Everything We Want

We in the rich worlds have everything we need. We may not have what we want....but we have what we need. Of course we know this, yet we often forget it and become fooled into thinking that our wants are actually needs. In the book I am currently reading, All Marketers are Liars (Tell Stories), Seth Godin makes this point and states that the job of marketers has gotten much more complicated as all our needs have been filled. The trick is to somehow turn this want into a need. Not easy as most consumers are not even listening to the marketers' stories (lies) anymore!

Today we went to Costco to stock on some food (a need). I left there a little disturbed by the scene, by my own purchases and actions. Why?

We got to the store at 10:00 - opening hour. Already the place was packed. The crowds filled the side aisles and we all had difficulty navigating our SUV sized carts around each other. Seriously, it was insanity. I have often found Costco to be a particularly draining place to shop and today would have felt the same had I not enjoyed observing the commotion. We filled our over sized cart with $500 worth of food. Kilos of cheese, breads, meats, cookies. Litres of milk, soy milk, juices, oils. Everyone around us had carts filled with hundreds of dollars worth of food all neatly packaged - colourful plastic, cardboard, paper, shrink wrapped food from all corners of the world. At the checkout we spoke to a Costco employee and he mentioned that they had had 650 members come through in the first 30 minutes the store was open. If they all spent $500 like we did that would be about $300000 in revenue in 30 minutes. In actual fact it is likely higher as many folks leave Costco with some electronic gizmo and this would bring the average up.

So here we were, western consumers, many of us overweight, with our stuffed carts and I felt disturbed by it all. We blindly and unappreciatively purchase food from half way around the world. We, literally, throw tens of thousands of calories worth of food into our carts unaware of the effort it took to grow and transport it. We then go home and often don't even taste the amazing German cheese, the Chinese garlic, the Cost Rican pineapple. We have eaten them so often that our taste is but a memory of past meals. We don't taste the current.

I guess my point after all of this rambling is that we are lucky. We are so damn lucky that we don't even realize that our wants have disguised themselves as needs. Thank your lucky stars ye of the first world, the industrialized and rich world. Thank your lucky stars.

Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!