Let’s Try To Do Less “Shopping Hauls”
W&S Culture and Society Editorial Team
SHARE:
If you search “shopping haul” on TikTok, you’ll get over 6 billion hits. This stunned us as millennials who has always viewed Gen Z as the more progressive, reasonable generation, especially regarding environmentalism.
Still, shopping hauls have the same, if not greater, chokehold on Gen Z as they did to us millennials raised at the height of the YouTube “beauty guru” era. How did this happen? What can we do as a collective moving forward to try and tackle this detrimental norm that’s prevailed for the greater part of the last century?
In this post, we delve into what shopping hauls are, how they are unaligned with the ethos of conscious living, and how we can instill better habits into the next generation of consumers in the era of climate change.
What Are Shopping Hauls ?
Shopping hauls describe when a person goes out and buys many items. While this activity has probably been around for a long time, shopping hauls as we know them today are a more recent trend.
Shopping hauls of our generation are defined not only by someone going to buy things but by the person uploading video content to a social media platform like YouTube, TikTok or Instragam detailing all the items they purchased and the experience they had doing so.
Youtube doesn’t allow you to see the number of videos a search has, but if you search Instagram and Tiktok, the search #haul has billions of hits. One can only assume that YouTube will reflect these trends as well.
Wondering why you’re seeing ads? Check out our Disclosure Policy.
Where Do Shopping Hauls Come From?
Shopping hauls are no doubt the brainchild of YouTue beauty gurus. This type of content became extremely popular around 2008-2015 and was the premier content of the then-largest internet community.
Notable influencers like Jackie Aina, Bethany Mota, Huda Beauty, Carli Bybel, and Desi Perkins built many of their respective multi-million subscriber counts by making shopping haul content. Whether they were buying makeup, clothes, homeware, or anything in between, the YouTube community was dying to know what they thought about what they bought.
“
It’s important to understand that YouTube beauty influencers became the premier source consumers went to before buying new cosmetics, clothes, or jewelry.”
It might be hard for those of you who didn’t grow up in this era to conceptualize how big this content and those making it were. It’s essential to keep in mind that YouTube was estimated to be taking up 10% of internet bandwidth alone in 2007 when social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram were still in their infancy.
It’s important to understand that YouTube beauty influencers became the premier source consumers went to before buying new cosmetics, clothes, or jewelry. The modern form of the parasocial relationship was birthed out of their content creation, and their subscribers viewed them as a friend that they got to catch up with every week.
Therefore, when a YouTube influencer bought a new product, it wasn’t just about the product. As described by Chloe James, it was a person you considered trustworthy giving a “vote of confidence to a brand’s ethics and values”.
Another element was the inspirational aspect of shopping hauls. The average American household income during the height of haul videos was around $50,045, and most families were still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis.
Disposable income was meager for most Americans, and watching people you considered friends buy things in bulk was gratifying. One on hand, it allowed some escapism from the harsh financial realities of a recession. On the other, it allowed consumers to get a better idea of a product before they bought it to use the limited funds they had most efficiently.
Shopping hauls are now considered core content for content creators across the spectrum.
What Negative Impacts Do Shopping Hauls Have?
Like most types of internet content, shopping hauls are not without controversy. The more they’ve grown in popularity, the more people have begun to examine its possible downsides critically.
The rise in popularity of ANTI-Hauls, or making content talking about things you will no longer buy, attest to this fact. But why? Well, here are some commonly touched upon issues that I’ve seen:
no. 1
Shopping Hauls Reinforce The Trend Cycle
The fashion industry first coined the trend cycle, and describes the popularity of a specific type of style or piece of clothing. The trend cycle has five stages: (1) introduction, (2) increase, (3) peak, (4) decline, and (5) obsolescence. In fashion, the trend cycle has become shortened in the context of fast fashion brands profiting from “micro trends”.
Microtrends tend to rise faster in popularity but fall even quicker into obsolescence. The problem with this is that quickening the trend cycle produces more waste as clothes have to be made quickly with low quality to satisfy demand but are deemed unfashionable and useless within a short period after they’re bought.
This microtrend cycle doesn’t just happen in the fashion industry. It’s now a norm impacting beauty, home, and health and wellness industries. As a result, more people buy more things more often that will end up being thrown away!
no. 2
Shopping Hauls Normalize People Having Excessive Amounts Of Stuff
How much is too much? According to influencers who still regularly participate in shopping haul content, there’s no such thing.
We’re not going to go on some annoying minimalist rant here, but I think we can all agree: there is no doubt that our collective relationship with consumption has to change.
There are groups within this collective (i.e. white/European, upper-middle-class people) who especially need to take some extra responsibility and acknowledge how they’ve been the leading group responsible for entrenching this harmful consumption norm.
Influencers at times will complain that negative feedback about their shopping hauls is a result of viewer envy. However, this perspective falls short. For starters, it’s not absurd for people going through financial hardship to feel envious of those who can spend loads of money on items they don’t need and will most likely be thrown away very soon.
Wondering why you’re seeing ads? Check out our Disclosure Policy.
Wealth inequality has been steadily rising in the US since the 1970s, and it’s only projected to continue on this devastating trend. With many people struggling to make ends meet, frustration with an influencer’s displays of runaway consumerism are not necessarily unwarranted.
While not all influencers may be posting their shopping haul videos to “flex” their audience, that doesn’t mean it can’t come off that way. (Especially when influencers whose goal is to flex their extensive wealth and privilege are making similar content simultaneously.)
The influencer economy of creating shopping haul videos in the context of a pandemic and a recession is, in many ways, super weird. We say this not to shame influencers or anyone who enjoys watching their content but instead to recognize the validity of criticisms highlighting the complicated ethics. Remember, here at W&S: we’re all about nuance.
no. 3
Most Items That Can Be “Hauled” Are Produced In Inhumane Environments
Not all items are created equal. Usually, consumer goods at mid to low range prices and accessible online and in-person to most of the country (or the world) were probably made through a sketchy supply chain.
This is because retailers and businesses are all about their bottom line: profit. Thus, they will only offer “cheap products” to consumers when they can lower production costs. If not, this incurred cost of production is transferred to the consumer, making the product more expensive and, therefore, less financially desirable.
Items that are hauled tend to be cheaper, as the cheaper something is, the more things you can buy. Therefore the supply chain representing the bulk of items purchased by influencers follows the sketchy route.
What does this sketchy supply chain look like, you might ask? It seems like H&M is repeatedly coming under fire for their refusal to ensure and prove they provide livable wages across their entire supply chain.
It also looks like Target selling suspiciously cheap crochet products which take a large amount of human energy to produce. Or it might look like Victoria’s Secret making an accessible, fair trade lingerie line whose raw materials were sourced from child laborers.
Wages are one of the most significant expenses for a business when trying to make and sell a product and tend to be the easiest area where a brand starts cutting production costs.
Hence, many products you’ll see influencers do shopping hauls from will be from brands that hire people living in non-western or eastern European countries, where the standards of acceptable minimum wage or working conditions are drastically lower than that of the people to which the final product will be sold to.
This model of outsourcing production to poorer countries is nothing new, and the data shows that it tends to impact BIPOC women the worst. For these models to work, companies must take advantage of women’s already disadvantaged status in the Global South as workers.
It’s been reported that many garment workers are working at least 60+ hours a week and only making about $53.93/£45/€62 per month, which is nowhere near enough to provide for themselves and their families adequately.
What’s more, these low wages are being earned in working conditions that are extremely dangerous. Whether it’s knowingly putting workers in contact with unsafe chemicals without proper PPE, cramming too many of them into small, unsanitary buildings, or not providing enough food and water, items produced cheaply through outsourcing are not always made with the best intentions.
Wondering why you’re seeing ads? Check out our Disclosure Policy.
Conscious Alternatives To The Traditional Shopping Hauls
Shopping hauls are not aligned with our goals to create a more sustainable future. We have to think about ways we can enjoy consumption, to some extent, without destroying people and the planet in the process.
Here are some alternatives worth thinking about before you go on a shopping haul spree:
Closest Clean & Switch
Are you looking for some new clothes? Why not try trading with your friends? Closest cleanouts are a yearly must, and I’m sure you haven’t cleaned out your closet in the longest time. You and your friends can clean out each of your wardrobes, then take your unwanted clothes, put them in a pile, and trade with each other!
The best part about this is that if you are like me and have a hard time letting go of something as you’re afraid you might miss it, you can always rest assured that the clothing item isn’t too far away and is with one of your friends you can easily borrow it from if need be.
Watch ANTI-Haul Content BEFORE You Buy
Watching anti-hauls before you buy will help you put your desire to purchase into perspective. Whether you’re looking for clothes, shoes, makeup or something in between, it’s essential to take that small step to think about why you’re looking for it in the first place.
Follow The Rule: No Buy Until You Trade Or Donate
This one’s easy. Once you complete a closet or general yearly cleanout, commit to not bringing anything new into your space until you let something go.
Following this rule was a game-changer for me as it allowed me to think out what I wanted to buy and why before I did. If I wanted to haul, I had to anti-haul many things I already had to charities or friends. Not only did this rule help me become a more conscious shopper, but it also made the experience of getting new things so much better!
