Despite the employment numbers, it still seems the economy is in the doldrums in some ways. I wonder if consumers are simply running out of things they want to buy. I realize this doesn’t apply to large parts of the world, nor to people at the poverty level. But I’ve never been so “meh” about the offerings during a Christmas season. It seems the first world has all the phones, tablets and game consoles it needs. Other than pure status-signaling, there’s nothing much left to buy.
This blogger sums it up pretty well (warning: very conservative and right wing). Here’s a short quote of his article:
Even so, I’m hunting around for some toy to buy this year and I’m coming up empty. I wonder if we have maybe hit some sort of dead end on the gadget front. The low hanging fruit of technology was picked long ago. The mobile phone and e-mail changed our world. Angry birds on your smart phone has not changed much of anything. Most people have a phone, a tablet and a PC. Everyone has a flat screen TV and some sort of console for games or movies. On the electronic gizmo front, we seem to have hit a dead end… There very well may be an end point to the materialist culture that blossomed in America last century. I could just be an old man with narrow interests, but it does feel like we have all the crap we need.
What do you think? Are we entering not only post-scarcity, but maybe a post-acquisitive era as well? I told my kids this Christmas that I can’t think of much I want to buy any more.
One issue is that some things are shifting from physical items to purely digital items. Video game companies, for example, are starting to shift from physical DVDs to digital downloads–you buy a card (very much like a gift card) at the store that gives you a code that you use to download the game.
Hardly. Every time there isn’t a killer toy for Xmas, thoughts like this start percolating through the blogosphere. Going back to the apocryphal story about the patent clerk who quit because “everything had been invented” - in like 1900.
Rest assured the consumer goods makers will always find something new to sell you. Even if they have to create the whole niche first.
I recall 2006 as being the end of any new products, ever, and we were obviously on a decline as a society and a nation. We were rescued by the appearance of… the iPhone.
I doubt it. Look at cell phones. It’s become generally accepted that you have to buy a new model every two years even if your current phone is still working just as well as it did when you bought it two years ago. There’s a similar attitude towards computers and cars.
There is always an option of gifting consumables- whether it be clothing, artisan scented soaps, or a vast variety of food products… besides that, there’s always the built-in obsolescence in electronics that Nemo mentioned.
Trigger warning? Anyway the economy as a whole could certainly be influenced by the labor force’s relative willingness to work for a given reward on average, if they don’t need as much, or as much more (before retiring, for multiple household members to work etc). It could be part of the explanation for lower workforce participation in the US, even after correcting for expected changes due to aging of the work force. Although, there’s also a bigger skills mismatches between workers and jobs caused by technology and trade, arguably increasing incentives against working (Social Security Disability used more now as a long term unemployment program, etc), and other things. But people becoming less materialistic could have an effect.
But just to isolate it to anecdotal taste for gadgets at Christmas seems narrow. I’ve told my family members ‘no gadgets as gifts’ because I don’t want to be bothered with them anymore, learning how to set up and use them and dealing with their problems. I’m OK with the gadgets I have. But that’s a pretty small piece of the overall economic puzzle, pretty small piece of family spending anyway.
To update my earlier post, which was written on a gadget I hate writing more than a few words on…
This is a perennial viewpoint. You can find it in magazine editorials of the 1950s and pretty much every year thereafter. Put simply, it’s both short-sighted and tunnel-vision and tends to peak in years like this one, where there’s no killer toy/gadget/appliance pushing Xmas sales - whether it’s a Atari 2600, a crockpot, an iPhone or a flatscreen TV.
Consumer spending rarely slacks, and tends to rise except in sharp downward corrections that often reset within months or a year or two and then continue rising. Just because there is some variation in holiday spending, and (again) no well-hyped must-give product this year, doesn’t mean we’ve reached saturation.
Saturation on cell phones? Maybe. Game consoles? Temporarily. Flatscreens? Only until 4K becomes far more standard (and it will, unlike 3D). Whether it’s a new generation of these products, or a WiFi-enabled crockpot, or electric earwax removers that drive holiday mania in coming years, consumer spending shows no signs of slacking overall. It’s just not on glitzy stuff that looks good on the cover of either *Wired *or Forbes. As **Flyer **notes, people find something to spend on even if it’s not trendy stuff.
And when any niche you can name is truly saturated or slow, the industry pulls another niche out of its… pocket, a “want” that no one had ever thought of before, that sells billions in product, clones, support, accessories and upkeep. And we can’t imagine how we lived without it.
And while I’d be the first to applaud people reducing their income because they have nothing to spend it on, that’s a long ways from the truth. People only work/produce income in part for actual need. The rest is “to get ahead” - by buying stuff, mostly.
I think the next “big thing” is going to be driverless cars. It’s going to revolutionize the way we get around. We’re a few years off, but it’s going to change things like the smart phone changed things.
I track electronics sales stuff on Amazon this time of year. And Amazon is certainly not hurting in the sales department!
Anyway: The items they put on big sales for does morph a bit over time.
Those power battery backups for phones have been a big thing for a couple years now. Sure you don’t need one of those? And Bluetooth everything. How about a Bluetooth light bulb with a builtin speaker? Gotta have that, right?
Drones have gotten so cheap that there’s amazing number of those being sold. Would have loved one as a kid. Now: meh.
This year one of the odder things they’re listing a lot of are hidden video cams. Embedded in clocks, fake wallwarts, “pens”, etc.
This … is … worrisome. Apparently a lot of people are buying these now. Errr …
No saturation in terms of “Oooh, I want that!” but perhaps some saturation of electronic “Ooooh, I need that.” As long as humans are humans, the latter doesn’t matter as much as the former.
We live in a consumer driven economy. Consumers love to consume. That’s what they do. What it is they consume will vary.
I don’t know why, but this idea, I do not like. Makes me feel older and more shouty than I should.
I think parts of the issue in the OP are who is buying, what they are buy, and where and, very importantly, when they are buying. I, by training, tend to spread Christmas shopping out over the course of the year, and try to avoid the newest most shiney and trendy stuff. I give cash.
Well, minimalism is kinda becoming a trend. There was that Marie Kondo book that was popular last year and “minimalism” and “anti-consumption” blogs and articles seem to be proliferating. The market for collectibles (other than Star Wars) has crashed. Home decorating and design sites are showing very clean and spare rooms. Minimalistic “capsule” wardrobes are a thing now. As is the interest in “tiny houses” or just smaller living spaces overall. So maybe, for now, we are all over it? I know I’ve curtailed my spending and am working on paring down. Maybe all those Hoarders shows had an effect?
All I want for Christmas is money to donate to my pet causes.
I think we are in a bit of a duldrum at the moment, but I do think the next big things will be VR augmented reality. My personal belief is that once AI becomes more developed, a lot of new technology will be sold in support of it and invented because of it. That’s a few years off though.
But I do know about in-app purchases. And renting movies and TV episodes on Amazon. Splurging at Whole Foods. Eating sushi at lunch instead of PB&J. Instead of spending $10 a month on a magazine subscription, I choose to pay for a subscription to my favorite music streaming service. Which then means CDs are kinda pointless to me.
As my income has increased over the past decade, my clothing and gadget budget hasn’t changed very much. But I do spent more on consumables and electronic entertainment.
If this makes me a hipster, ok. But I detest skinny jeans.
No. Not necessarily, and I wasn’t calling you that questionable term. I’ve just read an awful lot about how the upper-income bracket of the 25-35 group is “investing in experiences” now. While seeming to own and buy just as much Ikea furniture, cutting-edge tech, flashy wheels and defining stuff as before.
But it’s a practice I can mostly admire. I recently spent $2500 for a couple of magical hours, two very rare and irreplaceable linked experiences I will treasure until my dying day. I have nothing from it but two blurry photos, two autographs and an entire west wing of sharp memories. There are few things I own I treasure anywhere near that much. One is snoring on my feet.
Actually they’re not. The container shipping industry is reporting record lows, and some large firms have gone out of business because of the recent drop in demand. Both of these stories are from 2016.
Anyway the economy as a whole could certainly be influenced by the labor force’s relative willingness to work for a given reward on average, if they don’t need as much, or as much more (before retiring, for multiple household members to work etc). It could be part of the explanation for lower workforce participation in the US, even after correcting for expected changes due to aging of the work force. Although, there’s also a bigger skills mismatches between workers and jobs caused by technology and trade, arguably increasing incentives against working (Social Security Disability used more now as a long term unemployment program, etc), and other things. But people becoming less materialistic could have an effect.