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A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complet
by jsomau 6y ago
A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.
The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.
Here's what I'm planning next:
- Detecting the checkouts and extracting the checkout total generally across websites still needs refinement.
- Storing the purchases/savings locally in the extension storage to show you a graph of spending and saving.
- Showing a CO2 savings estimate.
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumerism/khdjgifdbcmpgadopnlhiffkbjljonhk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-consumerism/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con...
- johnmaguire2013 6y agoWow, this is exactly what I need. I've recently been thinking a lot about how much less likely I am to purchase a product if I map its cost back to my hours worked. Thanks for this!
- jsomau 6y agoI'm stoked you connect with the idea. Feel free to reach out with any feedback.
- mav3rick 6y agoHi I had another idea. You could also show "If you invested X dollars in VTI, your returns could be Y in 5 years Z in 10 years J in 15 years" X is the amount at the checkout page.
- jsomau 6y agoHaha, I love this - yeah there's lots of incentives available so maybe I allow the user to select which types of metrics are most meaningful to them. This is going on the list for sure!
- gerash 6y agoYour extension sounds cool but what I'd love is a system to suggest if I should go premium or cheap on an expense. For example I'd go super cheap on wired earbuds but premium on a set of knives. Or super cheap on knives but premium on an electric knife sharpener
- sq_ 6y agoMy (highly imperfect) solution to that problem is usually to go find the niche internet forum/subreddit for whatever thing I'm looking to buy and try to see what people there are interested in in my price range. I'm sure I end up with results biased towards whatever's in vogue for that community and likely something a bit more expensive, but it seems to have been a reasonably successful strategy in terms of getting things that fit my needs. Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.
- andrepd 6y ago> Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations. Indeed, it's a freaking scourge. My current tactic is to append "reddit" to my searches. Often there's a subreddit of mostly genuine enthusiasts about $thing.
- jldugger 6y ago> A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase. > The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying. I like the idea, but this could backfire on me =/ app: "it will take you 10 minutes to afford this" me: "but it took 30 minutes to decide which one! now i need to buy three!"
- jsomau 6y agoIt also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe they'll decide to not buy all 3. Not guaranteed to save everyone or anyone.
- hamandcheese 6y agoThis was my exact thought... I already rationalize too many purchases with “whelp, that’s not even a days work!”
- eyelidlessness 6y agoSmall purchases easily eat up way more budget than most people realize. I bet a “you’ve $$$ in the last $TIME” feature would really help with that use case.
- jldugger 6y agoI mean, I really don't have a spending problem. It's a joke.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoOh I got you, I was just piggybacking for the OP’s eyes if they see it. Because lots of people do end up having budgeting difficulties due to a large number of small, seemingly inconsequential purchases.
- 6y ago
- ambivalents 6y agoMaybe you can charge companies to be hidden from the service :D
- jsomau 6y agoSurely you're joking, Mr ambivalents!
- esoterica 6y agoFor a number of bay area devs I suspect this might have the opposite psychological effect. A $50 price tag might put some people off until they realize it's only 15-20 minutes of work.
- dheera 6y agoYeah this is exactly what I was thinking. I am certainly more put off by $50 than N minutes. On the other hand I often base my purchases based on "Will this $50 spend save more than N minutes of my time" For example a top-filling humidifer may cost $50 more than a bottom-filling one but I spend an extra 1 minute fighting with the bottom-filling one and cleaning up water spills so after 15 uses it makes up its price difference.
- jsomau 6y agoThe extension also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe it won't help everyone, but I hope that it reaches some.
- koolba 6y agoI want this but with a squeeze grip that shocks you for N ms for each dollar that you are about to spend. If you can’t hold down the grip and bear the shock, then you’re not allowed to run the charge.
- loosescrews 6y agoThe email address listed in the privacy policy doesn't seem to be valid. I couldn't find stated clearly one way or the other whether or not you collect information about the sites that I visit.
- jsomau 6y agoIt does not except in a single case. All the data is stored locally in the browser extension storage otherwise. As part of the onboarding flow you can choose to anonymously submit your money saved to the online tally at https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/ https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/ You can also read the source code here: https://github.com/jsom/curb-your-consumerism/tree/main/src https://github.com/jsom/curb-your-consumerism/tree/main/src I realize there have been browser extension authenticity issues recently with some sketchy things being published like The Great Suspender https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263 https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1.... I've got to spend more time investigating a way to remove this question for users, but my intent is to never collect any data beyond the anonymous online tally of the homepage which is opt-in only. Sorry, I need to replace that email address it is unfortunately a placeholder. Side project has some loose threads. I'll do that tonight. Edit: email fixed
- nitrohorse 6y ago> I've got to spend more time investigating a way to remove this question for users... At least on Firefox AMO, their new “verified” add-on badge is worth a look. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges
- archarios 6y agoCould it also estimate CO2 output from delivery? I always try to buy local even if it's online when possible. Luckily this is usually possible in the bay area/California :)
- jsomau 6y agoThat is actually where I was going to start. Tracking the CO2 output for the production of millions of individual items across the internet is hard but I believe there are some services that can estimate CO2 for deliveries based on country + zip.
- Sholmesy 6y agoeven if you just did it from "city center -> the address on the postal" -> estimate gas -> CO2 estimation would be useful. Lots of these suggestions are great, but honestly just focus on the first version. Great idea tbh
- offtop5 6y agoLove the idea, but I found it very intrusive and removed it. As in I don't like the redirect Keep refining it !
- jsomau 6y agoThanks for trying it! So unfortunately I can't launch an extension popup over top of the checkout, it's just not in the browser extension APIs AFAIK. One alternative was to inject the popup in to the checkout page but I figured if this got any traction it's possible then a checkout page host could read the data (ie, your salary) from that. Thus, I landed on the intrusive redirect. Open to other ideas though!
- d3nj4l 6y agoWeird - why'd the twitter account you've linked on the page get suspended?
- jsomau 6y agoI just submitted a Twitter support request to figure that out myself :)
- innomatics 6y agoThis is great idea and I love the name. Like some others hear I'm more interested in the carbon cost of purchases. How long it takes to earn the cost is something my brain automatically calculates! (maybe younger folks don't do that). I recently worked on an idea to try and build a movement to rally people around taking action to benefit the CO2 problem during a specific month of the year: https://march2zero.com https://march2zero.com
- i_love_music 6y agoSuper into the CO2 estimate part. I think incorporating shipping is a easy first place. While much harder, future iterations could consider the composition of the product. Is it plastics? Etc
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI'm not sure how one would word this exactly, but there are many additional costs to each product that we buy. Plant space, animal lives, tainted ecosystems, busted up terrain, displaced humans are all contained in most of the products we buy, and especially online. It's one thing when it's a bare necessity, but I shudder when I think about how many animal lives were lost in order to produce just one faux-animal beanie baby with cute oversized eyeballs.
- berkes 6y agoA local group is building FairSharesApp, which is an app that tries to make you aware of the additional costs to a product. And allow you to buy that off. AFAIK they only do CO2 emissions, yet. But when I spoke to them, they had more planned. My problem with such products, is that they will reach the people who need it less: people who already care and try their best, will be able to do a little better; but people who don't care, won't install and use it, yet their impact is probably relatively much larger.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI don't understand, how can you undo it by paying for it?
- hycaria 6y agoBecause they plant a tree or something. (Just greenwashing)
- berkes 6y ago"planting trees" is not "just greenwashing". When agricultural (or similar) lands are transformed back to forests, that has a real and direct effect on the ability of the environment to absorb CO2 emission. Obviously it needs to be done well, which often is not the case. Quite often there's no tree planted IRL, just some "promise to probably do so in some future" sold instead. And quite often the tree is planted but then abandoned (so that each 2 years everything dies off and the same plot can be re-used to "plant more trees"). But that is not the only modus operandi.
- rkuska 6y agoThat's a really nice idea! I like that. What helped me from impulse buying is a simple thing; I always when I encounter something I want to buy I store it in the bookmarks (I have a folder in bookmarks called "To buy"). I only buy after a couple of weeks have passed and I decided I really need that thing. When I have a free time I go through my list and delete things that are obsolete. The second thing is, I have a limit of buying 1 thing per week (this includes also things like basic necessities, for example deodorant, that I need for myself). Needless to say I got the inspiration from my wife, she practices this for a few years already. The best thing about this is that it actually makes me feel good.
- beshrkayali 6y agoThis is great! I think it’d also be useful if there’s a way to render stacks of cash (paper money and possibly coins) to show how much money you’re spending represented visually.
- danieka 6y agoI think a great opportunity could be the FIRE community. I think a lot of them think in terms of "if spend X amount I have to work Y more days before retirement". At least I try to do that. The problem is I don't really know how to calculate Y, if your plugin could translate the dollar amount on the checkout page to the number of days I have to work extra that would be really cool. This of course depends on my savings rate, current assets and expected return on investments. Either way, cool stuff!