Common Ground: Buying Out

December 2006

Buying Out

Fed up with consumer culture, a group of San Franciscans made a pledge to purchase nothing new — and in the process, started a movement.

By Nicole Achs Freeling

It was a resolution their friends and family never thought would stick. Last December in San Francisco, already hung over emotionally from a season of frantic consumption, John Perry was discussing his frustration with the limits of recycling over dinner with friends. As the conversation progressed, he and his guests began thinking about their own “stuff”: gifts mounting under Christmas trees that would join the other stuff piling up in closets, basements and storage units — until it eventually found its way to a landfill.

Perry and his friends decided that night to make a pledge: The consumer buck would stop with them.

Calling itself the “Compact” after the pledge made by the Mayflower pilgrims to create a new way of life, the friends agreed to just say no to retail purchases for a whole year. Members, they agreed, would acquire things they needed over the next 12 months at places like thrift shops and garage sales and through donations and barter. By hook and crook, but no new stuff.

Well, they have a few exceptions. After all, it’s hard to come across good used food, medicine and toiletries. Underwear and socks could be had, too, fresh from the fruit of the globalized loom. But everything else they bought had to be used, with free hand-me-downs and castoffs being the most preferable means of acquisition.

The pioneering Compacters set up a Yahoo! group, excitedly launched a blog, and congregated for monthly potlucks to give each other support and to put out the word for things they needed: glue sticks to grand pianos, the latter of which Perry got from a school that was giving one away. Compacters have their phones ring regularly with other members calling to borrow tools and to ask for encouragement when resolve started to flag, that living without that new pair of buttery leather boots was, in fact, possible.

Now, it’s December again and their self-imposed transcendentalism is drawing to a close — yet most of the original Compacters say they have no intention of returning to their all-consuming ways. “One thing that you realize in the Compact is that everything that matters has nothing to do with stuff,” says Sarah Pelmas, a dean at a private school in San Francisco.

Compacters like Pelmas, who recently married fellow Compacter Matt Eddy, say relying on each other rather than running out to the store to get something they need has been a profound exercise in community building. “Shopping is isolating,” Perry points out. “You never say to a friend, ‘Let’s get together with the kids and go to Target.’” Instead, Compact members go to interaction-rich swap meets, borrow items and trade services, make things for each other and throw no-gift birthday parties for their kids.

Putting a Grand a Month Back in Their Pockets

Erin Conroy, a Compacter living in Fargo, North Dakota, learned about the Compact when she was researching ways to save money. Since she and her husband started eschewing new purchases, she says they save $500 to $1,000 a month. She’s managed to avoid retail in outfitting her children, too, getting used snow boots and cloth diapers from freecycle.org, a website for people giving things away. This fall, she borrowed canning supplies from a friend so she could harvest apples from the trees in her garden. And this Christmas, Conroy is stocking gift baskets with sundry apple-y delights for everyone on her list. “I’ve made apple sauce, apple butter and over 30 apple pies. And I’ve never canned before!” she laughs. “I’m not Laura Ingles. I’m an urban girl.”

Touching a Nerve

The group seems to be on to something.

Members here and abroad have swelled the Compact to 1,500 members, from locales as far-flung as Eugene, Ore., to the United Kingdom. National magazines and newspapers have featured the Compact along with the Today Show, where members appeared alongside a major national retailer demonstrating home storage solutions. Besides the “what are those crazy kids in San Francisco doing now?” stories, right-wing talk show hosts have found the Compact threatening enough to accuse it of undermining capitalism and labeled their Henry David Thoreau-like ethos “bad for America.”

For their part, the original Compacters are surprised by the size of the ripple they’ve made in the cultural waters. “When it started out, it was just a little group,” Pelmas says. “I couldn’t believe anyone else would be interested.” They didn’t set out to change the world. What many do feel they’ve changed is themselves.

Opening Themselves to a New World

In the first few weeks of the Compact, Perry says he had to fight impulses to wander into shops and browse. “I was an active recreational shopper. I was addicted to the thrill of the chase.” But, he says, those urges subsided. “I was surprised by how easy it was. We realized how much stuff we already had.”

Members have found they are able to get just about everything they need without resorting to retail. Pelmas and Eddy just bought their first home and — each coming from separate apartments — furnished it almost entirely with things they already had. What they didn’t have, they found gently used on Craigslist. “We got a refrigerator that was a year old,” Pelmas says. “It was in perfect condition, but it was white, and they were going to stainless steel.” The garden hose stumped her for a while — but then she found a doggy day care with an extra one. “Whatever you need,” she says, “is usually no more than two people away.”

Not that temptation doesn’t or hasn’t beckoned. Pelmas has pined for fluffy new pillows. Shawn Rosenmoss daydreams over a set of energy-efficient red velvet curtains. For now, they do without.

Being in the Compact has been more difficult for Rosenmoss’s two almost-teenage daughters, Sophie, 12, and Naomi, 8. There was a crisis when the girls were invited to birthday parties and needed to get presents. “For some of these kids, hand-made gifts are just not going to be okay,” says Rosenmoss, who let the girls use their allowance money to buy gifts.

For their own birthdays, the girls have gotten event tickets, art classes, dance lessons and other “things” that don’t come in a box, or from a box store. At Sophie’s party last year, the guests brought beads and everyone helped make them into a necklace. “I think kids are really reasonable,” Rosenmoss says, “There’s a real focus on what’s fair in the world. The girls will say, ‘We’re not buying new jeans because they involve sweatshop labor and it pollutes the environment.’ It’s saddling them with a lot, but it teaches them they can do something about it. They can take a stand. They aren’t powerless.”

A Compact Christmas

As for Perry back in San Francisco, this season is a lot like Christmases past, but with a few key differences: The tree in the living room — a stately artificial spruce — was one claimed from a friend who was about to throw it away, along with six boxes of ornaments. The presents for his five-year-old son Ben and nine-month-old daughter Louisa are all second-hand. For extended family and friends, Ben is making donations to nonprofit organizations like the Heifer Project, which provides families in developing countries with sustainable food sources.

Perry says he could have never imagined a year ago that the Compact would be something he’d be involved with indefinitely. “We just wanted to see if we could do it,” he says. “But it turned out to be a pretty good way to live.”

Nicole Achs Freeling is a freelance writer living in Berkeley. She’s written for USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, MSN.com, Natural Living Today and others.

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