Items the advertisers try to convince us are essential

Butterfly_Brain

thisisace wrote: »

And to prove / show off that it's designer, it has the brand name in big letters across the front!!!! :cool:

B* Hell that means we are saving them millions on advertising as well :rotfl:Making the dorks even richer at our expense:eek:

GreyQueen

ceridwen wrote: »

...and I do hope you arent getting too much chocolate intake at the moment lass..

I'm down to 120g of the hard stuff after w*rk (peppermint A*ro being my fave substance to abuse at the moment). Not ideal but I'll give it up next month. At least, I'll try (should be very trying as I have been giving up choc for at least 30 years and am still a serial piggie)
:whistle:

Ben84

coolcait wrote: »

There was certainly an element of devil's advocate in my question , but I am finding this thread fascinating and thought-provoking, as well as entertaining and funny.

Why do we consider some things 'essential' (like deodorant, anti-perspirant, toilet paper, for example)? Previous generations obviously had the same bodily functions, but dealt with them without the products we have today.

Essential is a strong description of something. Certainly a lot of things could be considered very useful, but essential, maybe only a few things.

Thinking about it, the huge majority of people throughout history and even many today did not/don't have water collected, cleaned and piped to their houses. It seems basic, but the infrastructure and cost that delivers clean water to our houses in the UK and just as importantly takes dirty water away is a modern luxury and not essential. I'd dislike to not have it, but I wouldn't find myself unable to live without it. Same for fuel, there are still plenty of houses around the world without electric and gas and the majority of people who have ever lived didn't have cheap effortless energy delivered to the houses, but they all survived.

Products like deodorant may not be essential for survival, but they help modern humans survive. Smelling good makes other people respond better to us and make it more likely to find a partner, so it serves a purpose, even if most people who use it don't consider it in such detail.

How we live today has changed a lot and our views on essential are different now. Work is spread between many people and machines and most people have some disposable income now. Our time and skills are valued differently. We're increasingly free from having to do everything ourselves and because of this most of us have bigger plans in life now and expect to do more things each day. There is for many people a point where your income makes it less than cost effective to do many things yourself, most of all when you consider time is the biggest limitation for many of us now. An appreciation that something (like cleaning the house) is worth doing doesn't mean we enjoy the task either, so people are buying things that make it quicker.

When I was really poor I washed my clothes in the bath because I had to, but now I have an automatic washing machine. For the small cost of electric, letting the power plant do the work is extremely beneficial. I've just bought an electric mixer that does a huge range of things quickly too. We're all just buying time. It's amazing how cheaply you can buy time now and there's an abundance of more useful things to do with it. So some of these things seem lazy, I'll admit I buy quite a lot of time, but I do try to get good value. The important question to ask ourselves is are we getting the balance right? Are we simply working all the time to afford all these conveniences - many of which are only needed because we're working all the time? Or is the convenience we're buying actually making it easier to do the things we want to do?

So, I have to defend time saving stuff if we're using it to help ourselves. However, products that are generic and pretending to be more are a hazard and so is excess consumerism where people just start shopping for the sake of shopping.

Austin_Allegro

Nimeth wrote: »

I feel I must apologise for this, it seems to have followed me across the pond when I moved!:eek: Frankly I have to say I'm a little annoyed by this American style invasion (I left for a reason! But that doesn't mean I don't like American people - I do). Whatever happened to doing it the British way? If I could I'd return it all for a refund.:rotfl:

I suspect it was caused by the prevalence of American 'teen-age' television programmes set in 'high schools'. In my young day, we had 'Grange Hill' which was about poor British state school pupils, or 'Kids From Fame' which was American but they were poor too. Add this plethora of aspirational drama to an England awash with cheap credit, and you get the 'prom' nonsense. My favourite story about this was a nouveau-riche girl whose parents paid for her to land at the 'prom' by helicopter, but the nearest landing site was four miles away so she had to come by taxi!

GreyQueen

Ben84 I thought your post was excellent.

I'm fairly hardboiled about advertising, although I would never claim to be completely immune to the blandishments of a very powerful and sophisticated industry. Mostly, I laugh at them.

I like the conveniences of modern life very much, particularly having access to my very own washing machine, something which I didn't have until my forties. It makes life so very much easier. I enjoy hearing the washer do its stuff while I play on the computer or read a book. It's running now.

So many of the things which we use are force magnifiers insomuch as they increase our power above merely human strength; the car takes us further, faster and with the ability to carry more than our own two legs, an electric drill is easier than a brace-and-bit etc etc.

I do think that we have reached a point in many fields of human endeavour when the technology we have at present has solved the "problem" satisfactorily and what we are being offered now is just more bells-and-whistles. Or the attempted manufacture of a problem which doesn't exist so that we can have a solution offered by industry. It gets sillier and sillier each year.

As an aside on the subjects of antiperspirant deodorants, they do serve a practical as well as aesthetic purpose in that sweat rots textiles, so keeping that down does your clothes a favour as well as the rest of us in confined quarters.

As Mark Twain apparently said;

Civilisation is an limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

Austin_Allegro

Ben84 wrote: »

Essential is a strong description of something. Certainly a lot of things could be considered very useful, but essential, maybe only a few things.

Thinking about it, the huge majority of people throughout history and even many today did not/don't have water collected, cleaned and piped to their houses. It seems basic, but the infrastructure and cost that delivers clean water to our houses in the UK and just as importantly takes dirty water away is a modern luxury and not essential. I'd dislike to not have it, but I wouldn't find myself unable to live without it. Same for fuel, there are still plenty of houses around the world without electric and gas and the majority of people who have ever lived didn't have cheap effortless energy delivered to the houses, but they all survived.

Products like deodorant may not be essential for survival, but they help modern humans survive. Smelling good makes other people respond better to us and make it more likely to find a partner, so it serves a purpose, even if most people who use it don't consider it in such detail.

How we live today has changed a lot and our views on essential are different now. Work is spread between many people and machines and most people have some disposable income now. Our time and skills are valued differently. We're increasingly free from having to do everything ourselves and because of this most of us have bigger plans in life now and expect to do more things each day. There is for many people a point where your income makes it less than cost effective to do many things yourself, most of all when you consider time is the biggest limitation for many of us now. An appreciation that something (like cleaning the house) is worth doing doesn't mean we enjoy the task either, so people are buying things that make it quicker.

When I was really poor I washed my clothes in the bath because I had to, but now I have an automatic washing machine. For the small cost of electric, letting the power plant do the work is extremely beneficial. I've just bought an electric mixer that does a huge range of things quickly too. We're all just buying time. It's amazing how cheaply you can buy time now and there's an abundance of more useful things to do with it. So some of these things seem lazy, I'll admit I buy quite a lot of time, but I do try to get good value. The important question to ask ourselves is are we getting the balance right? Are we simply working all the time to afford all these conveniences - many of which are only needed because we're working all the time? Or is the convenience we're buying actually making it easier to do the things we want to do?

So, I have to defend time saving stuff if we're using it to help ourselves. However, products that are generic and pretending to be more are a hazard and so is excess consumerism where people just start shopping for the sake of shopping.

I agree - there's nothing wrong with things that make life easier - eg running water, electricity etc - but there's a balance and a lot of things advertised are not needed and play on people's fears or vanity; or are needed but given unnecessary expensive frills or built-in obsolesence so that they keep needing to be renewed. Unfortunately, our perpetual-growth-based economy requires ever more junk to be produced and sold. As the spoof posters say - 'buy more **** or we're all *****d!

ceridwen

Now trying to remember more about the lesson we had at school (errr...cough...years ago then) about advertising and how to "see through it".

As I remember - advertising appeals to our "baser" instincts. 'Bout the only one I can recall is "fear" - as in if the advertiser makes us scared we will have a worse life if we don't have something then we will buy it. Guess I can recall that one because that is the one that personally "rings my bell". I can deal easily with stuff about being more desirable to the opposite sex and any other "peer pressure" type gambits they come up with - but if its "buy so-and-so or you may not be secure in some way" then I DO have to sit there and ask myself whether I'm sure my house/income/self are as secure as I can possibly make them from all possible mishaps or whether I DO actually need more insurance/more security precautions on my house/more precautionary healthcare, etc, etc...

Softstuff

GreyQueen wrote: »

do think that we have reached a point in many fields of human endeavour when the technology we have at present has solved the "problem" satisfactorily and what we are being offered now is just more bells-and-whistles. Or the attempted manufacture of a problem which doesn't exist so that we can have a solution offered by industry. It gets sillier and sillier each year.

As an example of this, behold, the EZ Cracker:

http://www.tvpdirect.com.au/Ez-Cracker-Double-Pack-P59111.aspx

This has been recently advertised here on TV, there's a nice little video on the link there. It's a device to crack an egg. I joked with my hubby about it, saying that I'd been cracking eggs with no problems for a number of years now, and that maybe it was a skill to list on my resume. Since that joke every time I've cracked an egg I've ended up with shell in the bowl. That'll teach me.

cat_g_83

Softstuff wrote: »

As an example of this, behold, the EZ Cracker:

http://www.tvpdirect.com.au/Ez-Cracker-Double-Pack-P59111.aspx

This has been recently advertised here on TV, there's a nice little video on the link there. It's a device to crack an egg. I joked with my hubby about it, saying that I'd been cracking eggs with no problems for a number of years now, and that maybe it was a skill to list on my resume. Since that joke every time I've cracked an egg I've ended up with shell in the bowl. That'll teach me.

I need that EZ cracker. With an individual egg separator? How have I survived without the instant scrambler? Oh wait, I had a a fork. What a joke! X

GreyQueen

Softstuff wrote: »

As an example of this, behold, the EZ Cracker:

http://www.tvpdirect.com.au/Ez-Cracker-Double-Pack-P59111.aspx

This has been recently advertised here on TV, there's a nice little video on the link there. It's a device to crack an egg. I joked with my hubby about it, saying that I'd been cracking eggs with no problems for a number of years now, and that maybe it was a skill to list on my resume. Since that joke every time I've cracked an egg I've ended up with shell in the bowl. That'll teach me.

OHMIGAWD how have I been managing all these years. Buy me that thing and buy it for me now!:rotfl:And there was I imagining I could crack eggs into a bowl (and separate them using their own eggshell). Good job Granny died years ago or she'd kill herself laughing at that one.......:rotfl: