The Tail Wagging The Dog...

... another of my pet peeves...

Any company or brand expecting you to pay to wear their logos...

Tell me again - why should I do that?

Ought it not to be the other way around, where you pay me to wear, carry, drive your products - seeing I'm a walking advertisement for you???

It used to bug my children that I wouldn't buy branded, labelled products...

They felt left out, when they compared themselves to their peers...

I did occasionally succumb, but to the smallest degree possible...

When my daughters were in primary school, Benetton and Esprit entered the New Zealand clothing market...

My daughters went to a suburban school that had a high socio-economic population and most of their friends were wearing both brands within a matter of weeks of their launch in the country...

Knowing how much peer pressure around body image and popularity affected young girls especially, I gave both girls socks with the Benetton and Esprit brands woven into the tops...

They were so happy; they felt like they were part of the 'in crowd', normal, equals, accepted...

It was a small thing to do to make life a little easier for daughters who have a mother who doesn't fit the mould...

And I had a hard time giving in to the programming, on even that scale...

And this doesn't even address the issues relating to slave labour being employed in Third World countries to make these products and the unholy profits manufacturers are making on the backs of this exploitation...

My mother worked for most of her life in the clothing industry.  I saw how hard she worked and how little she was paid, even in a western factory.   I know the cost of the materials, of marketing and distribution etc...

Why on earth would I want to pay more to be used as a walking billboard to market a label, which, in itself has no substance in reality, is nothing more than an illusion?

 

Pet Peeves: In No Particular Order & Not An Exhaustive List

1:   Women who complain that their man and father of their children has to pay child support for the children he had with another woman...

Why shouldn't he have to pay?

How come these women don't stop to think how they would feel if they were left with the children to raise and no support from the father?

 

2:   Humans, mostly from the western hemisphere, who treat their pets like children and spend enormous amounts of money on them, when there are children in the same city, same country and all over the world starving, ill, abused, homeless, sick...

 

3:    People who still, in this day and age, throw rubbish out of their car windows...   What planet have they been living on that they haven't heard the same "don't litter" message the rest of us have been hearing for the past 30-40 years?

4:    People who don't clean the bath out after they've used it, so the next person is confronted with soap scum and hair from various body parts... oh, and disgusting public toilets...yuck!

5:   Cigarette smoke on skin, hair, clothes, breath... and the smell of beer on a person's breath, especially if you combine those odours and that person is also wearing Old Spice aftershave!... I can't be in the same space with them for more than a few moments...

6:  People who use weasel words in both their personal and professional lives.   I'm a wordsmith - a journalist, researcher, public relations and marketing consultant, social activist - I can see/hear/smell/sense them a mile off... If you want me to take you seriously and treat you and your views with respect, don't try weasally, manipulative, power-play words with me!

To Be Continued... maybe.....