The True Cost of Black Friday

November 25, 2021 3 min read

The True Cost of Black Friday

 

 

Hallelujah the festive season is around the corner...

....and today our big dear friend Black Friday. Retailers offering everything they can possibly think of with big discounts for consumers to drastically change into wild crazy animals. And then they lock them up and slaughter them. Wuhu... Figuratively. It’s called capitalism and consumerism.

Very profit friendly, not very people and planet friendly. But who cares when one can get a big, wide TV 80% off??

Well… we all should, or at least if we care about our survival and the future of humanity. 


Smashing down the discount buttons

It’s all fun now. Or, in fact, not really. Not even now. Retailers and firms on the end of the chain affecting and messing up the whole chain is a real thing. Smashing the discount buttons is like flicking the first stone in a domino game. There they go, like lightening up a match in the rainforest. There it goes.

It’s basically like the start of the end, a systematic environmental collapse, and then priced at a discount. Ka-tching! we are buying into our own destruction. 


Are we brainwashed?

As much as we are being encouraged to forget, before being consumers, we are also individuals, people, and humans deep down. Humans that are interconnected with all the biodiversity and systems around us.

People that take specific actions because they want a happy life on a healthy planet with healthy and strong relationships. 

This is why this Black Friday, we invite you to drop that greedy consumer inside of you, drop the trashy consumerism urges, and come back to the person who is aware of the actual cost of their decisions.  Drop the Trash!

Let’s talk about true costs 

Research done by money.co.uk has found that online shoppers during this Black Friday could emit over 386,234 tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

That is equivalent to 215,778 return flights between London and Sydney and has the same weight as 3,679 blue whales (Haqqi, 2021).

A Friday indeed has never looked that dark. 


Here at Moyee…

We are very far from being perfect and not naive enough to believe that we have tackled the world's complexity to really calculate the true cost of our coffee, but we have been doing the most to try!

Poverty, child labour, climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, forced migrations… All these ingredients can be found on almost every cup of coffee and, unfortunately for free. 

Using the True Price method, we can reduce social and environmental costs and ensure they are included in our true price.

Our ambition is to offer the coffee world a business model that reduces the 'dark ingredients' you don’t pay for and helps fund positive externalities such as a living income for the farmers and reforestation programs. 


Buy Less Buy Better

True pricing can transform our economic system in three phases:

1. first by creating transparency

2. second by enabling the remediation of hidden costs

3. and finally by creating a level playing field

(TruePrice, 2021)

And you can transform the system by just asking yourself twice if you really need it, if you would purchase the discounted item, if you would have calculated the true price if the discounted price would equal the external costs of harming the planet and with it the earth. 


This Black Friday, we invite you to drop the trash you don’t need in your life.


Your choices are your greatest power. Choose wisely.




 


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