Buying things is easier now than ever before: a trend that harms both the planet and individual consumers
By GEETIKA MAHAJAN — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
I love when people tell me they shop at Shein because it’s the most affordable option for them. I love it because it gives me the opportunity to ask my favorite question ever, which is: “How much do you usually spend there?”
Every time I ask this, the answer is never below $200 — which suggests, to me, that it’s not about the affordability at all or about other extraneous factors like the quality of the products or how durable they are. In our current era of $2 lipsticks and $15 dupes, it’s not actually about what you’re buying: it’s about how much of it you can buy at once.
Shein, Aliexpress, Temu and other such companies have been hit by wave after wave of controversy — from exploitation to plagiarism to being vehicles for the Chinese government to spy on us. Yet, they endure; The siren song of a good deal on a product that everyone but you seems to have is apparently impossible to resist for the average consumer. Virality and affordability go hand in hand, and it seems like certain brands have mastered the ability to capitalize on the most popular styles and products to generate the maximum amount of buyers.
On TikTok, you can find a million people who “can’t believe” that a lip stain is as cheap as it is. On any dropshipping website, you can look up any designer item of clothing and find it for a fraction of the original price. It’s so easy and convenient to add products to a cart that follows us no matter where we’re scrolling. Buying things is a natural byproduct of being on the Internet.
But our unconscious consumption has ramifications beyond those that have already been recorded in exposés about exploitative working conditions or fast fashion. They have a circuitous effect on everyone, including consumers. But there are also more direct and prevalent consequences, ones that are becoming harder and harder to ignore.
Growing up, many of us were taught to distinguish between “needs” and “wants” when it came to spending. Now, however, it’s more of a question about whether you actually want something or if you just think you’re supposed to want it. If social media is able to convince us, within the span of a 15-second video, that we need a certain celebrity’s lip liner or mascara, we lose the ability to decide for ourselves whether a product is worth having and the ability to develop personal tastes or do any kind of independent research into the actual value of a product.
In an era where consumption is as automatic as it is, our collective ability to make conscious decisions about what we buy is slowly being chipped away. When consumers wield their purchasing power so carelessly, companies are able to get away with more and more — advertising their products based on virality, or because an influencer declared it essential.
For instance, almost every hair care brand is selling hair oil now. It’s not because $38 scented grease is going to magically erase the damage that years of bleaching and heat have done — it’s because the product is a goldmine for marketing and markups. A bottle that costs $2 to produce can be sold for more than 10 times that, if you convince people that it’s what every clean girl on their “For You Page” is using.
The same goes for Hailey Bieber’s glazed-skin campaign that took the Internet by storm a few years ago, when the epitome of skincare was piling on layers of moisturizer and oils to achieve a dewy look. But the thing is, healthy skin is not perpetually wet and healthy hair is not achieved through the application of a singular overpriced product. Skin is dry and hair is frizzy, and these are facts that should be apparent if one does even a few minutes of thinking before making a purchase.
When people buy these things, however, they aren’t really thinking about what’s in them, or even the results that they’re trying to achieve. Oftentimes, it’s less about the product itself and more about the fantasy — a concept that has been true of most advertising campaigns since advertising was a thing. What’s different now is how easily it works and how easily these items are bought, used and discarded as soon as something else goes viral. As consumers, we need to start asking questions again, before putting our card details into whatever website promises us the cheapest price for the most popular product. We need to ask: What’s in this? How is it supposed to help me? And, most importantly, do I even really want it at all?
Written by: Geetika Mahajan — giamahajan@ucdavis.edu
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.
