CONSUME! CONSUME! CONSUME!

At first glance, Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski seem like a couple I would like. He runs a bike shop. She’s a vegetarian. They have pet rabbits. She even lectures people about proper rabbit nutrition and care. But after reading a Modesto Bee article about them, I couldn’t help but think they’re a deeply disturbed pair.

They sound like very nice people. But Frazee and Lubanski are collectors.

According to the article, by 1999 the two of them “had accumulated 8,437 rabbit-related clocks, neckties and figures -- or enough to win the Guinness world record for owning the most bunny items in the world. The couple believe that their collection has since doubled.”

“Collecting has become one of the nation’s popular pastimes. About 35 percent of Americans collect, according to one study,” the article states. In a nation of recreational shoppers, this is hardly surprising. People shop for the sake of shopping. People shop even when they don’t need to buy anything. And that’s exactly what collecting is -- intentional gathering of stuff you don’t need. Look through the advertising supplements that come with any Sunday newspaper and you’ll find figurines advertised as “collectibles.” These are items designed, manufactured and marketed with the sole purpose of being collected.

“She and Lubanski met 11 years ago in a singles group at a church and began dating. For Valentine’s Day, Lubanski gave a white plush rabbit to Frazee, who called him ‘Honey Bunny.’ At Easter, she gave him a white porcelain rabbit. Then they began exchanging bunny gifts on all holidays. Soon, it was bunny gifts every day.” Every day? These people buy gifts to exchange every single day?!

This couple is Corporate America’s Dream.

“‘Buying is like breathing,’ Frazee said. ‘We’re always thinking and doing it.’” Corporate America has trained her well. The messages come every day, through television, radio, the internet, newspapers, magazines, billboards, ads on buses, shopping carts, benches, bus stop shelters, T-shirts, store windows, kiosks, floors, license plate frames, pens, pencils, calendars, movies, sports venues and the athletes themselves, on public restroom walls, and, most insidiously, in textbooks. I’m sure there are other locations I’ve missed (I don’t do much shopping, so I’m sure there are ads in places that I’m completely unaware of). The message is sometimes loud, sometimes subtle, but it’s repeated over and over and over:

      “BUY! BUY! BUY! CONSUME! CONSUME! CONSUME!”

We’re taught that happiness comes from buying things. It doesn’t matter if we need the things or not. Happiness comes from buying. We’re taught that the more we buy, the happier we will be.

I used to be a collector. When I was a teenager, I collected stamps. At first I didn’t buy any stamps. I just soaked stamps off envelopes from pen pals. It was a very small collection. It grew very slowly. I didn’t save all the stamps, only the pretty ones.

When I got older and moved to Ann Arbor I found a store that sold used stamps for some really cheap price, something like 3¢ each. I spent some time rummaging through some bins and found a bunch of pretty stamps to add to my collection for under a dollar. What the heck.

I started saving US stamps as they came out, the ones I liked anyway. I never was interested in having everything. If it wasn’t pretty, I wasn’t interested. At some point I crossed a line. I think it was when I began to regret not having saved certain US stamps that I remembered being issued years earlier. Stamps that I had bought, thought “oh, that’s pretty,” and actually, gasp!, used every last one as postage. And I didn’t just keep this regretful thought to myself. Oh no. I mentioned it to a friend, a more serious collector. She told me of a store where I could go and purchase said missing US stamps in mint condition, which I of course did to fill in the gaps in my collection. I had become a collector.

Then she invited me to accompany her to a stamp show. I should have said no. I did not. Though I limited myself to only a few countries I was interested in, and only looked at commemoratives to do with textiles, turtles, trains, maps, and maybe a few other things I can’t remember now, and I only bought sets that cost no more than a few dollars, somehow I spent over $100. How did that happen?

I brought home my stamps and spent a few hours looking at them. They were really pretty. But now I had to actually deal with putting them all away. That was kind of a chore actually.

I didn’t learn. She invited me to another stamp show. I went. The same thing happened. And now I had another chore to do.

She invited me to a third one. I had the sense to realize, no, I’d better not. I really don’t have that kind of money to spend. I still bought the US commemoratives as they came out though, and people sometimes gave me stamps. I set them aside to deal with later when I had time.

At some point I realized I had about two years’ worth of stamps to deal with. Sigh. Time to get to work. So I mounted them all in the appropriate binders and felt good that I was finally caught up. And then someone who knew I collected stamps gave me a whole bunch of beautiful mint and used stamps from the UK and Brunei and a couple other countries. Whimper. I had finally been caught up. Now I had more work to do.

Wait a minute! I wasn’t having fun anymore! This was supposed to be a hobby! This was supposed to be fun! It had been fun when I had just a few stamps, but now that I had hundreds (thousands? I have no idea how many I had), it was just work. I never looked at them just to admire them anymore. I only looked at them when I had the binders out to add to them. Dealing with my stamps was just a chore.

I realized I had absolutely no use for my stamp collection. It was nothing to me but work. I realized I had been a fool to spend hundreds of dollars on it. The stamps were pretty, but I hadn’t looked at any one stamp for more than a few minutes. Why did I need to own it?

I sold my stamp collection, auctioning it off in small lots, and made about what I paid for it. The US mint stamps we just used for postage. (In my friend’s defense, I should say she also quit collecting and sold her collection.)

Buying things to add to a collection is only one form of shopping to fill a non-need. The other is gift buying. Now, it’s one thing to buy someone a gift because you truly want to, but ask anyone working in a store how often they hear someone come in and say, “I need to buy someone a gift...” Need. They’re buying the gift out of obligation. They’re buying it because they’re expected to. They’re buying it because if they don’t, someone’s going to throw a hissy fit.

People often complain about the overcommercialization of Christmas, but the truth is, the only reason Christmas is celebrated at all in this country outside a very small group is precisely because in the mid-1800’s merchants decided they could be rolling in dough if they could get more people to celebrate this holiday. They hyped it for all they were worth and never looked back. (Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Consumer rites: the buying & selling of American holidays. Princeton University Press, 1995)

Just about every holiday we celebrate is pushed as a reason buy someone a gift. And of course spending more shows you care about them more, right? And don’t forget the wrapping paper! And it would be gauche to not also give them a card... (Of course some of the non-gift holidays are candy-buying holidays, so there’s still money to be made.)

In early 1998 my husband and I took stock of our lives and made some changes. While we had never lived an extravagant lifestyle (we lived in the same 850 square foot townhouse we live in now), we were living beyond our means, and we had been doing so for some number of years. We had been in denial for several years about the fact that our income was less than our living expenses; we had a lot of living expenses we could have easily reduced. But we lived in denial for years. I shouldn’t have been going to stamp shows. We shouldn’t have been eating out twice a week. We shouldn’t have been doing a lot of things that we did. We were charging everything on credit cards. Even though we were trying to pay them off, paying way more than the minimum payment each month, each month somehow we charged more than we paid off. That would never work. We had to stop buying stuff.

We sat down and really looked at everything. We had over $38,000 in credit card debt. Wow. Ok. It took us years to get into that much debt. It was going to take us years to get out. But we were going to do it. The first thing to do was just stop using the credit cards. But how?

We cut every unnecessary expense. We stopped eating out. An odd thing happened. I was really used to eating out frequently. At first when we stopped, I felt deprived. But after about three weeks, I just didn’t feel deprived anymore. Whatever it was I craved, I no longer needed.

I stopped buying prepackaged frozen meals and started cooking from scratch to reduce the grocery bill. I found some recipes that weren’t too much work, since I am a lazy cook. I have no idea how much weight I lost before one of my coworkers commented; I had no idea what she was talking about. Weight loss hadn’t been my intention, and I had been completely oblivious to my shrinking size. It was actually somewhat disconcerting to me that other people paid such close attention to my body.

We decided not to exchange gifts anymore. What was the point of me buying something for Pete and him buying something for me just because our society says we’re supposed to when we say we don’t want to spend money we don’t have to? And it’s not like either one of us needs more stuff. We don’t want more stuff. It’s just clutter (looking at the photo of Candace Frazee’s living room, I shudder...).

We looked at what else we had been charging. At the time I was working at the Census Bureau in Lincoln Park, an hour’s drive each way. I was putting gas in my car every three days, charging it each time. That had to end. We figured out what I was spending and made sure I was allotted that much cash each week. Obviously when I started working in Ann Arbor I needed much less money for gas, and when I started bike commuting, I no longer needed any money for gas at all!

Everything else we were charging fell into either legitimate household expenses that we were justified in spending money on, but we should budget for the expenses and write checks -- we shouldn’t be spending money we didn’t have -- or items that just weren’t legitimate household expenses, and there wasn’t even any sense trying to justify them as such. CD’s. Books. Earrings. You get the idea.

A couple of times on earlier occasions Pete had suggested that we each get a cash allowance of $20 a week, and I had shot the idea down, saying, “We can’t afford to each spend $20 a week!” But I was forced to concede that his idea might be cheaper as I looked at the Visa bill. Strange things had happened, like I would go to my favorite nursery with the strict intention of buying one tall blue plant to fill in a gap, but then I would find myself in the checkout line with $85 worth of plants, in some sort of horticultural trance.

So we went to his system of “Frivolity Money” as he calls it. We each get $20 cash each week to spend on frivolous things, whatever we want. If I want to spend $85 on plants, I can, if I have that much frivolity money saved up. And the odd thing is, I hardly ever spend money anymore, not for lack of money, but for lack of desire. I eventually opened a savings account because it seemed kind of stupid to have that much cash just sitting around. It just kept accumulating week after week because I never bother to spend any of it. I do actually spend some money in the spring on annuals and potting soil, and once in a while I buy some CD’s, but I’m just not a consumer anymore. I don’t go into stores unless I actually need to buy something there.

The other thing we noticed, looking at the credit card statements, is how high the interest rates were. They were not that high when we had gotten the cards. The rates had all crept up incrementally! I’m not stupid -- I never would have taken a credit card with an interest rate of 24.9%, a rate that should and used to be illegal! But the corporate-owned government lets banks charge usurious rates now. I suppose the banks figured since we were that deep in dept, we were desperate and there was nothing we could do about it. What were we going to do?

Well, I was getting pre-paid credit card offers in the mail every day. I had been ripping them up, thinking, “You evil vulture scum! Get away from me!” Most of them were also high interest rate cards, but occasionally one was a low rate. I’m sure they figured I’d keep on charging and charging like I had been. Well, I really didn’t care what they thought. People had been exploiting me long enough. Now it was my turn. When I’d get a low rate card offer, I’d read the terms carefully to make sure it didn’t jump up to a high rate later or if a payment was late or something stupid, and if it really was a good deal, I’d transfer the balance from our highest rate card to the new card. I kept doing this with every offer we got, all the while paying as much money as we could afford toward credit card payments and my student loan. When it occurred to me that my student loan had a lower interest rate than the credit cards, I arranged to have the student loan deferred for a few years and just pay the interest on it so I could take the amount I would have paid on that and apply it toward the credit cards where it would have more impact.

In early 2003 we made the last credit card payment. Later that year we paid off my student loan. Since we’re just accustomed to living on so little money now, having mailed off such a large portion of our income for debt payments each month for so long, we’re now working on paying off the mortgage early.

I feel like we’re rebels. We’re swimming against the tide. Corporations tell us over and over that we should buy stuff in order to be happy. No, if we buy stuff, they’ll be happy! They’re very happy to take our money! I’m not saying that we shouldn’t buy anything -- we need some minimum amount of food, clothing and shelter, and a certain amount above that does make life easier and more comfortable. But people have the mistaken idea that if they have more and more that life will just get better and better, and this just isn’t the case. Beyond a certain point, having more actually causes problems.

The amount of stuff we need to be happy is actually very little. Thoreau said, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.” I’m much happier now that I hardly ever buy anything. We’ve sold or given away an unbelievable amount of stuff in the last few years, and we’re much better off without it. I wish we had figured out this sane way of living before racking up $38,000 of credit card debt, but better late than never. At least we figured it out eventually. And we actually got out of debt. I’m proud of that. Some people never figure it out.

We do eat out on rare occasions now, but when we do, it comes out of our frivolity money. I do spend more on groceries now since I decided to buy organic food as much as possible, but I believe this will save on medical costs in the long run. Regardless, I cannot support businesses who poison the Earth and other people and mistreat animals simply to save money. We still don’t exchange gifts though, since we just don’t see a need.

I do wonder about the state of Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski’s finances. Running a bike shop isn’t exactly lucrative. The article doesn’t mention Frazee’s occupation (a horrible thought comes to me. Does she actually have a job, or does she shop full time?). They live in Pasadena, a relatively high cost of living area. “Asked how much of their income has been devoted to the collection, Lubanski shrugs. ‘If I can give someone enjoyment for a couple of hours -- that’s what life is all about.’” It’s not clear from this statement whether he’s unwilling to divulge how much money they spend giving gifts to each other every single day, or whether he really doesn’t know. I think maybe it’s a combination of the two. When we were deep in debt and in denial about it, I had no idea how much we were really spending. I didn’t know how deep in debt we really were. Since we had several credit cards, I didn’t bother to add up the total balances of all of them to figure just how much we really owed until I was ready to really face the big number. I wonder if Lubanski is in a similar situation.

Frazee and Lubanski open their house to visitors on holidays and think of their house as a museum. Lubanski says, “What we do is give joy to people.” Well, ok. I can understand that people like bunnies. Some of my best friends are bunnies. I can understand that bunnies make people happy, and it’s a normal human desire to share happiness. But I don’t think it’s normal or healthy to try to own every single bunny-themed thing produced. I think these people are victims of Corporate America’s brainwashing. They’re extreme cases, admittedly, but I’ve known a lot of people who are disturbingly similar.

They’ve established a pattern of exchanging gifts every day. They’ll never be able to stop, will they? They’ll never be able to say, “You know, honey, I think we have enough.” They’ll keep on buying and buying, even though the 23 display cases in their living room block the windows, even though they don’t have room for everything they own in their house and some of it is in storage. I hope they don’t go bankrupt in the process.