A Short History of BND

A Short History of Buying Nothing around the world

In the Beginning. . .

... were, believe it or not, the economists. Or, more accurately, (a) some (b) political (c) economists. Before the first BND hit the streets in Vancouver back in the early nineties there was already a considerable track record of more than a hundred years of enquiry and debate on the consumption and hyper-consumption sides of capitalism. And as the productive power of the engines of the economy shifted into high gear, the buying power of even us ordinary people began to be not only noticeable but even has been increasingly considered by quite some number of thoughtful observers as a necessary precondition of well-being as the 20th century picked up speed. "We buy so that others may live" might be thought of as a slogan for this current of thinking and practice. Political economists such as Heilbrunner and Hirschmann among others have raised many questions on this score, which even today are far from being satisfactorily answered. A recent essay that you will find on the site of the ever provocative Paul Krugman provides a pretty good synopsis of the main line economic thinking on our topic.

But back on the action side, out there on the streets, what is now coming to be firmly known around the planet as the World Buy Nothing Day campaign traces to several initiatives, places and names. The first "No Shop Day" (as it was initially called) that we know of was started in 1992 as a personal initiative by Ted Dave, a Canadian who made his living by working in the advertising world. His idea was to organize a collective protest against the unrelenting calls to overconsume, with the advertising and marketing professions at the core. His original motto was: "Enough is enough!" In addition to the Buy Nothing Day and Adbusters sites on the Web, the battery of proposed weapons included uncommericals and spoof ads (both of which you can access directly here.

On the other side of the Atlantic two years later an independent project was proposed and tested in 1994, led Wolfgang Zuckermann, Eric Britton and The Commons. Their project and call to action was called Consumer Holiday. At the time the Consumer Holiday team knew nothing of the pioneering Canadian project, but came to know it in the process of developing ideas and getting support for their own proposed anti-consumption project. As a result we dropped our proposal and arranged for The Commons to provide immediate support to the Adbuster's project as soon as we learned of it. We decided to call it This support continues to this day.

Since great minds often do work alike, it was hardly surprising that on year later, in 1995, Omslag, the Workplace for Sustainable Development in Sint-Michielsgestel, introduced the International "Niet-Winkeldag" (No Shop Day) in the Netherlands. As was the case with the project of The Commons, the Dutch project has since worked in close collaboration with the Adbusters campaign, as can be see from the menu on this site.

There have been a number of other independent precursors, and indeed if you have anything on them we would be pleased to add them to this little historical overview. Since then the idea has been picked up in more and more countries as you can readily see from the materials collected in this site and from tehence to its many links and extensions.

Additional Background and Perspective

Here are several introductory statements on BND and its meanings and objectives, that you may find useful by way of introduction to the considerable breadth of thinking that is out there on this subject:

And for more we invite you to click to the contact page here identifying the main coutnry BND programs of which we have information.

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