Purchasing Power

As spring finally arrived at the end of May, I took one of my all too infrequent trips to the Maltby Street market area...
No, this isn't yet another post extolling the virtues of buying local: apart from the honey, I don't think much for sale in Spa Terminus can be classed as truly local, it's in central London ffs. However I'm not going to apologise for the pleasure I get from shopping there and judging by the numbers of other middle class foodie cliche types, I'm not the only one. For me, buying good food is a pleasure: seeing it and smelling it, the anticipation of cooking and eating it. However, I understand that not everyone feels the same. I know people who view all aspects of the food consumption process as an inconvenience to be endured for the shortest amount of time possible. I pity them in my patronising middle class foodie way, but ultimately if they think there are more important or interesting things in life than food, then good luck to them. I will continue to get my thrills at food markets.
For me it is part of my weekend entertainment, so I am happy to go and spend money that I would otherwise spend on a football match, because the amounts involved are similar. And I need to have a decent amount of money to spend because these sorts of markets are expensive right? Well, they're not cheap, but as my butcher never tires of pointing out on Twitter, neither are supermarkets. Indeed the last time I went to Maltby Street, my spend was slightly more than I might spend in a trip to the supermarket, but then I had bought slightly more of certain things than I might on a normal trip to the supermarket; I was stocking up. At the time though, it occurred to me that I had spent a lot of money, which is a thought that rarely crosses my mind at the supermarket, or at least isn't so persistent. The only obvious reason I could find for this (and this may well be obvious to everyone else) was the fact that in order to do my shopping at the market I had to make several financial transactions instead of just one.
Experts in managing personal finances are always encouraging us to use cash instead of cards, as it gives us an understanding of the value of the purchases we make. I would add that in buying our goods individually or in small batches we become strangely more aware of the total value of our purchases. This is another product of the sorts of economies of scale I'm always banging on about: if we consider adding an item to an already large supermarket shop, its cost appears insignificant against the much larger cost of the total shopping bill. We will therefore add items to our shop safe in the knowledge that they will make little difference. Of course if we were to add up all these 'insignificant' extras over the course of a month, we'd probably quickly become aware that they were actually fairly significant. But we don't add things up that way, we only see them in their immediate context, which is why, when our immediate context is a single transaction for a small number of goods, each item appears much more costly. For some reason this makes us believe that markets are expensive and supermarkets are cheap even when much of the evidence is entirely contradictory.

Product Push

You may have noticed that I haven't posted so much in recent months. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which is that I've been busy doing other things. Although I write my blog on the tube, when there is little else for me to do, so maybe it's at least partly a motivational thing, although I think it's more to do with technology. I started this blog as something constructive to do on my phone whilst underground. Most apps require constant communication with the mother ship, which is simply not going to happen on a subterranean public transport network, so I thought I'd do something that only needs uploading to the internet when it's finished. Of course form the start I was wrong about this: the blogger app would constantly be trying to find my location, or download draft posts that I'd saved whilst offline. The whole process can be incredibly frustrating, but it's an experience that is repeated time and time again with apps on my phone. They cause all kinds of havoc with the phone memory because they're storing tonnes of data offline, but when I try to use any of them it appears that all this data is insufficient to make them work offline.
I imagine this is the result of the technology being designed around the understanding of life as lived by people in Palo Alto: high spec software for high spec technology, usable anywhere there is a good WiFi or mobile signal, which is everywhere right? It is software designed to a single ideal: that more is better. Again unfortunately, it is the old world of commerce driving the new world of technology. Indeed this is the illusion that modern technology has given us: just because we have allowed it to change every aspect of our lives, we assume that in some way the underlying business structures are different, when they're still very much based on the Henry Ford model of mass production and the George Gillette model of obsolescence.
Google recently launched a test version of the balloon it intends to use to bring wireless services to the more remote parts of the world. Presumably this is done with the intention of being able to sell more services into markets such as Africa, but they may need to rethink their software offering in such a case, as I can't imagine users in the developing world upgrading their hardware every two years or less just to keep up with the software. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe that's what's so great about mobile computing: any shortcomings can always be presented as something that can be fixed by upgrading, constantly selling up on the idea that perfection is just round the corner, as long as we're willing to pay for it. It's a win win for all the companies involved, especially the network providers who get to make most of their money providing finance for buying the latest technology. If I were cynical, I would say that it is in the interests of the network providers not to improve their service too much so they can encourage people to buy new hardware to get a better service. Regardless, we are sold a dream of perfection that is ever diminishing on the horizon and we seem willing to chase it relentlessly.
I think pretty much the best thing I've ever done with this blog is name it: I genuinely do need saving from what I want, as do we all: the accelerated process of consumption and disposal drags us all along in it's wake. However I don't think I need saving by someone else; just as the agency to engage in this buying frenzy is mine, so is the agency to disengage from it. We are never going to persuade massive corporations to stop selling us stuff if we just keep on buying it: they exist to perpetuate that status quo. Consumer power is a genuine force, that is felt keenest when it is withheld altogether. I suppose the question is are we, as consumers, willing to refrain from automatically following the upgrade path like sheep? It'll be hard: I'm not 'due' a new phone for another six months, but I've probably been thinking about it for the last six. Maybe I need to spend those six months researching software (and probably an OS) that will work well on my aging phone. I'm not saying I'll never get a new phone - that would be ridiculous - but maybe I can slow down the upgrade cycle by a year or so. Maybe if we all did that, the manufacturers and software providers will divert some of their attention from the shiny future to the problems of optimising the tarnished present.
In the meantime I guess I'll just have to put up with the Blogger app constantly trying to update my location (I'm underground - you can tell by the lack of signal) and whatever else it would rather do than let me get on and write this blog. And you, dear reader will have to get used to less frequent rants from me. I'm guessing we'll both just about cope.