From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Wed Feb 13 2002 - 08:19:22 MST
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D2EE.htm
"But if there's anything the Buy Nothing Day brigade hate more than big
corporations, hypermarkets and all-consuming brands it's consumers
themselves - individual shoppers who are so weak and fickle that they would
buy a tin of thin air if it was accompanied by a sexy advertising campaign.
The Buy Nothing website warns of Britain's 'shopaholic epidemic': 'Known as
omniomania, one woman in five is a shopaholic. The condition has been known
to psychiatrists since the early 1900s but only now is it reaching epidemic
proportions....Experts believe 10 percent of the UK population, and possibly
20 percent of women, are manic, compulsive shoppers.'
This is where Buy Nothing Day's 'floating sheep' come into it - the
sheep-shaped balloons that the anti-consumerists will be flying in London's
Covent Garden tomorrow. The sheep symbolise us shoppers, who apparently see
advert, get brainwashed by advert, buy product, consume product - as
unthinkingly as sheep follow each other into the pen. What about a
Patronising Nobody Day, instead of this anti-shopper nonsense?"
I take it that the meme comprised by said sheep did not prove especially
fecund or longlived :-)
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