shopping | organised castle

I now know why I live where I live and do not trawl the shopping malls for ‘entertainment’.

This morning we dropped some things off to Missy and then headed off to Paddington Hardware and found these handles.

We had to order some more of the larger ones as they only had 2 in stock.

This is the project for which we need the handles.

Here are the small jewellery drawers that go on top and the supports for the mirror.

The Duke has started stripping the brown paint off the drawers so you can see the silky oak timber. Here is the mirror.

The Duke then mowed Belle’s yard and our final stop was Westfield Chermside, a large shopping mall not far from Belle’s place.

I am not keen on shopping malls but I had a specific plan. I wanted to go to the Early Learning Centre to buy a wooden puzzle as part of Izz’s birthday gift. We could not find a park so The Duke dropped me off and I thought I would just quickly duck in and get what I needed.

As I got to the bottom of the travelator I turned into the main mall and was confronted by wall to wall people. It looked like the week before Christmas. According to the media there is a downturn in consumer spending, so were all these people window-shopping?

I battled the crowds and eventually reached my destination. It is no longer called the Early Learning Centre but Kids Central and there is nowhere near the selection of toys and games available that there were previously. I found this puzzle which was $15. Unfortunately, like almost everything else these days, it was made in China.

I have heard various retailers whinging about the rise of online shopping and how it is eating into sales and profits in traditional retail outlets. Other perceived issues include opening hours and the value of A$. I don’t know about other people but the crowds and inconvenience would drive me straight to online shopping.

My experience this morning reminded me that I would be better off searching the internet or trying to find wooden toy craftsmen in the local area.

If you are interested in the issue of ever-increasing consumption and consumerism and have not read Affluenza it is definitely worth a read. It will open your eyes.

I am very pleased to be home again, in the relative peace and quiet of our rural acreage. I just sighed with relief that we made it out of the mayhem.

How do you balance the competing priorities when you shop? This is a question with which I constantly wrestle.

While meandering through blogland I found this gem of a post at Little Eco Footprints. If you are concerned about the impact of your shopping habits I would strongly recommend that you read this and also the very wise comments.

Buying ‘green’ products may salve your conscience but it is not enough to just toss a few green cleaning products in your trolley and assume that all will be well. Where were they made? How much transport was involved in getting them to your supermarket? Are they really ‘green’?

I think the priority should be to reduce consumption because everything, yes, EVERY single thing that you buy has been manufactured and that process uses resources and produces greenhouse gases.

While we can and do produce some of our own food there are still many things which I have to buy. My priorities are to buy things as local as possible and with the minimum of packaging and preferably recyclable packaging. Organic is not particularly high on my radar. Here is a reason why.

Today while I was shopping I saw a tin of organic kidney beans that were product of USA. There is nothing wrong with produce from USA if that is where you live. However, these beans had been processed, canned and then transported halfway around the world. I can buy dried kidney beans at Simply Good in Morayfield. This is a family-owned local business where I can put my purchases in recycled paper bags that I bring from home. See a previous post for more detail. Even if the beans happen to be imported there is much less weight/packaging to transport a 25kg bag of dried beans than individual steel cans of processed beans.

I try to buy some things second-hand and also re-home things that I no longer need. For this I generally use my local Freecycle group. Freecycle is a fantastic concept which was born in Tuscon, Arizona and is now a world-wide phenomenon where people can give away almost anything (there are rules).

Good quality items, which can cost a little more are also my preferred option as they have a longer life and are much more ‘green’ in the long run than something that gets used/worn a few times before it breaks or wears out and is then discarded to landfill.

What are your priorities? How do you decide? Have you tried to reduce your overall consumption?