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Opinion | Next step: change in the cost of living Israel today

2022-02-08T20:40:22.392Z


Efficient consumption begins long before the cart at the supermarket • A long look at the home refrigerator and pantry will reveal quite a few products just before their expiration date and will prevent us from buying double


One can certainly pat ourselves on the back for a successful consumer protest.

But after we got angry at a barn and a diplomat, after comparing pastas and seeing how a brand allows itself to sell us double-priced wheat - even though the other brand's wheat is made in the same factory - even journalist Guy Lerer and the "pipe" system asked aloud what the next step in the cost of living war is.

So it is possible to move on to other shelves in the supermarket and fight over other brands that have exaggerated the height of the bounce from which they pee on us, but perhaps the next step is our inner contemplation as part of the fight over the cost of living?

It's time to think more broadly about what makes us spend money and that maybe we also have a part in making our monthly spending so much.

The easiest and most requested is to pass by pasta at the supermarket and send your hand to the unbranded competitor, it is likely that more and more Israelis are doing it today.

But when was the last time we looked at our shopping cart at the supermarket and exchanged a bit of the rage over prices, thinking about whether we really need this or that product?

How many of the products in the cart we bought in a moment's decision?

How many of them are a form of compensation, and on second thought we could have avoided buying them?

What did we load up on because of an unnecessary operation that made us think "here, we're knocking the system out"?

Effective consumption should start long before the supermarket cart.

A long look into the home refrigerator, the cupboards and the food pantry will reveal quite a few products to us just before their expiration date, will prevent us from buying double products hidden from us and will cut the expense account quite a bit.

This is not a call to become "minimalists", the same people who strongly oppose the ideal that states that objects bring happiness, but a combination of the "less is more" approach is certainly true of the shopping cart as well.

The benefits that will arise from recalculating a trajectory in relation to our consumption will also be healthier, and no less important: energy.

One of the most famous docu-health films, dealing with the US childhood obesity epidemic, "FED UP", describes how in the world we live in, the candy and snack companies have created an environment where it is impossible to avoid their addictive and unhealthy products: if ever candy were waiting for us in the grocery store Or at the supermarket, today they are in every gas station, in the schools, in the cash registers of do-it-yourself shops, even in the hospitals, which we will reach because we could not avoid them - vending machines are waiting for us to sell more of them in every corner.

Companies know how to do what they are supposed to do: direct the entire chain of temptation - brand building, seductive advertising, aggressive marketing at points of sale.

That does not mean we should be a part of this game and swallow the bait.

Consumer protest is important, but one does not have to be a psychologist to understand that its energy is built on negative feelings: anger, boycott, sacrifice.

Effective consumer thinking, on the other hand, comes from a positive place: examination, separation of focus and treatment, a sense of satisfaction from reaching the right conclusions, or in other words - much more fun to find that you have reduced monthly expenses as a result of prudent behavior.

Were we wrong?

Fixed!

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Source: israelhayom

All news articles on 2022-02-08

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