Could 'peak stuff' be in sight this Christmas?

Many parents of small children will be familiar with the depressing Christmas Day rubbish routine.

Presents are unveiled. The paper is eagerly ripped off. And packaging starts to accumulate around your ankles at such a rate that you start to empathise with those flood victims you see on TV wading through their own living rooms.

Disposing of the mountains of trash that are the by-product of the joyful gift unwrapping is as much a part of the festive workload as peeling the potatoes, keeping relatives refreshed and sweeping up the tree's pine needles. It's estimated we collectively throw out around 100 million black bin bags full of packaging at this time of year.

It's not a new observation of course, but nothing illustrates our materialist and ecologically insouciant economy quite like Christmas.

But is change, along with sweet notes of carollers and the whiff of mulled wine, in the air this year? One of the eye-catching business stories last week was the profit warning from the previously unstoppable online fashion chain Asos.

We all know that traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers are, as Mike Ashley put it recently, being "smashed to pieces" by savage trading conditions. But their market share was, we thought, being devoured by the internet players. Yet if the online leviathans like Asos are suffering too could that mean that we're collectively simply buying less than we used to? Will we look back on the Christmas of 2018 as the moment where we reached a "post-consumer moment"? Let's reserve judgement on calling that one until we see the retail sales figures for the end of the year.

"Peak stuff" has been called before only for us to discover that "stuff" was only, in fact, taking a breather.

There's been no dip in the upward growth trajectory in UK retail sales since Ikea's head of sustainability said we'd reached the top of the western physical consumption market in 2016.

Yet that doesn't invalidate the concept. Maybe it's just a question of timing. After all, it's manifestly true that the rise of the digital economy makes the possibility of less stuff than before feasible.

There's no need to buy DVDs or CDs anymore in the era of downloads and streaming. We can read a whole library of books on a single tablet. And Independent readers don't need to be told that no one needs to hold slices of dead tree in their hands any more to consume a newspaper.

Presents, even Christmas ones, don't need to be manufactured. We can gift "experiences", whether a ride in a hot air balloon, a visit to the spa or concert tickets. Some surveys have suggested that many young people now value soul-enriching experiences more than physical possessions.

The retail sales data may also be misleading. The Office for National Statistics has looked at the amount of material consumed in the UK and estimates it declined from around 12.5 tonnes per person in 2000 to just 9 tonnes per person in 2016.

Some economists argue that advertising doesn't create demand from nothing, but rather only persuades us to buy a particular brand of a good that our underlying preferences inclined us to desire anyway.

But this feels too simplistic. Before NW Ayers' "A Diamond Is Forever" advertising campaign in the 1940s there was no mass market for diamond engagement rings in the US. And as my colleague Adam Lusher reported last week, Charles Dickens gave a push to the Christmas industry in the 1840s (even if claims the novelist "invented" it are exaggerated).

An interesting question is whether we could go in the other direction? Is it conceivable campaigns could stimulate lower consumption of physical goods, not just at Christmas but generally? In fact we did have something along those lines recently with David Attenborough's Blue Planet BBC series which showed how plastic pollution is throttling the oceans. This gave a significant boost to anti plastic public sentiment and has put a great deal of pressure on manufacturers and politicians to take action.

The conditions of peak stuff are arguably in place this Christmas. But we may require nudges to get over the top.

How technology eased the deadweight loss of Christmas

Christmas is upon us. Will Santa bring you what you asked for this year? The chances are much improved these days – at least if you’re an adult.

Barely a day goes by without the leviathans of Silicon Valley attracting opprobrium for some social crime, whether it’s destroying our attention spans, pushing fake news or tearing apart communities – you name it.

But this is also a time of year when the convenience and value these internet technology firms bring to our lives actually comes into focus.

In a book published in 2009, the economist Joel Waldfogel laid into the inefficiency of gift buying for relatives at Christmas. “We make less-informed choices, max out on credit to buy gifts worth less than the money spent, and leave recipients less than satisfied,” he complained in Scroogenomics. Christmas is, he complained in the jargon of economists, a festival of “deadweight loss”, the term economists often use for waste.

Yet Amazon has delivered a way around this deadweight loss – at least for adults who want to buy gifts for each other. For those who don’t know, its “Wish List” function allows you to browse the “everything store” and put some of the items you’d like on a special list which you can then share with your friends and family.

Top it up through the year and there’s a good chance you’ll be pleasantly satisfied on Christmas day. Your relatives may well have got you something you actually want. The surprise element might be there too, if like me you tend to forget what you put on your wish list on a whim back in March.

Online shopping is another way technology has made many of our lives in the festive season merrier. In 2008, online sales as a proportion of all retailing was 4.2 per cent. In November it hit an all-time high of 17 per cent. Expect it to go higher still in this year’s Christmas shopping period.

No doubt there are some people who actually enjoy schlepping through the town centre laden down with bulky bags and parcels. But for many it’s much nicer to get the clobber delivered to one’s home by a delivery man: less deadweight Christmas-time loss.

Waldfogel’s thesis was criticised by other economists for missing the point: namely, the intrinsic value of the act of exchanging gifts at Christmas. One woman’s deadweight loss is another’s social “signal” of love and affection.

Yet technology can facilitate both. Our daughter received a birthday party invitation recently which asked for no presents for the child, but a donation to a chosen charity instead. Go online. Enter the code on the invitation. Make a donation and an automatic message goes to the family to notify them.

It won’t be for everyone, but imagine, parents, if this caught on: no more last-minute trips to Toys R Us to buy some piece of moulded plastic, uncertain about whether the child has it already, uncertain over whether another parent is buying the same piece of plastic, unsure about whether it will even get played with. Just a few clicks online instead, and much of the deadweight loss involved in children’s birthdays is instantly wiped out.

And this goes for charitable giving more generally. 

Making donations to charity, such as The Independent’s Help a Hungry Child Appeal, is easier than it ever has been thanks to the internet. As contactless technology rolls out, it should become simpler to donate to street fundraisers too. Boris Johnson’s “Penny for London” scheme failed, but the large potential for contactless charity microdonations surely remains.

These are the kind of subtle ways in which technology – for all the undeniable new social headaches it brings – is enhancing our lives and experiences. So merry deadweight loss to one and all.

This article appeared in The Independent on 24/12/17