Learning to Be an Un-Consumer
John Perry, 44, a marketing manager, co-founded The Compact, a group that avoids unnecessary consumption. Two years later, it has more than 8,000 followers. As told to Thomas M. Anderson
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, July 2008
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How did The Compact begin? Over dinner, nine friends and I decided to go an entire year without buying anything new besides food, medicine and hygiene products. If we needed anything else, we would borrow it or buy it secondhand.
Why bother to put yourselves through this? We have concerns about sustainability, and we are Type-A personalities. We wanted to see if we could adapt our behavior as consumers to live off what we have while maintaining a modern life. We thought it would be fun to see how long we could go.
How did it grow into a movement? We consider ourselves accidental activists. The people and the media came to us -- we did not pitch to them.
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Tell us about your online community. I created a Yahoo group (groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompact) soon after we started. We had a lot of friends who wanted to keep score. The address for the group was listed in the first newspaper article about The Compact. The group took off and has grown to 8,000 people.
Who are your members? They're spread all over the world. People join for different reasons. Some are concerned about credit-card debt, and some want to simplify their lives or set a good example for their kids.
You must be saving money. Before, my family -- me, my partner and two kids -- probably spent $200 a month on things we bought without thinking. When we stopped doing that, we freed up money for other things. Now we overpay the mortgage every month, and we give more to charity.
If everyone followed your lead, wouldn't it hurt the economy? Runaway consumption and the depletion of natural resources is going to have a worse impact on our economy than some middle-class people like us deciding that enough is enough and that we're going to stop buying things.
What happened after the first year? Most of us re-upped our membership in The Compact. My family is in its third year. It is a lot easier than we thought. That was the real discovery.
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Reader Comments (1)
Posted by: Kathleen at 06/20/2008 01:21:40 AM
I was laid off in February, and thankfully have a decent severance. Since I lost my job, I have found that I can live very modestly with my reduced severance pay, and am even able to put money into my savings account every month. I've went through all the magazine and online subscriptions I have and canceled most; traded to a new auto insurance carrier (saved $500 per year); sold lots of stuff on eBay and Amazon.com (few hundred here and there); and started cooking at home versus eating out. Hundreds of dollars over the course of a few months. I've also found that the public library carries lots of decent DVD's that I can check out for FREE, along with current book titles and hundreds of magazine subscriptions. Go to the library once a week and read to your heart's content! Things like buying songs on iTunes are my weakness. But, I tell friends and family that iTunes gift cards are highly desired for birthday presents, so that helps. New clothes buying is kept to a minimum, and sometimes second hand is good as new. You'd be surprised. All in all, I've been very pleasantly surprised at how much free cash I've had while living on my base salary (I lost a nice car allowance, mileage reimbursement, paid cell phone and sales commissions). As Americans, we really do just consume way more than we need...reduced demand will reduce prices, which makes things more affordable. It's American marketing folks who create the insatiable demand for gadgets and the latest-greatest whatever, which drives UP prices, uses more fuel to deliver these things, and helps lead to inflation. Once I get back to working, I want to maintain my sensible lifestyle...aside from an occasional lost night out of sushi (I Must have my sushi!), but this is a great idea and I hope more will try it.