Hoodwinked by retailers mixing a thneed with a need!! Carelessness toward consumer goods is making it harder to conserve energy, truffle trees & a stable economy. How to help? Thrift Shopping.”
Medium: Acrylic Paint on Canvas Board
Everyone loves the Lorax, but as we read it to our children we sometimes fail to realize that we’ve been buying those Thneeds; hoodwinked by retailers mixing a Thneed with a need.
Our passive attitude toward consumer goods is becoming a major obstacle in conserving energy and those precious Truffula trees. It’s not doing much for a healthy economy either. But exactly what are we to do when we’re told that shopping is a patriotic activity? There is an alternative that people often overlook: thrift shopping. One person doing it may make a small difference, but if many people start to thrift, it has the potential for a much bigger impact. People have been conditioned to believe that if it’s not new, it’s old and therefore dirty; and now us as humans. are caught in a net of product surplus and waste on top of a mountain of debt.
The thrifting market – Goodwill, Salvation Army, and the many other charitable thrift stores, large and small, throughout our country – sell high-quality repurposed goods, many nearly new sold at fair prices. But, because of this stigma that thrifting has acquired over time, many people don’t even consider this.
How does thrift shopping lower our carbon footprint? No additional energy is required to fill the consumer’s need for a gently used product. The fuel of long-haul transport, often from the other side of the earth, has already been burned. The only fuel attached to the item is the car ride over to the donation site. Reused products do not have the weight and waste of excessive packaging new products do. Finally, thrift-store shopping diverts reusable items from landfills. That is a respectable energy savings.
Thrift shopping is also a poetic gesture: The profits from the sale of repurposed products in charity-run thrift stores directly promote the repurposing of lives in need. Not only do we avoid product waste, through our contributions we help to avoid the waste of another human’s life. This, in turn helps our community.
What people in the Thrift Store community need is to be more accessible to the public. The stereotype of being dirty and unusable needs to be alleviated. The economic, charity and environmental benefits fairly outweigh any downside to thrifting. By using a Lorax analogy, it will be easier to put into perspective how people are materialistic to an unreasonable degree, and hopefully bring about change.
