Creative Changes Blog

The Friday after Thanksgiving (in USA) is the unofficial launch of the Christmas shopping season, and is famous for being the busiest shopping day of the year. Many retailers depend on a successful holiday shopping season to boost their annual sales into a profitable status before the end of the year. With a day off from work, the need to walk off huge turkey dinners, and great sales incentives, shoppers are apparently more than willing to endure traffic and huge crowds, to join the masses at the malls.

Here is the problem. We already have way too much stuff. So much stuff that we don't have room to keep it all in our own houses. The Self-Storage industry is an industry that now exceeds the revenues of Hollywood. One in 11 American households, according to a recent survey, owns self-storage space - an increase of some 75 percent from 1995. Most operators of self-storage facilities report 90 percent occupancy, with average stints among its renters of 15 months. Last year alone saw a 24 percent spike in the number of self-storage units on the market.

Participate by Not Participating

Kalle Lasn, co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation, which was responsible for turning Buy Nothing Day into an international annual event, said, "Our headlong plunge into ecological collapse requires a profound shift in the way we see things. Driving hybrid cars and limiting industrial emissions is great, but they are band-aid solutions if we don't address the core problem: we have to consume less. This is the message of Buy Nothing Day."

As Lasn suggests, Buy Nothing Day isn't just about changing your habits for one day. It's about starting a lasting lifestyle commitment to consuming less and producing less waste. With six billion people on the planet, the onus is on the most affluent - the upper 20% that consumes 80% of the world's resources - to begin setting the example.

We clutter the planet with our cast off junk, and we clutter our homes with all the stuff we believe we cannot live without. As a professional organizer, I have seen the direct result of our collective consumer addiction. People's lives are not always improved by the quantity of their belongings, and many times quite the opposite is true.

Consider participating in Buy Nothing Day. Stay home and clean a closet instead!

Visit http://www.adbusters.org for more information about Buy Nothing Day.