What if we stopped shopping?

Speaker 1 No buy 2025 is a TikTok trend that invites you to imagine: what if you just stopped shopping? People are doing it for all kinds of reasons.

Speaker 3 Debt? It's official. My debt will be 100% gone, including my car loan by August of next year.

Speaker 1 Protest.

Speaker 4 These prices are ridiculous. I'm not okay with them.
I'm sure you're not okay with them. So, what we need to do is stop buying anything to get their attention.

Speaker 5 I feel like the only way to actually make a change in this country is to continue with the no-buy 2025 boycott community, even.

Speaker 6 I love no-buy TikTok because instead of just being poor and not being able to buy things,

Speaker 7 I'm just a no-buy girly.

Speaker 1 Coming up on Today Explained, what happens when so many of us decide we have enough?

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Speaker 10 you are listening to today explained.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 my tick tock story is quite funny.

Speaker 11 I

Speaker 11 had no idea how to use the app. I didn't have it over lockdown or anything.
My friends and family were saying, get TikTok and I was like, it's going to just damage my brain.

Speaker 11 Like I don't don't want to download TikTok. I eventually did because I was seeing quite a few funny videos on social media.

Speaker 11 I'm fast as fuck boy.

Speaker 9 Come get some.

Speaker 9 Hi.

Speaker 9 Hi.

Speaker 11 Good morning.

Speaker 11 And I made a video thinking that just my friends would be able to see it.

Speaker 1 Oh no.

Speaker 1 You are like that person who thinks your Venmo is private.

Speaker 11 Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 11 So I made a TikTok video with absolutely no makeup and hair done. I was in my work uniform.

Speaker 13 So 2024 is going to be the year that I get my shit together in terms of my finances.

Speaker 13 I have been...

Speaker 11 Please just support me for the next year because I'm not going to buy anything because I'm poor.

Speaker 11 I go to sleep. I wake up.
The video has over a million views. I've already got about 6,000 followers.

Speaker 12 Thank you for being so supportive.

Speaker 11 And I was like, oh, okay,

Speaker 11 I didn't quite understand how this website works, but I guess I'm going to roll with it now. Maybe it'll keep me motivated.

Speaker 13 I'm here to hold myself accountable.

Speaker 11 And if I help somebody else along the way, then that's just about us. Frome!

Speaker 1 Mia Westrap, 27, English, social worker, sometimes goes to extremes.

Speaker 11 I think I'm quite a Taipei person, as in like I either do something to its utmost extreme or I just don't bother at all.

Speaker 11 And that's always been such a character flaw of mine, because I will give up a hobby as soon as I start it, because I'm no good at playing like the guitar, for example.

Speaker 11 So I kind of set myself a year because I wanted to A, see whether I could actually meet a New Year's resolution for myself. And B,

Speaker 11 I think if I had just set myself a month, that wouldn't have been a long enough time for me to undo any of the problematic behaviors I had around spending.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about those behaviors and what your financial circumstances were that animated this whole thing. What was going on with your money?

Speaker 11 So I, to really, really rewind, I grew up, my mum was a a single mum of three children. She worked really hard, but we just kind of had like the basic necessities.

Speaker 11 There was no big holidays or anything like that growing up. So there wasn't really any money to budget.
And following that, I didn't learn how to budget money.

Speaker 11 My financial literacy was at an absolute 0%.

Speaker 11 I couldn't afford to do anything.

Speaker 11 Unfortunately, in 2017, my best friend passed away from cancer and he had kind of celebration of life up in London because he was a journalist and I couldn't afford to get there.

Speaker 11 I could only choose between going to like the funeral or that party essentially.

Speaker 11 So that's when I began to realize okay I really

Speaker 11 do not understand where my money is going. It's like it disappears into thin air.
And then over the years, no matter how much my income improved

Speaker 11 what I ended up with at the end of the month stayed exactly the same

Speaker 11 and so yeah I essentially it just got to a breaking point at the end of 2023 where I didn't have enough money to hold up a long distance relationship

Speaker 11 I was anxious because I rent and that's becoming more and more precarious by the day in the UK.

Speaker 11 And I just felt like I needed more of a security blanket because it was just this overwhelming stress that I was experiencing.

Speaker 1 So as many of us do, you took to TikTok and you told TikTok, I am not going to buy anything for a full year.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you what you did spend money on and what you skipped.

Speaker 11 So when I was planning my no buy year, I thought it would be best to kind of colour code my spending. Taipei.
Yeah exactly. Taipei.

Speaker 11 So I made a green, yellow and red list.

Speaker 11 Green was the things that I could spend my money on without question. So that was bills, rent, groceries.

Speaker 11 I didn't put any limit on the groceries that I was going to buy because I knew that it was going to be a year of me cooking my own food.

Speaker 11 So I might as well try and purchase things that I like and not try and skimp too much there.

Speaker 11 Yellow was the category of items where I was allowed to spend money, but only if there was a caveat attached to it or specific circumstances.

Speaker 11 So if my laptop charger broke or something that I use every day in the kitchen, for example, broke, then I would replace that. It was more replacements than anything.

Speaker 11 And then red was the long, long, long list of things that I was not going to let myself buy for an entire year. So that was meals out, carbonated drinks, which I was very much addicted to at the time.

Speaker 12 So the first absolutely abhorrent financial decision I made in 2023, it was spending over a thousand pounds on Cherry Pepsi Max. And that's a very, very conservative estimate.

Speaker 11 No new clothes, no books, just things that I had enough of and could make do without buying more for a year.

Speaker 1 Did you...

Speaker 1 Did you cheat at all?

Speaker 11 I did a couple of times, but I was very honest with everybody about it.

Speaker 1 Did you go on TikTok and spell or do you think?

Speaker 11 I did, I did.

Speaker 11 So that was another good thing about TikTok was that it allowed me to kind of talk through my my thinking if I was tempted to buy something on the yellow list or on the red list.

Speaker 12 When my other friend came round, we all went out for dinner.

Speaker 12 I've spent about £60 over the past three days that I probably didn't need to, like, we probably could have found things to do for free.

Speaker 11 And it makes me feel. There was a couple of times over the summer where my weight had fluctuated, and I hadn't really accounted for that because

Speaker 11 none of my summer clothes fit me me anymore. So I bought like a pair of trousers with a stretchy waist and one oversized t-shirt that would go with kind of everything else I wore.

Speaker 11 And other than that,

Speaker 11 there wasn't any big breaking of the rules. It was more so like little breaking of the rules.
But in a...

Speaker 11 they were mindful purchases and they've informed the way that I still think about consuming things now.

Speaker 1 We are on Zoom and I am noting that your hair is quite cute. You have nice bangs.

Speaker 1 Your eyebrows are on fleek as we said five years ago.

Speaker 1 What about beauty, hair care, makeup? What'd you do?

Speaker 11 I am still getting through the same tinted moisturizer that I bought about two and a half years ago. So that's gross.

Speaker 11 You say I've got cute bangs. We're both kidding ourselves.
I obviously cut them myself.

Speaker 1 But you cut them well.

Speaker 11 And then for eyebrows, again, I went without for a year, but then that was the first thing that I treated myself to

Speaker 11 this year was getting my eyebrows waxed because I was just taking to them with a razor and I ended up looking like two completely different people depending on which side of my face you were looking at.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you got through the end of your year and you worked really hard. How much money did you end up saving?

Speaker 11 I actually ended up saving just under £9,000,

Speaker 11 which I think in like USD, that's maybe $11,500

Speaker 11 or something.

Speaker 1 Okay. It's a lot of money.
It's about close to $1,000 a month.

Speaker 11 Yes, yeah, which really, really surprised me. A lot of that was, well, maybe a little less than half of that was

Speaker 11 TikTok paying its creators, which is always lovely.

Speaker 11 But yeah, at least £500 a month of that was just me saving my salary.

Speaker 1 What was the hardest thing? What was the thing that you wanted to buy and couldn't stop thinking about buying, but for that year, you just weren't allowed to?

Speaker 11 Clothes. That was my,

Speaker 11 yeah,

Speaker 11 they're my downfall. I just love charity charity shopping and going to vintage stores.

Speaker 11 And then the other thing that I missed was being lazy, basically, because you are having to go out grocery shopping and doing a full grocery shop.

Speaker 11 You can't just rely on like food deliveries. You need to kind of organise how you're going to get places without an Uber.

Speaker 11 So that's what I found difficult at times was the

Speaker 11 letting go of the ease that that I lived my life by beforehand.

Speaker 1 All right. So at the start of your year, you were just a girl standing in front of a TikTok, asking, no, asking your friends to support you in your endeavor.

Speaker 1 You, like all of us, did not have millions of friends, but you woke up after posting this and you found that a million people or so had seen it. That is the definition of virality for my money.

Speaker 1 Why do you think this went so viral?

Speaker 11 I think it does speak to people.

Speaker 11 So many people were supportive and saying

Speaker 11 in the comments saying like, these are my problem areas as well.

Speaker 11 So I think it did speak to people in that they weren't necessarily going to do a no-buy year because that's crazy, but they were going to

Speaker 11 stick around for any tips and

Speaker 11 maybe

Speaker 11 they were just curious to see if somebody could do it for an entire year.

Speaker 1 And you did. Mia, congratulations.

Speaker 11 Thank you.

Speaker 1 That was Mia Westrap coming up why it seems like everyone is starting to agree that we buy too much crap.

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Speaker 1 Today, explained Omna Will King, Aja Barber loves clothing. She also loves knowing how things were made.
About two decades ago, Aja started wondering about her clothes.

Speaker 2 I'm someone who has a sewing machine, who knits, who does both of those things badly. So I understand that there is a level of skill that goes into making things.

Speaker 2 So I started to not be able to understand how HM could sell a dress for $5

Speaker 2 that looked far better than anything I could create with my two hands, especially when I know what fabric costs, what a machine costs, you know.

Speaker 2 And a lot of this never really added up for me personally.

Speaker 1 The answer, of course, is the people making those clothes are often overseas and frequently paid very little. Eventually, Aja quit buying fast fashion.

Speaker 1 She quit buying from Amazon, and she wrote a book called Consumed, The Need for Collective Change. It was published in 2021, and we called Aja this week to see how it feels to be vindicated.

Speaker 1 So you've been, you've been banging the drum for a decade. 10 years ago, nine years ago, were you embraced online? Like, what was the reaction to what you were saying?

Speaker 11 No.

Speaker 2 So I've been talking about, you know, fast fashion for a decade, and it was literally like...

Speaker 2 telling a bad joke and people throwing tomatoes at you.

Speaker 2 And I've been in, you know, really like liberal and lefty spaces, but I began to see that there was some raging hypocrisy surrounding fast fashion because people would be all about the feminism and they would be all about you know human rights and then I'd be like yeah and we need to stop shopping at Forever 21 because they are you know not paying their garment workers and people would be like boo

Speaker 1 like how dare you make me think about this system I really enjoy engaging with We've probably been asking ourselves this since time immemorial, but where do you think the need to consume so much comes from?

Speaker 2 I think the need to consume so much is really built into the fabric of our society.

Speaker 14 Now, the most important step of all, velvety smooth Maybelline mascara.

Speaker 14 To order your Betty Crocker 100-piece decorating kit for $10 plus shipping and handling.

Speaker 9 But if you call now, within the next 20 minutes, because we can't do this all day, we'll give you a second set absolutely free.

Speaker 2 We are raised as consumers from the amount of advertising that you see, from the messaging that we get from political leaders. This is something that I talk about about and consumed.

Speaker 2 After 9-11, George W. Bush told people to get out there and shop.

Speaker 15 To meet the challenges of the 21st century, we must also work together to achieve important goals for the American people here at home.

Speaker 15 This work begins with keeping our economy growing.

Speaker 15 And I encourage you all to go shopping more.

Speaker 2 You know, there were a few things that he could have said.

Speaker 2 Morin, pray, be peaceful, gather in community. No, you got to shop to save the economy.

Speaker 2 And on the same note, Rishi Sunak in the UK did the same thing during the COVID-19 lockdowns when asked about, you know, if people have savings due to not being out in the streets and spending money, what should they do with it?

Speaker 2 And he basically was encouraging people to put their money into the economy. And I pushed back very hard against that online.
It was like, Rishi Sunak is married to a billionaire.

Speaker 2 He could put his money in the economy. You keep your money in your pocket.

Speaker 1 I want to ask you to wrestle with something for me. We do have consumer economies.
It is true that when people buy less, our economy suffers. People lose jobs.

Speaker 1 The markets might go down, which matters to people who have, you know, their retirement in the markets. So like, there's lots of things about our economy.
that do make it necessary for us to consume.

Speaker 1 As you grapple with that and also still want to like, you know, have like friends and be able to be someone who like lives in the quote-unquote real world. How do you

Speaker 1 like, what's that tension like for you?

Speaker 2 Our economy cannot be structured in a way where we have to buy cheap garbage in order for us to survive. in a way that thrives.

Speaker 2 I think that's the crux of the problem is that our economy has to be structured differently because buying all of this stuff isn't making us happier. It's not making our planet better.

Speaker 2 It's not providing really good jobs for people.

Speaker 2 So for me, I just look at the whole system and go, if this system requires me over-consuming garbage to run, perhaps it's a bad system and we shouldn't be propping it up.

Speaker 1 There's something that's been happening, and I am sure that you've seen it and are aware of it. And I am desperate to know what you think.

Speaker 1 So we're at this point in American history where people who have very different politics are converging on a shared view.

Speaker 1 President Trump's Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, made big news recently because he was defending tariffs, which of course will make Chinese and Canadian and Mexican imports more expensive for Americans.

Speaker 5 And he said, access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.

Speaker 1 That sounds to me like something that you would agree with wholeheartedly. It's not from the Green Party.
It's not from the Socialist Party. It's from the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 Well, here's the thing. I think where we feverishly disagree is on this notion of the American dream.
One person's American dream tends to be another person's American nightmare.

Speaker 2 What sort of dream is there for a country that is built on the exploitation of the indigenous people that live there and the exploitation of imported people through chattel slavery?

Speaker 2 When we look at the modern fashion industry, when we look at the industrial revolution, we need to recognize what is behind all of that is slavery and colonialism and exploitation of labor and goods and resources.

Speaker 2 And so I just don't know if I would ever agree with the Republican Party on this notion of the existence of such a dream.

Speaker 2 But I do agree that access to cheap goods isn't something that we should really honestly prize above all. The problem I see is we have eroding social safety nets in our society.

Speaker 2 And so because of that lack of actual systems that work for people, people are leaning into consumerism. I see this all the time in my generation, right?

Speaker 2 Can't buy a house, don't have health care, but you know what you can get? You can get a cheap summer dress, and that'll be the band-aid that you'll put over

Speaker 2 the scrape on your arm that's annoying you that you're not going to go to a doctor to check out because you don't have health insurance. I remember telling someone when I was living in the U.S.

Speaker 2 that you shouldn't get mad at immigrants that you think are taking your job. That's not who's taking your job.
The corporations that are shipping jobs overseas that used to be union U.S.

Speaker 2 jobs and exploiting other people with that system. That's who you should be mad at.
So, yeah, I do think that there's some space for

Speaker 2 people to maybe see eye to eye on this one. But ultimately,

Speaker 2 we have to want better for everyone else. And in that, we'll want better for ourselves.

Speaker 1 All right. So many of us live in the U.S.
It is a consumer economy. It's a capitalist society.
The question then, I guess, is how can we be more responsible? No buy 2025 is one option.

Speaker 1 What else do you see as useful?

Speaker 2 If you are a person like me who has a closet full of clothes and you like your clothes, clothes, they're good clothes, wear your clothes, learn how to repair your clothes.

Speaker 2 If you have a cabinet full of beauty products, maybe it's time to actually just start

Speaker 2 using what's in your cabinet before you buy more. And there's another part to this.

Speaker 2 When it is time to buy again,

Speaker 2 Because you know that you have more than enough, it's time to actually start researching the corporations that you spend your money with and asking some hard questions questions: like, does this corporation actually pay the people who make the products fair wages?

Speaker 2 And if you can't really figure out what's going on behind the literal seams of a company, then maybe it means that you don't spend your money there.

Speaker 2 It's time for us to open our eyes and stop engaging in a system that just requires us to shut up and buy. It's time for us to do more than be consumers.

Speaker 1 Aja Barber, her book is called Consumed: The Need for Collective Change. And you can get it at the public library.
Victoria Chamberlain produced today's show. Jolie Myers edited.

Speaker 1 Matthew Billy and Andrea Christen's daughter engineered. And Laura Bullard checked the facts.

Speaker 1 Today Explained is produced by Peter Balinon-Rosen, We Miss You, Bud, Avishai Artsi, Gabrielle Berbay, Miles Bryan, Carla Javier, Travis Larchuk, Amanda Llewellyn, Hadi Malagdi, and Devin Schwartz.

Speaker 1 Patrick Boyd mixes, masters, makes decisions. Amina Elsadi is our managing editor.
Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Speaker 1 It is March 14th, and do you know what that means? Sean Ramasfirm turns 50 today. Happy birthday to this man, and here's to the next 50.

Speaker 1 Today Explained is distributed by WNYC, and the show is a part of Vox. If you wish, you can support our journalism by joining our membership program today or whenever the markets rebound.

Speaker 1 Go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. And do remember, we make a show on the the weekends now too.
You can check out Explain It to Me, which will be in our feed on Sunday morning. I'm Noelle King.

Speaker 1 It's Today Explained.

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