us to focus on what possessions or experiences we might need to have in order to attain Veblen's 'complacency which we call self-respect.' In the end, Partanen moved back to Finland. Immediately, she said, she felt like she could put aside the success-signaling wardrobe that she wore in New York. No longer feeling pressured to focus on status, she felt freer to think about what she truly wanted to accomplish.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“In effect, the richest countries have an efficiency problem: they are squandering consumption without transforming much of it into joy.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“When it comes to reducing consumption, you can be the change you want to see in the world, but it will not change the world.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“And so it has continued, with back-to-the-land movements, reconnect-with-nature movements, fads for decluttering, manias of worry about the nerve-fraying pace of modern life, all rising time and again only to be swept away by a rush of consumption unlike anything seen before. The hippies became the boomers. Generation X rejected conspicuous consumption of the 1980's only to take up what psychologist Geoffrey Miller called 'conspicuous precision,' or the public display of artisanship, quality, provenance and ethical virtue-drawing more sophisticated lines around positional consumption than ever before.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“Another core difference that Michael S. W. Lee found between anti-consumers and consumers is a wider 'scope of concern,' or regard for issues bigger than themselves and their personal needs. Anti-consumers are more likely to engage with issues such as climate change, species extinction, racial injustice, and poverty-matters that can be disturbing, depressing, or even frightening. Since engagement with such topics is congruent with their values, however, it makes life meaningful-but perhaps not cheerful.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“It was a quiet revolution. Most downshifters dressed quite a bit like everyone else and lived in ordinary neighborhoods rather than communes or cabins in the woods. Seattle emerged as the nexus of voluntary simplicity as the growing tech industry-Microsoft's headquarters were there-made the city synonymous with the overworked, conspicuously consuming yuppie, while many other residents were still mixed in a lingering recession. The result was perhaps the most deliberate experiment in stopping shopping in modern times: a whole city in which the rejection of consumerism entered the mainstream.
For nearly a decade, few aspects of daily life in Seattle were left unchanged by its shadow culture....For a few rare years, the consumer lifestyle was uncooled. 'We were sure in the '90s that we were the up-and-coming lifestyle choice,' Vicki Robin, coauthor of the downshifting classic 'Your Money or Your Life' told me....Then the global economy came roaring back to life, Seattle became better known for billionaires than plain living, and downshifting faded.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“He recalls, early in his career, meeting an American corporate vice president who arrived on a first-class flight, stayed at Dhaka's best hotel, and complained about the quality of the bottled water. 'Right behind the hotel there was a slum built on a marsh, with houses on bamboo poles, where people drinking from the lakes and rivers were going off to the same factories he would be asking later that day to cut their prices,' Maher said. He remembers thinking back to his university years, when he had studied Charles Dickens' tales of Victoria-era inequality and injustice. 'The stories are the same.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“downshifting classic Your Money or Your Life,”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, for the fifty years following the Great Depression, the tax rate on the highest income bracket averaged 80 percent, redistributing much of the richest Americans’ wealth. Beginning in the 1980s with the advent of politicians like Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and with growth increasingly seen as the be-all and end-all of economics, far less was asked of the wealthy. The comparable tax figure for 2020 was 37 percent.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“When the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 triggered the sharpest decline in consumer spending ever recorded, commentators were soon debating how many deaths might be acceptable to keep the economy “open.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“But every society needs mavericks. Take away consumer culture, and some of the people who oppose consumption today will need a new place to put their contrarian spirit. The choice is obvious: they become the rebellious overconsumers of our low-consuming future.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“Need is a very subjective word.” In a consumer culture, what we consume is essential to how we express our values and identity to others; our belongings constantly signal both that we are a part of the wider social order and that we stand apart from it as unique individuals.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“The idea that a less consumerist society would be better, he said, stems from the fact that everyone today knows somebody who stepped off the money-in, money-out treadmill, simplified their life, and ended up happier. The paradox is that only so many of us can choose that happiness before it triggers economic catastrophe.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“The average person in a rich country consumes thirteen times as much as the average person in a poor one. In terms of environmental impact, that means that having a child in the United States or Canada, the United Kingdom or Western Europe, is equivalent to having thirteen children in a country like Bangladesh, Haiti or Zambia. Raising two children in a rich country is like having twenty-six kids in a poor one.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“Fortunately, ideas already exist for how to achieve every aspect of deconsumer society that appears in this book. Lifespan labeling can encourage product durability: new tax regimes and regulations can favour repair over disposability, job-sharing programs and shorter work days or work weeks can keep people employed in a slower, smaller economy. Redistribution of wealth can reverse income inequality, or prevent it from worsening in a lower-consuming world.

I set out on my thought experiment as an observer, I wanted to see for myself where a world that stops shopping would lead, rather than be guided by others' theories. In the end, both approaches arrive at the same place. Movements for degrowth and a well-being economy-one measured not by GDP but by its ability to improve the quality of life of citizens-have been steadily refining a set of ideas and ways of life that could free us from the need for relentless, and relentlessly damaging, economic expansion. The alternative to consumer capitalism is not a constellation of possibilities, but increasingly a convergence.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“As one longtime New York realtor once said of conspicuous wealth, "It was considered un-American." The rich were also, as they likely would be in a lower-consuming economy, simply less rich. According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, for the fifty years following the Great Depression, the tax rate on the highest income bracket averaged 80 percent, redistributing much of the richest Americans' wealth. Beginning in the 1980s with the advent of politicians like Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and with growth increasingly seen as the be-all and end-all of economics, far less was asked of the wealthy. The comparable tax figure for 2020 was 37 percent.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“As one longtime New York realtor once said of conspicuous wealth, "It was considered un-American." The rich were also, as they likely would be in a lower-consuming economy, simply less rich. According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, for the fifty years following the Great Depression, the tax rate on the highest income bracket averaged 80 percent, redistributing much of the richest Americans' wealth. Beginning in the 1980s with the advent of politicians like Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and with growth increasingly seen as the be-all and end-all of economics, far less was asked of the wealthy. The comparable tax figure for 2020 was 37 percent.”
― J. B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How to have a better life and greener world