Eugenia Mello

It doesn’t require a total overhaul of your life, but following a few simple steps can help you start consuming less, says Lucía González Schuett.

A few years ago, Lucía González Schuett embarked on a “personal rollercoaster journey,” as she puts it in a TEDxHHL Talk. And it all started when she looked at something that most of us have: a junk drawer.

She was disturbed by what she found — most of the things there were broken, incomplete or imperfect, but she had felt compelled to hold onto them. She questioned every item, asking questions like:

“Do I really need this? Does it add value? Is it worth the space that it takes up or the care it requires?”

And she made a radical decision: She vowed to go for a year without buying anything except for food.

Around the same time, she was going through a professional transition. She’d made a career in fast fashion, where her salary was partly based on commission — the more she could get people to spend, the more she earned. One of her responsibilities was to rotate the store’s contents so the merchandise would appear new to shoppers and they’d discover something they overlooked on a previous trip.

In 2018, González Schuett left the industry to go to business school and she chose to make it her no-buying year (which she discusses in a TEDxHECParis talk). Her experiences caused her to rethink consumption — on a personal and a societal level — and become aware of the invasive, ongoing pressures to acquire new stuff.

“The app I use to measure my performance when I go jogging is trying to tell me when it’s time for me to throw away the sneakers I’m wearing and buy a new pair,” says González Schuett, who is currently based in London. “The pillow I sleep on I recently found out has an expiration date.” She adds, “We collectively need to pause for a moment and wonder: Are we losing — or at least outsourcing — our very basic common sense to decide our needs by ourselves when it comes to consumption?”

It’s not realistic or feasible for most people to swear off shopping as she once did, and González Schuett gets that. She says, “It is possible for us to rethink our day-to-day behavior towards consumption, exercise the ability to appreciate things again, and eliminate that link between easy access and taking things for granted.”

She urges people to engage in what she calls a “scary yet extremely insightful exercise”: “getting over the want and becoming honest about the need.” In other words, she invites us to take an honest look at the things we want and we need and question whether we actually do.

There are many good reasons to regain control of your consumption. González Schuett suggests, “Maybe it’s for the environment, for the sustainability of future generations, for your personal finances, or for the sake of your peace of mind.”

To help you take back control, González Schuett shares these tips:

1. Let yourself run out of something before you re-buy or re-order. “Spend some time without it; in other words, try to miss it,” says González Schuett. “Because there’s so much to be learned from missing things. Plus, you’ll exponentially increase your short-term happiness once you get it again.”

2. Keep an item in your online shopping cart for a few days — or weeks — before buying it. You’ll reduce your chance of regretting an impulsive purchase when you find something better later, or realize you don’t actually need it at all.

3. Instead of immediately replacing something that’s broken, try fixing it first. It’s not always cheaper to buy something new, and you can support a local business or repair cafe by visiting them. You can also teach yourself some new skills. In her no-buying year, González Schuett learned to sew on replacement buttons, and she even watched a YouTube video to figure out how to repair her washing machine.

4. When you do buy, consider second-hand. By purchasing something that’s pre-owned, you’ll keep from adding to the sum total of things in circulation — since the thing you’ll buy is already out in the world — and you’ll also save money. When it comes to furniture, she points out that for people who live in cities, “we’re all moving around so frequently that second-hand items are more often than not hardly ever been used.”

5. Choose quality over quantity, especially when it comes to fashion. Try to pick things that are made to last, and when you are done, consider selling, donating or swapping them, instead of throwing them away.

6. Share what you have, and find others who will. Rather than buying a tool or gadget for a one-off project, “knock on your neighbor’s door when you need a screwdriver,” recommends González Schuett. And while you’re there, let them know what you have to lend, whether it’s a bike pump, snow blower or sewing machine. These relationships can benefit both of you. She says, “What a burden for both of you to each own both things and how enriching to go back to knowing your neighbors.”

7. Shift your mindset about stuff. As González Schuett puts it, “Consider yourself a custodian of things, rather than an owner.” When you think about it, you’ll realize that there are ways to enjoy things without owing them — take the library, for example.

She adds, “Ultimately, we know it isn’t the junk in our drawers that is going to make us happy but having the resources, the space and the time to dedicate to the things that truly matter.”

Watch her TEDxHHL talk:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lucía González Schuett is head of retail projects at the Vestiare Collective, a global marketplace for pre-owned luxury and designer fashion.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Melissa McFeeters

The bad news: Online user reviews don’t really match up with performance reviews, says behavioral scientist Bart de Langhe. But that means there’s also good news: We can stop obsessing over them.

Online shopping has brought tremendous convenience — but it’s also brought us a staggering number of options. Burdened as we can be with too many choices, it’s easy to feel like online reviews and ratings from other consumers can provide us with a crowdsourced pool of good information about the product we’re considering.

But is it the most reliable information?

Bart de Langhe, a behavioral scientist and marketing professor at ESADE in Barcelona, Spain, was led to ask this question after he went shopping in a store for a car seat for his newborn son. He faced a dilemma: Should he pay $300 for a car seat from a well-known brand that was highly recommended by the store’s salesperson, or $50 for a car seat from an unknown brand? Like many of us, he found a quiet corner in the store to take out his phone and read through online reviews. Since they were largely positive for the $300 car seat, he bought it.

Later, he wondered: Do user reviews on the car seats line up with the kind of objective tests that independent product testing organizations like Consumer Reports do? To his surprise and dismay, the answer was no. According to Consumer Reports, the $300 car seat received a significantly lower score in crash protection and ease of use than the $50 car seat did.

de Langhe collaborated with colleagues at the University of Colorado in Boulder to run a large-scale analysis comparing online reviews with performance reviews. They did this for 1,272 products in 120 categories — including car seats, bike helmets, blood pressure monitors, headphones, sunscreen and smoke alarms — which could be objectively assessed. In a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, they found that even though a correlation existed between products that were positively reviewed online and those that performed well, it was an extremely weak correlation.

As he explained in Science Daily, “The likelihood that an item with a higher user rating performs objectively better than an item with a lower user rating is only 57 percent. A correspondence of 50 percent would be random, so user ratings provide very little insight about objective product performance.”

Instead, “there are many products that get high ratings but perform poorly, and there are many products that get low ratings but perform very well,” he says in a TEDxESADE Talk. Why does this happen? The existence of fake reviews is one reason. What’s more, people’s reviews are swayed by factors such as brand reputation, packaging and price (even though they may not realize it), and only a small subset of consumers — the ones holding the most extreme positive and negative opinions — tend to leave reviews. The latter causes the proliferation of 1- and 5-star reviews that we often see on products, while a truly random sampling of consumer reviews would likely generate more 3-star responses.

de Langhe’s conclusion: “I recommend you rely less on the recommendations of other consumers. You should realize that the ratings out there come from a small and biased subset of imperfect people who evaluate products in imperfect conditions.”

Does this mean we stop reading reviews all together? No. But we can release ourselves from agonizing about whether to buy the product that got 3 ½ stars or the one that got 4 stars or feeling like we need to read through every review before we make a significant purchase.

Watch his TEDxESADE Talk now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bart de Langhe is a behavioral scientist and a marketing professor at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.