Measuring the real cost

We all love a bargain – sure there are those who like to tell you how expensive something was when they purchased it in the exclusive store in the High Street, but they would probably be even more excited to tell you that they actually bought it at a huge discount.

As for the rest of us, we just like to shop around and, even when we spend half a day making endless phone calls and have to travel an extra 20kms, if it means we can save $50 we’ll do it.

And how many of us, believing ourselves to be environmentally conscious, don’t think twice about doing this?

I really like wearing my $10 Rolex and I’m not sure why. I can say it’s because I bought it from a second hand shop, (and No, I don’t for a moment believe it is real) but I can’t help but think about the people who made it, who mined the metal to produce it, who worked in the factories to assemble it. How much did this Rolex cost before it became a consumer item sitting in a shop?

I first began thinking about this sitting inside a very inexpensive tent on a wet summer evening. Allowing for a 50% markup, the various zips, mesh, poles, mats and moldings for the tent were cut, assembled, packaged, transported overseas, to the warehouse and then to the store for about $18. Was the $25 I paid from my visa the true cost of this tent?

Imagine how our decisions might be different if we paid the real cost of the items we fill our homes and lives with.

Costs in human rights, human lives, environmental degradation, water quality, air pollution, loss of biodiversity. Long term we can only guess at the effects each throwaway product will have on climate change and species extinction, on the delicate balance of small ecosystems and on the ecosystem that is planet earth, on the health of our children and grandchildren.

And for what? Drop by drop we are eroding our lifestyles in ways too small for all but the most observant among us to see.

Perhaps if we paid the true value of consumer items then we would demand these items be made durable rather than cheap.

But instead we mistake our “wants” for our “needs”, and allow advertising agencies and TV characters to convince us what our lifestyle should be, convince us that we deserve the newest, best and fastest, and convince us that we should have it now.

You might be lucky enough to know someone who remembers a time when children shared a bedroom, when a family had just one car, when people usually had at most three pairs of shoes, and there was only one telephone in the house.

If you do know someone – make sure you take the opportunity to talk to them.

If you don’t, you might like to look up old copies of Australian Newspapers at Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper )