Review of The Day The World Stops Shopping by J. B. MacKinnon

“The most savage of consumerism’s ironies is that those who consume the least offer suffer far more of consumption’s harms than those who consume the most.”

— J.B. MacKinnon

*The Day the World Stops Shopping* by J.B. McKinnon (2021). Published by Ecco.

Sustainability has been a conversation I’ve had ever since I was in college.

I had a unique experience compared to many people my age or class, as I was able to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York for my undergraduate degrees, and that school absolutely solidified my beliefs that consumption, and by extension, fashion, was one of the plagues of the Earth.

Environmental concerns should be at the forefront of everyone’s minds right now as the world is about to go through rapid warming due to the effects of climate change, and a lot of people in the Western world are unable to acknowledge the fact they’re a part of the problem.

I saw The Day the World Stops Shopping promoted by one of my favorite small YouTubers lately—you can find her channel here. She made a video about the books she read that convinced her to try and stop shopping fast fashion, and this was one of them.

It was one of the only books I had never heard of on her list, so I put in an order at my local library immediately so I could check it out. When the book finally was in my hands, I read it in one sitting—there was a wealth of information found throughout, things I found very valuable.

Onwards with the review!

What would happen in the world was to stop shopping?

In this review, I thought it would be more efficient to go over some of McKinnon’s key talking points throughout rather than the traditional reviews and summaries I do for other books, such as memoirs and fiction. Let’s go through some of those points in this review since they’re worth isolating and talking about in tandem with each other.

There’s a good mix of sociology, business, environmental studies throughout the book, and we kind of need that interdisciplinary approach when we’re talking about climate change since capitalism is a root cause to our problems.

McKinnon’s work tends to focus a lot on the environmental aspects of consumerism, if that wasn’t obvious already, and fashion is a key part of the equation. Fast fashion is one of the world’s biggest polluters, and people are buying way more clothes than they actually need to get through the day.

There are specific company examples extrapolated when it comes to the efforts it takes in order to make the clothes in, for example, Bangladesh, and how those living in the wealthy world are the ones actually reaping the benefits of this labor. Those living in the Global South tend to suffer from the effects of consumption, and cannot actually enjoys its benefits because of how they’re designated the source of the labor.

Patagonia is brought up at one point, and how their marketing strategy is to appear environmental friendly. Not saying they aren’t in the post, as the work they’re doing is still better than a lot of other people’s right now, but it still requires resources and goods in order to produce the products they’re selling on the market.

There’s a distinct juxtaposition in how those living in the United States, South Korea, or Europe tend to consume a lot more than the average person in India, which is an easy deduction, but McKinnon digs deeper into these somewhat known facts and makes broader implications as to what this exactly means in the overarching world and its contexts.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book to me is when McKinnon consults with economists and scientists. The COVID-19 pandemic is brought up as a moment in time in which people stopped shopping and driving around as much, so there actually was some progress when it came to meeting the environmental goals of stopping climate change.

But McKinnon talks to an economist who has a model for what it would look like for GDP if everyone were to just stop shopping, and there are multiple outcomes that can come out of this. The economy could tank completely, we could become more self-sufficient, etc.—there are many pathways that the disaster model could follow.

A key point I found myself fixated on was how we end up killing ourselves for the name of these goods, and kill others in the Global South to get what we want, even if it’s a cheap shirt from Walmart.

The idea that if we cut back we could have more of a circular economy and work less, providing more meaningful lives and work with what we actually do, is a powerful one. I think it’s an important one too, as we need to be kinder with the world. Will we achieve this? I honestly don’t think so. Try taking away people’s purchasing power, like during COVID, and it will only cause more problems.

Overall Thoughts

This is a book that’s quite useful for sorting through priorities and confronting the realities of the things we deem basic necessities. To make the most basic products or even a ton of homes no one will be living inside of in a hundred years’ time, we’re completely destroying entire ecosystems just to fit the needs of overconsumption.

This book could be considered a proposal for what could happen if we simply cut down on our consumption by not even half, but in a world where we keep buying more and more, this increasingly seems impossible.

I do think this is a must-read in the era of climate anxiety, as these are the necessary steps we need to take as an individual to keep on surviving.

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