Remember last week when Gwyneth Paltrow took a “food stamp challenge” to supposedly live like someone less fortunate than she? Remember how she miscalculated how much a food stamp recipient has to live on each week and proved that she has no idea how to shop for herself? Remember how she quit said challenge after four days and then celebrated her failure with an $80 meal at an elite Los Angeles restaurant?
Well it appears another wealthy celebrity is trying to appear heroic by living like a normal person.
Ashley Judd, who once considered running against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will take a 30-day challenge as an “unshopper” and buy nothing new. The point of the challenge is to reuse the things you own and “unclutter your life, save money and create a lot less waste.” Things you can’t reuse, like food and gas, are exempted from the challenge.
The challenge comes from an organization called Yerdle, and has a nifty little video showing an anthropomorphic pantyhose egg shopping for random items that we all buy each month — a new purse, a new clock, a new down-feather vest, a new turntable, a new coffee machine, a new violin and something that looks like a new Dalek.
Of course, maybe you need to buy a new coffee machine because your Dalek keeps exterminating it, but then WHY WOULD YOU BUY A NEW DALEK?
(I showed the Dalek-looking object to my editor, who believes it is a sextant. Who needs a new sextant every month? And if you do, you might be at sea too much to be constantly buying other new things.)
But I digress. I’m not sure of the shopping habits of everyone, but I can tell you from my experience (that of a millennial living near a big, expensive city) I don’t buy a new one of these things every month. My puffy vest gathers dust in the summer months and I only ever needed one violin (it’s actually a ukulele and it, too, gathers dust).
But maybe Ashley Judd buys these things and others every month. Us normal people, not so much.
I thought about signing up for Yerdle just to see what was available. It seems to be like an online thrift shop, but you have to wait for what you want to ship. I thought: “Yeah maybe I’ll post some of my old stuff in exchange for Ashley Judd hand-me-downs,” but I wouldn’t go past the part where they asked for my cell phone number.
In all seriousness, there’s nothing really wrong with Yerdle — except that the economy might collapse if everyone stopped buying new things. But whatever.
It appears the point of Yerdle is to combat consumerism — you know, the thing you hated as a goth/punk at your high school in the suburbs.
And the testimonials from people who use Yerdle don’t really focus on the waste of buying new things. They mostly talk about finding great gifts for their friends and family members at great prices. That’s not a problem Judd has.
I’m all for giving unneeded items away to other people, and the online thrift shop kind of sounds like a good idea. But please, spare us the wealthy celebrities taking “challenges” to imitate normal people.
