Consumer Street

There are no stores on the street where I live. The occasional car or delivery truck drives by every few minutes in the winter.  Today is very quiet as winter made a comeback, dumped a load of wet snow and blew some chilling temperatures on us. Those who can are hunkering down for better weather. No one is driving down to walk on the beach.

Often I complain that there are no stores around here and I have to drive far away to get things. But with the stores comes the people.

In start contrast, last March Break I ended up on one of the busiest streets in London (Ontario, Canada) at The Mall. It was a Friday at dinner time. There were so many cars and people, mostly teenagers, it was insane. My mom would have called it “a mob scene”.

My mind was blown with sensory overload in a very small store filled with glittery things for young girls, tweens and teenagers; earrings, tiaras, phone and pad covers, hair pieces, purses and much, much more. There were signs all over, “Buy two things and get a third one free!”

The store was packed with girls trying to find that third thing when they could hardly find a second thing to go along with the thing they didn’t really want in the first place but it was cheap.  All this crap soon to become garbage.

I found it very disturbing. Our consumerism is choking the life out of this planet and yet we are seduced to buy more and more because it “drives our economy”.

Recently there was article in the London Free Press happily announcing that $77 million dollars are being pumped into this same mall to entice people to shop more.

Hardy said retailers such as Zara and H&M will bring in younger women who enjoy shopping as recreation in an upscale atmosphere.

“You can’t make shopping a chore,” he said. “It has to be a pleasure.”

“Higher fashion demands a better ambiance than the basement of Sears, so I can see them putting in the money to glam it up,” he said.

I’ve heard this term before, “shopping as recreation”. Many women love to shop even when they have heaps of clothes already. They feel comfortable that their cast-offs can be given away to “the poor”. Some of it gets re-sold at Value Village or GoodWill  but tons and tons of it gets shipped overseas to be ripped up for recycling by women living in poverty: abject poverty…. not just shopping at Value Village or Sear’s Basement poor.

There is getting to be a bigger and bigger split in this society between the rich and poor.  There is so much money being put into luxury lifestyles; cars, condos, fashion…… and so little being put into making a better life for the less fortunate.

The big news story this week is the “Panama Scandal” outing so many of the ultra rich stashing away their billions so they don’t have to pay so much tax.

It’s really starting to disgust me. You haven’t heard the end of this subject! 

For now all those crazy, shopping people can stay over there on Consumer Street.

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“And the people bowed and prayed, to the neon gods they made…..”Sound of Silence

 

Source: ‘Relentless investment’ fortifies Masonville