'I think we all like capitalism a bit, or maybe a little bit more than that'/ Ruby Sinclair

With COVID-19 restricting our movements, we have no reason to shop. No visiting stores, impulse buying, window shopping - no weddings or events to get dressed up for. How, in such tight parameters, did the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, recently become the first trillionaire? Key to Amazon’s success was providing a centralised platform where consumers could purchase a multitude of items as quickly and easily as possible. Our mentality of convenience over quality has rewarded a man who owns more money than anyone else in the world. A man who sometimes still gets praised for providing a $15 starting wage alongside poor working conditions, with claims that some employees have to piss into bottles to meet productivity demands.

On the 20th of March - at the same time as the Australia-wide lockdown began, Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Since then, there have been 13.41 million copies sold, eclipsing sales of previous versions of the game within the first 6 weeks. It seems that once we couldn’t get out into the rich and wonderful world of capitalism, we invested our money into allowing ourselves to create our own virtual bubble of money-making and spending. The premise of Animal Crossing is to create a city, from nothing. In this beautiful little island, your character wanders through a new terrain, finding tools to combine with materials to create desirable items. While enjoying this recently discovered land, you can fish, catch butterflies, and shake fruit out of trees. All signs of a calming oasis. However, this relaxing world doesn’t suffice without the ability to create profit and the desire to spend and invest it. The game enables you to build properties for more inhabitants to move into your city, to create gardens and bridges and buy clothes for your character. You begin to gather items with the intent of selling them to the Nook brothers - the greatest capitalist pair of them all (except for you, who is destined to give them hundreds of items in exchange for money you will inevitably spend within the same store). Suddenly, your beautiful oasis is filled with houses, fences and construction, where you are planting imported fruit to earn more profit per piece, desperately shaking trees for some loose change, and checking the guide for when the biggest fish can be caught in certain areas. Then, once you create your paradise, you want to continuously upgrade it. The parallels between what lockdown made us give up, and what Animal Crossing offers us in the form of virtual reality, allow us to see the form of escapism that the game engenders. It is a void where our capitalistic tendencies, undernourished by the COVID-19 world, can be fulfilled.

Due to lockdown regulations, customers not trying on clothes in stores eliminates the wait of having to find the time to visit a store at all. The lack of alternate entertainment  combined with the money saved from not going on holidays and out for food and drinks, has allowed online shopping to be one of the only ways to spend disposable income. Businesses battling with the anxiety of trying to predict the future months of a pandemic have begun making smaller runs of clothing in order to avoid over-producing items. The reduction  in the available inventory of clothing  combined with the immediacy of  customers’ abilities to  shop online, has resulted in clothing selling out quicker. In turn, this has created a domino effect of people buying items faster and faster to avoid missing out on specific items, due to the low quantity and rise of dead-stock fabrics making restocking less likely. While this process might slow down as the pandemic continues, current payments such as Job Seeker and Job Keeper have endowed some individuals with partial financial security for at least a few months, making small purchase items still feel achievable to buy. It also becomes a desirable time to make purchases, because, let’s face it - none of us have any idea when lockdown will be over. There is no date to wish for—no deadline for social isolation. This feeling can become overwhelming. Not only is there no deadline for COVID, there are no important dates to look forward to. Weddings, lunches, even a casual house party with everyone sitting outside on crates are all far from possible. Without any occasions to look forward to, the array of short term goals that we typically become excited about have vanished. In this bleak landscape of social interaction, one thing you can look forward to is checking the tracking on a pair of shoes you recently bought, and waiting for that parcel to arrive on your doorstep. With nothing else to do and no big life events to anticipate, people turn to the items sitting in their online cart for fulfillment. This has resulted in Australia Post recording 2.3 million deliveries on August 17th, the overwhelming results up by 157% in Victoria. The Australia Post has reported that such numbers are usually only see at Christmas. 

This is not a mentality to be overly critical of. When you work 40 hours a week with limited time to spare, why not buy things to make yourself feel happy? Working at any capacity, and trading our precious time for money, makes us want to spend what our labor awards us. However, it is important to reflect on what our input to the system actually does. This includes our relationship to money and how it affects those around us. As we spend more, and money becomes quicker to send, we should incite our ethics to reflect on the way we distribute what we earn. 

One simple way to change our input is to change the conversation around consumption, so that retailers come to prioritise humanitarian concerns over convenience. Businesses advertise to us based on what reports say we want most, and what will be most likely to convince us to make a purchase. This places us in a position that enables us to induce a change in their priorities. If companies know that the best way to convince us to purchase from them is to be transparent about workers’ wages, use sustainable materials, and encourage local production, they will start to factor these considerations into their marketing. This could go some way in eroding the dominant business model of producing hundreds of low quality items per season, shipping them to consumers overnight, and all at prices that repeatedly force down workers’ wages and living conditions.

The semantics of talking about purchases still largely revolves around an item’s price tag, instead of how it is made, by whom, and in what conditions. For example, to change the conversation  from how much an article of clothing is purchased for to how much the workers were paid to make it, would be enough to alert companies that consumers have had a change in priority. To be worthy of our money, we need to place ethics over convenience. Companies like clothing retailer Arnsdorf, who present transparent breakdowns of costs for each individual article of clothing, adapt to the kind of practice that could see real change in how we consume products. To make items locally, pay workers correctly, and to use that as the marketing will lead to a positive ethical shift in the clothing industry. To talk about raising the minimum wage while simultaneously discussing a bargain item of clothing gives rise to a fundamental inconsistency. In the same way that we discuss wanting to be paid adequately for our own time, we should prioritise our purchases to encourage the same outcomes for others. This is not to claim that the only way to purchase items guilt-free is to always ensure that workers are paid correctly. This is not only unsustainable for individuals on lower incomes, but also for those who live in areas where they don’t have access to a wide range of options. Rather, this is an appeal to look at the culture of ‘beauty hauls’; for people who are in positions of power in the industry to reflect on how they are using their roles, such as influencers considering ethics when choosing what they promote. Fault ultimately resides in those businesses that are consciously making unethical decisions, and this is important to remember, as responsibility should not be pressed solely on the consumer. For individuals, this is a call to change the way we talk about clothes - focusing on the productivity demands, such as the time spent working, safety procedures, and the working environment of the employees involved, as opposed to how quickly and cheaply we get the item. These concerns should also include the impacts of the production process on the environment, as this is a cost we will all soon be paying back. Clothing is cheaper than it has ever been, which has led to the rise of haul culture. Prices lower, and we buy more. With clothing - it has shifted in the opposite direction. It has become so cheap that we can’t fathom the alternative, which was once the norm. People owned less, mended more, and saved much longer to purchase an item of clothing. This isn’t the new way of buying clothes, it is the old way.

This is a human rights issue that we don’t have the ability to merely wait for the government to change. The forced labor camps in China offer just one example of of heinous criminal organisations that a wide variety of Australian retailers rely on. 1 to 1.8 million Uyghurs, amongst other Turkic and Muslim people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, work in forced labour to create cotton that is used for apparel and retailers. Torture, compulsory sterilisation of Uyghur women, and forced separation of families are commonplace practices in these camps. While our government has done nothing to prevent Australian retailers sourcing cotton from these camps, we can address this issue by not supporting companies that do, making them shift their own values to keep their customers. You can read the full report here outlining all the companies who are linked to benefiting from this labor, but no surprise, it includes Amazon as well as other brands popular in Melbourne, such as Ikea, Muji, Dangerfield, Fila, Adidas, H&M, Cotton On, Patagonia, Target, Tommy Hilfiger, Zara And Uniqlo. These are companies that have specific cases linked to this issue making them appear complicit in this process. If they claim they weren’t aware, they should have been. If Uniqlo has enough money to do a brand collaboration with Billie Eilish, their revenue should also enable them to pay someone to routinely check the ethics underlying their production lines.

Imagine the domino effect that a shift in the priorities could lead to. This would be a farewell to impulse purchases, buying lower quality items so they arrive quicker, and throwing out the contents of your wardrobe to start afresh. We have seen the effects this has on the recycling system in Panipat and the overwhelming amount of garment waste. This may mean that clothing costs more, but that would force us to consume less items of longer lasting quality, which is similar to how the fashion industry worked before the rise of fast fashion. For those who cannot afford these options, the rise in well produced clothes would mean that second-hand stores hold more items of a higher quality, which can be repaired, and could last another lifetime. To focus on repurposing capitalist society within ethical parameters will mean that piss bottle men like Jeff Bezos become less obscenely rich, by realising that convenience doesn’t trump worker and environmental concerns. Or at the very least, it would allow workers time for toilet breaks.

Image retrieved from: https://screenrant.com/animal-crossing-new-horizons-best-custom-clothing/

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Verve Zine.