What if we stopped shopping?

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.
Debt. It's official.
My debt will be 100% gone, including my car loan, by August of next year. Protest.
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. I feel like the only way to like actually make a change in this

country is to continue with the no buy 2025 boycott. Community even.
I love no buy TikTok

because instead of just being poor and not being able to buy things, I'm just a no buy girly.

Coming up on Today Explained, what happens when so many of us decide we have enough? This message comes from Rinse. These days, you can do a lot from your phone.
Book a vacation, trade stocks, but you can also make your dirty laundry disappear and then reappear washed and folded with Rinse. Schedule a pickup with the Rinse app and before you know it, your clothes are back, folded, and ready to wear.
They even do dry cleaning. Sign up now and get $20 off your first order at Rinse.com.
That's R-I-N-S-E dot com. With a Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase.
And you get big purchasing power, so your business can spend more and earn more. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus.
Terms apply. You are listening to today explained so my tiktok story is quite funny i 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 like i don't want to download tiktok i eventually did because i was seeing quite a few funny videos on social media i'm fast as fuck boy come get some hi hi good morning and I made a video thinking that just my friends would be able to see it. Oh no.
You are like that person who thinks your Venmo is private. Exactly.
Exactly. So I made a TikTok video with absolutely no makeup and hair done.
I was in my work uniform. So 2024 is going to be the year that I get my shit together in terms of my finances.
I have been... Please just support me for the next year because I'm not going to buy anything because I'm poor.
I go to sleep. I wake up.
The video has over a million views. I've already got about 6,000 followers thank you for being so supportive um and I was like oh okay I I didn't quite understand how this website works but I guess I'm gonna roll with it now maybe it'll keep me motivated I'm here to hold myself accountable and if I help somebody else along the way, then that's just a bonus.
Bye. Bye.
Mia Westrap, 27, English, social worker, sometimes goes to extremes. I think I'm quite a type A person, as in like I either do something to its utmost extreme or I just don't bother at all 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 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, 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. Let's talk about those behaviors and what your financial circumstances were that animated this whole thing.
What was going on with your money? So I, to really, really rewind, I grew up, my mom was a single mom of three children. She worked really hard, but we just kind of had like the basic necessities.
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. My financial literacy was at an absolute zero percent.
I couldn't afford to do anything. 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 I could only choose between going to like the funeral or that party essentially.
So that's when I began to realise, okay, I really 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, what I ended up with at the end of the month stayed exactly the same 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 I was anxious because I rent and that's becoming more and more precarious by the day in the UK. And I just felt like I needed more of a security blanket because it was just this overwhelming stress that I was experiencing.
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. Let me ask you what you did spend money on and what you skipped.
So when I was planning my no buy year, I thought it would be best to kind of color code my spending. Type A.
Yeah, exactly. Type A.
So So I made a green yellow and red list. Green was the things I could spend my money on without questions so that was bills, rent, groceries.
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 so I might as well try and purchase things that I like and not try and skimp too much there 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 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 and then red was the long long long list of things that I was not going to let myself by for an entire year. So that was meals out, carbonated drinks, which I was very much addicted to at the time.
So the first absolutely abhorrent financial decision I made in 2023 was spending over a thousand pounds on Cherry Pepsi Max. And that's a a very very conservative estimate no new clothes no books just things that i had enough of and could make do without buying more for a year did you did you cheat at all i did a couple of times but i was was very honest with everybody about it.
Did you go on TikTok and spill? I did. I did.
So that was another good thing about TikTok was that it allowed me to kind of talk through my thinking if I was tempted to buy something on the yellow list or on the red list. When my other friend came round, we all went out for dinner.

I spent about 60 pounds over the past three days that I probably didn't need to like we probably could have found things to do for free and it makes me... There was a couple of times over the summer where my weight had fluctuated and I hadn't really accounted for that because none of my summer clothes fit 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. And other than that, there wasn't any big breaking of the rules.
It was more so like little breaking of the rules, but they were mindful purchases and they've informed the way that I still think about consuming things now. We are on Zoom and I am noting that your hair is quite cute.
You have nice bangs. Your eyebrows are on fleek, as we said five years ago.
What about beauty, hair care, makeup? What'd you do?

I am still getting through the same tinted moisturiser that I bought about two and a half

years ago so that's gross um you say I've got cute bangs we're both kidding ourselves I obviously cut them myself but you cut them well um and then for eyebrows again I went without for a year but then that was the first thing that I treated myself myself to 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. Okay, so you got through the end of your year and you worked really hard.
How much money did you end up saving? I actually ended up saving just under 9,000 pounds, which I think in USD, that's maybe $11,500 or something. Okay.
That's a lot of money. It's about close to $1,000 a month.
Yes. Yeah.
Which really, really surprised me. A lot of that was, well, maybe a little less than half of that was TikTok paying its creators, which is always lovely.
But yeah, at least £500 a month of that was just me saving my salary. 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? Clothes.
That was my... Clothes, yeah.
They're my downfall. I just love charity shopping and going to vintage stores.
And then the other thing that I missed was being lazy, lazy basically because you are having to go out grocery shopping and doing a full grocery shop you can't just rely on like food deliveries you need to kind of organize how you're going to get places without an uber so that's what I found difficult at times was the E, letting go of the E's that I lived my life by beforehand. 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. 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. Why do you think this went so viral? I think it does speak to people.
So many people were supportive and saying, the comments saying like these are my problem areas as well so I think it did speak to people in that they they weren't necessarily going to do a no-buy year because that's crazy but they were going to stick around for any tips.

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

And you did.

Mia, congratulations.

Thank you.

That was Mia Westrap.

Coming up, why it seems like everyone is starting to agree that we buy too much crap. Support for Today Explained comes from Delete Me.
As humans, we tend to forget things over time. It's just one of the things that makes us who we are.
Unfortunately, the internet doesn't work that way, and your sensitive information can live online for a long, long time. Kind of gross when you think about it.
Anyway, a lot of data can be collected and sold to the highest bidder by data brokers, which can lead to identity theft, phishing attempts, not the cool kind, harassment and unwanted spam calls. But Delete Me wants to help you protect your privacy.
Delete Me says they'll help you monitor and remove the personal information you don't want on the Internet. Claire, what did you think of Delete Me? Delete Me does everything for you.
It's great. They scrub the internet and send monthly privacy reports of all of the places that they have removed your information, including phone number, email address, and personal address.
I truly have not had to do a thing since signing up. They continue to monitor the web for my information and make sure that I am safer.
You can take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for

Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners.

Today, get 20% off your Delete Me plan by texting TODAY to 64000.

The only way to get 20% off is to text TODAY to 64000.

That's TODAY to 64000.

Message and data rates may apply. Support for Today Explained comes from Quince.
Sometimes it's nice to splurge on the finer things in life, I say to myself, when I take the train to New York instead of the bus, but still don't take the Acela. Anyway, according to Quince, you can invest in luxurious essentials without paying a small fortune.
Quince says they offer high quality items priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Items like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, okay, or washable silk tops and dresses, okay, or organic cotton sweaters, okay, or 14 karat gold jewelry okay.
Tell them, Claire. I've loved everything that I've received from Quince.
I've been wearing the organic cotton poplin tops to work and the cotton boyfriend sweater on the weekends. They both just feel like pieces that I would reach for in my closet regardless of where they come from.
They're super versatile and they're super comfortable and they're really well made. You can give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince.
You can go to quince.com slash explain for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash explained to get free shipping and 365 day returns.
Quince dot com slash explained. Nowadays, you can do a lot from your phone.
Things from booking a vacation, buying and trading stocks, even ordering a car for yourself. But did you know that you can make your dirty laundry disappear and then reappear washed and folded? Yup, and all it takes is rinse.
You can schedule a pickup with the Rinse app, and before you know it, your clothes are back, folded, and ready to wear. They even do dry cleaning.
Sign up now and get $20 off your first order at Rinse.com. That's R-I-N-S-E dot com.
Hi! Hi! Good morning! Today Explained, I'm Noelle King. Aja Barber loves clothing.
She also loves knowing how things were made. About two decades ago, Aja started wondering about her clothes.

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.
So I started to not be able to understand how H&M could sell a dress for $5 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, and a lot of this never really added up for me personally. The answer, of course, is the people making those clothes are often overseas and frequently paid very little.
Eventually, Aja quit buying fast fashion. 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. So 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? No. So I've been talking about, you know, fast fashion for a decade.
And it was literally like telling a bad joke and people throwing tomatoes at you. 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, we need to stop shopping at Forever 21, because they are, you know, not paying their garment workers.
And people would be like, boo. 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? I think the need to consume so much is really built into the fabric of our society. Now, the most important step of all, velvety smooth Maybelline mascara.
To order your Betty Crocker 100-piece decorating kit for $10 plus shipping and handling. 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.
We are raised as consumerists from the amount of advertising that you see,

from the messaging that we get from political leaders.

This is something that I talk about in Consumed.

After 9-11, George W. Bush told people to get out there and shop.
To meet the challenges of the 21st century,

we must also work together to achieve important goals for the American people here at

home. This work begins with keeping our economy growing.
And I encourage you all to go shopping more. You know, there were a few things that he could have said, mourn, pray, be peaceful, gather in community.
No, you got to shop to save the economy. 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? 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.
He could put his money in the economy. You keep your money in your pocket.
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, the markets might go down, which matters to people who have, you know, their retirement in the market.
So like, there's lots of things about our economy that do make it necessary for us to consume. 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, like what's that tension like for you? 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. 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.
It's not providing really good jobs for people. 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.
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. So we're at this point in American history where people who have very different politics are converging on a shared view.
President Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bes, made big news recently because he was defending tariffs, which of course will make Chinese and Canadian and Mexican imports more expensive for Americans. And he said...
Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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? Can't buy a house, don't have healthcare, but you know what you can get? You can get a cheap summer dress and that'll be the bandaid that you'll put over 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.
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. 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 people to maybe see eye to eye on this one. But ultimately, we have to want better for everyone else.
And in that, we'll want better for ourselves. All right.
So many of us live in the US. 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.
What else do you see as useful? If you are a person like me who has a closet full of clothes and you like your clothes, they're good clothes, wear your clothes. Learn how to repair your clothes.
If you have a cabinet full of beauty products, maybe it's time to actually just start using what's in your cabinet before you buy more. And there's another part to this.
When it is time to buy again, 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 like, does this corporation actually pay the people who make the products fair wages? 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. 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. 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. Matthew Billy and Andrea Christen's daughter engineered.
And Laura Bullard checked the facts. Today Explained is produced by Peter Balanon-Rosen.
We miss you, bud. Avishai Artsy, Gabrielle Burbay, Miles Bryan, Carla Javier, Travis Larchuk, Amanda Llewellyn, Hadi Mawagdi, and Devin Schwartz.
Patrick Boyd mixes, masters, makes decisions. Amina El-Sadi is our managing editor.
Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.
It is March 14th, and do you know what that means? Sean Ramosfirm turns 50 today. Happy birthday to this

man. And here's to the next 50.
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. Go to Vox.com slash members to sign up.
And do remember, we make a show on

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. It's Today Explained.