The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Inspired by Paco Underhill, and with half an hour to spare, I stepped into the Atria Mall at Worli to do a little retail anthropology of my own.

I saw a few hundred families on their Sunday afternoon outing, I saw empty shops and a full food court, and then I saw the perfect off white linen jacket from Provogue.

I have been searching for an off-white linen jacket for months, I totally love the brand (more than half of my shirts are from Provogue), and, on any other day, I would have whipped out my wallet and paid the four and a half thousand bucks without even thinking about it.

However, even the most perfect linen jacket is so obviously not a necessity, especially when I already have half a dozen jackets I wear no more than ten times in a year.

So, I lingered on for half a minute and let my fingers roam over the soft textured fabric, then reined in my temptation, and walked out of the mall, thinking of the lime-green shoes from Judith Levine’s ‘Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping’ —

The intent of my off consumption experiment is to spend an year without buying anything that is not a necessity.

Even though I have written down rather elaborate rules for what is allowed and what isn’t during my year of being off consumption, I have deliberately avoided defining what is a necessity. This is because one of the most interesting aspects of the experiment for me is to discover what I think of as a necessity and how it changes with context.

Perhaps the only fool-proof approach to discover what I think of as a necessity is to record and study what I actually buy, and how it changes over time.

So, here’s a complete list of everything I bought during week 1-2 of my experiment:-

Can you guess what is number one question everyone is asking me ever since I have gone off consumption?

No, it’s not “but why have you gone off consumption?”, or “but how will you live/ work/ date/ network if you go off consumption?”, or “but how will you survive without eating out/ going out?”, or even “but why should we care if you have gone off consumption?”.

The number one question everyone is asking me ever since I have gone off consumption is: “when you say ‘no shopping except for necessities’, how do you decide what’s a necessity?”

Clearly, for readers of this blog, scientific curiosity is much more important than concern for my sanity!

So, how will I decide what’s a necessity and what isn’t? Honestly, I don’t know. I know that it sounds evasive to say that “it depends”, but it really does, on time, place, person and context.

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the experiment for me is to “discover” what I think of as a necessity and how it changes with context. That, more than anything else, is the one big insight I’ll look out for.