The opening session is all about consumerism and how we can counter that as parents. One of Kym’s experiences was the joy of watching her children get creative and more meaningful in their gift-giving (for example, making a necklace containing a friend’s favorite colors and symbols).

In my blog’s New Year’s Resolutions post, I challenged my readers to shift at least one of their significant, ongoing purchases from a mega-retailer to a local merchant. This is of course easier if you live where I do–a 45-minute drive from big-box stores! I just avoid big box stores altogether and support our Port Townsend Main Street retailers. I find I buy less stuff when I am not tempted/overwhelmed by the overabundance on mega-retailers’ shelves.

You’re taking this concept to another level, and I look forward to your updates!

Mine is run by my (rural) county, and it is mind-boggling to track the requests that get fulfilled. I keep thinking “No way — you’d be lucky to find that for a bundle of money!” And yet the most unlikely “Wanted” posts keep being followed by “Found” (aka “Eureka”) posts. It’s fun, too.

I buy food new, coffee and eating out new.

some but not all of my tools(needed a new screwgun and used was the same price for a lesser gun that I didn’t want). vehicle maintenance should be new(no used tires/oil here).

Oh yeah, I buy ammo new(only a few people manufacture their own bullets). I buy raw materials for my business new, but as locally as I can.

everything else…craigslist. EVERYTHING IS ON CRAIGSLIST. It’s like everyone in this region uses that service. If you really wanted something specific you could put in a few calls to some consignment shops and they’d track down what you wanted for you, but yeah. Craigslist.

F box stores with fall apart junk furniture made by children. I get my furniture at estate sales or from the free section of CL.

F Apple for charging 2K dollars for a computer that is essentially the same as the one they had a child make 4 years ago. I bought the 4 year old one from a guy who bought it new, for 500 bucks.

So good on ya, I wish you the best of luck in trying to do this thing.

Now we have to pay for advertising of products, transportation of farm output and manufacturing output and pay for automobiles to drive to work often far away, and pay for expensive highways. All this adds to the cost of everything.

Both husband and wife need to work full time to afford all this for a family.
Add to this the “things” that we seem to crave and it makes it almost impossible to achieve the lifestyle of the isolated family in today’s world.
Technology and the gadgets that it has spawned increase the expense of modern living. The generations no longer halp each other for the most part. And so family support services such as childcare,
housework, and the like must be hired from outside the family.

We certainly need to scale down this lifestyle and contribute to
sustainability of our earth. We need to take back our world and cherish it and preserve it and start being self sufficient in many ways that we have not been accustomed to for many years. We need to decentralize the cities and reclaim farmland nearer to where people live and begin to interact in new ways so that all ages can interact more often in creating a society that speaks to each other more often. Otherwise our texting thumbs will become over stressed and our conversational skills will atrophy and we will be a society that is completely unreal and only experienced virtually rather than in reality.

Wendy: Thanks for sharing your experience. I’ve been buying mostly used clothes myself for many years. And re: Asia. I was inspired, in part, by Sara Bongiorni’s book, A Year Without ‘Made in China’.