On the way to IKEA to do the consumer thing. My wife Bobbi loves IKEA via their catalog but she has never been to one of their stores. There is s new store here in Portland so she gets to have her first experience. I will give you an update later.
There country is so rich with things you can buy and have. We get to go look and want and buy and have. Fortunately the car is full and we can’t fit much more in.
I wanted to write about consuming to share with you some insights I have had. There is no such thing as truly cheap goods. Goods that we have available to us that are low priced are that way usually because someone is taken advantage of. Cheap goods come from people who are not paid a fair wage. There are many sweat shops in lesser fortunate countries and they make our goods but get as little pay as the company can get away with. Wal-Mart is a great example of taken advantage of cheap labor. They have many huge plants in China that don’t pay fair wages and are what can be called sweat shops. The goods they make are shipped to the US and sold to us a dicount prices. That is only possible because of workers being unfairly treated to produce our goods.
I am not sharing this with you to make you feel guilty. I too love a good deal. I still buy cheap items but now I buy them with the awareness that someone may not be paid fairly and someone in this country may have lost a job when this products production was taken to China. I try to buy with awareness and tend to support local businesses when I can. Conscious consumerism makes sense and is earth sensitive. We are all responsible for what we do at the level of impact on our fellow humans, other life and the planet.
Back from Ikea; I enjoyed the looking at all the really cool things there. She really liked taking in all the good ideas the design folks at IKEA have put into their products. If we had one closer to where we live, there would have been two very comfortable chairs added to our purchase. There was lots of stuff we could have gotten but I feel much less interested in having more things than I did before. Simplicity and less clutter has more appeal these days.
Well tomorrow we get back on the road as we head toward Boulder. I suspect we will be wearing some tire tread over the next two long driving days ahead. I hope to have a journal entry tomorrow. If not I will have one on Saturday. Have a good end of the week; be aware wherever you are and whatever you do.