Kicker774 wrote:faninor wrote:Buy Nothing Day.
Don't go turning into Nikka and start ruining things like the economy!
Are you suggesting that the economy needs us to consume more products so that the economy survives? That's completely backwards.
Personally I think it's a by-product of people trying to survive, improve their quality of life, and get what they want.
Economic stagnation, deflation, collapse, etc. isn't necessarily a
bad thing. It could happen for a very simple reason such as consumers changing their priorities. I mean, it is still an unwanted result for someone who has a lot of money riding in something that collapses. It's good to avoid it, but not the end of the world.
Celebrating Buy Nothing Day won't ruin it anyway. It's making a choice against consumerism, not against capitalism.
Kicker774 wrote:xjsb125 wrote:My 401K has a problem with this!
That's ok if he doesn't buy anything Friday, he still has to get his Christmas presents some how. There still Christmas eve to sucker him into a doorbuster sale on a 20 pc cookware set.
Nope. Simple as that. I'll celebrate Christmas without consumerism. I'm giving some family members photo albums. I have an unopened toy that someone gave me as a sort-of-joke a few years back which I'm going to donate to charity. And that's pretty much it. As for myself, the less I receive the happier I'll be.
I don't mean to suggest that I never buy anything or that I've extracted myself from being involved in the economy -- but a lot of people I know go about this completely backwards and dig through Black Friday ads to find the great deals that they then decide are too good a deal to pass up out of some need to consume.
As for the 401K's, avoiding consumerism won't hurt those. Probably the most likely thing to hurt them will be hyperinflation, and if you're heavily invested in US Treasury securities you're screwed. Many people are predicting that it's not so far off.