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If your TikTok For You page is anything like mine, then you’ve probably seen a lot of videos about ‘no buy’ and ‘low buy’ challenges recently. Doing a low/no buy year involves people pledging to stop spending money on non-essentials for 12 whole months. You can set your own rules if you take part. Often people are only allowed to shop if they need to replace something, or they can only make planned purchases.
It’s an interesting idea and a refreshing change from the non-stop barrage of TikTok shop, Temu and Amazon ads on social media. Although this trend has been around for a few years, it feels like people are finally starting to open their eyes to the huge amounts of waste we produce as consumers, and how scrolling feeds our desire to buy more.
The origins of the ‘no buy’ trend are difficult to pinpoint, but the first Buy Nothing Day took place in 1992. Since then every Black Friday people have protested consumerism by refusing to shop for 24 hours. As someone who worked full time keeping track of deals and special offers for SIX YEARS, I can promise you that Black Friday is a scam. All of the low prices you see on that day happen multiple times a year, it’s just a ploy to create a sense of urgency to get you to spend money quickly without considering your purchase.
The Year of Less by Cait Flanders is a book about how the author paid down $30,000 in debt by stopping shopping for a year. I read it when I was going through my own mini low buy in 2019. You can read my blogs about Secondhand September or how to declutter without sending things to landfill. You should pick it up (or get it out of the library) if you’re thinking of starting your own no buy year.
I don’t think I’m the only one who’s noticed how online content has completely morphed into teleshopping. In this Youtube video by The Financial Diet, the host Chelsea Fagan talks about the aspirational overconsumption we see in ‘restocking’ videos. These short mesmerising clips show people taking items out of plastic packaging and putting them into different plastic boxes that are more ‘aesthetic’. In this genre of video everything matches, everything costs money, and all of this stuff will stay on the planet forever.
If you’re interested in becoming a more thoughtful consumer, I recommend the 2024 Netflix documentary Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy. The doc reveals the tactics that corporations use to keep you spending money. It features ex-insiders from companies like Apple, Amazon and Adidas sharing the reasons why they use greenwashing language, but don’t want you to repair what you buy. One thing that shocked me was the amount of waste that fast fashion creates. The sheer scale of clothing floating in the sea in places like Ghana and the Dominican Republic is scary.
In 2025, I won’t be doing a no buy year. I’m getting married in October and I don’t have anything to wear yet… However, in the spirit of new year’s resolutions I want to make an extra effort to choose second hand clothing wherever possible and encourage others to do the same. I’ve even made a TikTok video about a new charity shop in Rochester to accompany this post.
https://www.tiktok.com/@_bronni/video/7459460146687642912