Bigger is Not Better; More is Not Necessary

It's Easter weekend and the media is flooded with bigger, better, and much more expensive ways to celebrate eating candy. As I made my way through the grocery aisles, a thought came to me about how to curb an out-of-control society that demands both bigger and more, more, more: stop feeding the demand and go back to simply meeting the needs.

Shop the cereal aisle and extrapolate that excess to the rest of our lives: there is no need to have literally hundreds of kinds of cereal in dozens of different sizes and brands. The major cereal companies could eliminate half of the product occupying shelf space and still meet the needs of the customer to have a box of cereal. I am one who would gladly buy either the small, the medium, or the large box of cereal, rather than all of the size variations, if it meant that production cost would decrease, along with the price of the product. And I can add my own sugar when I want to have a sweet cereal, an option that is not only cost- and space-effective, but may be an much healthier option that we could train children to accept by refusing to buy the sugared flakes.

One of the few cereals I enjoy is Cream of Wheat, better known simply as "farina," a grain product that few, if any, consumers purchase. I don't buy the famous brand at $4.29 a box; instead, I can buy the same size box of generic farina at Big Lots for $1.00. Last time, I bought 6 boxes and stored the contents in sealed canisters. I'm from the store it and save mindset: I buy what I use, store it in containers, and save money. I figure the extra $3.29 per box is money better off in my pocket than on the corporation's balance sheet.

Many seniors are eating oatmeal, which is being marketed as the drug of choice for dealing with high chloresterol. That's great, but have you checked out the price of plain old oatmeal lately? If you purchase the "slow cooking" kind, you pay a lot less than the "fast cooking" product, but if you buy it in individual packets, you pay even more for so much less. If I ate oatmeal, I'd buy the bag of generic oatmeal and package my own "individual serving size" portions. Result: far fewer products on the shelves, much lower production costs, environmentally friendly concept, and the customer puts the savings into other financial need envelopes.

So, back to the candy aisle and Easter: can you say boiled eggs? Am I the only person on the planet who loves egg salad sandwiches, the best by-product of Easter weekend? Sure, we used to get some candy for Easter, usually jelly beans, peeps, and those solid chocolate eggs wrapped in silver paper, along with one chocolate Easter bunny, but the bulk of the bounty was handed over to Mom and repurposed into meals. You don't miss what you don't have, but if you become conditioned to expect massive baskets filled with candy and incredibly expensive non-edible goodies, that becomes your expectation. If you expect hard-boiled eggs and you find hidden hard-boiled eggs, that's what it's all about!

Parents have a tendency to play the "can I top last year" game, believing that the kid actually remembers last year's Easter basket and wants it bigger and to contain more. We forget the lesson of the first Christmas: the child wants the empty box and the paper! We're the ones who fail to understand that it isn't about what's in the box, it's about how much fun the box becomes once it's empty. Horror of horrors, we also used the same basket year after year: after all, it's a basket, and once the goodies are collected in the basket, it is emptied and ... what? Thrown away? Why? It hasn't been really used, so save it and store it for next Easter.

This need for both bigger and more bugs the hell out of me because people tie their own self-worth to the things they use to define themselves: houses, cars, clothes, and media centers, to name a few. Parents want to be the best parents, especially when compared with their peer parents, and the way to be the best is to give, escalate the giving, and then preen at how well you rate on the parent giving survey.

We all need to get over ourselves and streamline not just the cereal shelves and Easter baskets, but our lives. The old concept of "he who dies with the most toys wins" is no longer applicable because his house is in foreclosure, the family has to file for bankruptcy protection, and collection jars are used to pay the funeral expenses. The quality of life improves when we learn that bigger is not better and more is not necessary.