In my neighborhood there are some similar activities.
About once in a year there is a “Money-Free Zone”, which means that someone rented a big room for a day (for example a gym at a school, during a weekend) and put there some tables. People who want to donate stuff come there, give the stuff to organizers, the organizers sort it out and place it on the tables. Then everyone is free to take whatever they want. At the end of the day, organizers put the remaining stuff to bags and offer it to some charities, and I suppose whatever is rejected ultimately gets thrown out.
This requires some money and work, but only on the side of the organizers. For everyone else it is free. For people like me it is actually a good opportunity to get rid of some things I no longer need, so I usually give about as much as I take. The event is open for everyone, and giving is purely optional.
The problem is that this works okay as long as giving and taking is at least somewhat balanced. I do not need to take as much as I give, but if I take literally nothing, it removes a large part of the incentive to come the next time. Most of the time it is okay—I suppose because most poor people do not get the memo? though that explanation sounds a bit weird—but I have heard that at some places the event was overrun by hordes of poor people (sometimes poor smelly people) which was a bad experience for the donors, so the next year the event was organized at a different location and was not advertised publicly; it was still open for everyone who came, but you needed to be lucky and get the info through the grapevine.
We also have a neighborhood group on Facebook, and related to it there is a mutual donation group, that only the members of the neighborhood group can join. If you want to get rid of something, you post a photo and a description, and the first person who replies can take it.
There is also a website for people selling to each other, where you can also “sell” for a price of 0 €.
Compared to the American versions, as described on Wikipedia, it seems to me that our local version is much less ideological. Like, the Facebook group is not ideological at all, the spirit is “neighbors offering stuff to each other”; at the selling website the spirit is “this is so cheap that I am actually not even asking money for it”. Only the Money-Free Zone has some ideological connotations in the title (it may appeal to people who believe that money is a bad idea in general), but the activity itself is very factual: you bring stuff, you take stuff, no one is giving you lectures on anything. I suspect that whatever is your motivation for organizing such events, not pushing your ideology on the participants makes it a better experience.
(I assume that the main effect of a “Buy Nothing Day” is that people buy that stuff on the previous or the next day instead, so the weekly sales remain the same.)
Not only do I share your guess that the main effect of a buy-nothing day is to shift rather than remove purchasing, I can’t escape a cynical suspicion that the idea of a “Buy Nothing Day”, on a day when major retailers have particularly low prices, might originally have been seeded by those retailers in an attempt to get people to feel good about Not Contributing To Capitalism when what’s actually happening is that they buy the same things but at different times and hence at higher prices.
(I think that probably isn’t what happened. But I wouldn’t bet against it at 10:1 odds.)
In my neighborhood there are some similar activities.
About once in a year there is a “Money-Free Zone”, which means that someone rented a big room for a day (for example a gym at a school, during a weekend) and put there some tables. People who want to donate stuff come there, give the stuff to organizers, the organizers sort it out and place it on the tables. Then everyone is free to take whatever they want. At the end of the day, organizers put the remaining stuff to bags and offer it to some charities, and I suppose whatever is rejected ultimately gets thrown out.
This requires some money and work, but only on the side of the organizers. For everyone else it is free. For people like me it is actually a good opportunity to get rid of some things I no longer need, so I usually give about as much as I take. The event is open for everyone, and giving is purely optional.
The problem is that this works okay as long as giving and taking is at least somewhat balanced. I do not need to take as much as I give, but if I take literally nothing, it removes a large part of the incentive to come the next time. Most of the time it is okay—I suppose because most poor people do not get the memo? though that explanation sounds a bit weird—but I have heard that at some places the event was overrun by hordes of poor people (sometimes poor smelly people) which was a bad experience for the donors, so the next year the event was organized at a different location and was not advertised publicly; it was still open for everyone who came, but you needed to be lucky and get the info through the grapevine.
We also have a neighborhood group on Facebook, and related to it there is a mutual donation group, that only the members of the neighborhood group can join. If you want to get rid of something, you post a photo and a description, and the first person who replies can take it.
There is also a website for people selling to each other, where you can also “sell” for a price of 0 €.
Compared to the American versions, as described on Wikipedia, it seems to me that our local version is much less ideological. Like, the Facebook group is not ideological at all, the spirit is “neighbors offering stuff to each other”; at the selling website the spirit is “this is so cheap that I am actually not even asking money for it”. Only the Money-Free Zone has some ideological connotations in the title (it may appeal to people who believe that money is a bad idea in general), but the activity itself is very factual: you bring stuff, you take stuff, no one is giving you lectures on anything. I suspect that whatever is your motivation for organizing such events, not pushing your ideology on the participants makes it a better experience.
(I assume that the main effect of a “Buy Nothing Day” is that people buy that stuff on the previous or the next day instead, so the weekly sales remain the same.)
Not only do I share your guess that the main effect of a buy-nothing day is to shift rather than remove purchasing, I can’t escape a cynical suspicion that the idea of a “Buy Nothing Day”, on a day when major retailers have particularly low prices, might originally have been seeded by those retailers in an attempt to get people to feel good about Not Contributing To Capitalism when what’s actually happening is that they buy the same things but at different times and hence at higher prices.
(I think that probably isn’t what happened. But I wouldn’t bet against it at 10:1 odds.)