It’s all about the green
In the US, they queue for the iPhone, a revolutionary ‘handheld computer’ that plays your videos and music, and lets you surf the web, take pictures, and call your mum. (It also makes you eminently more muggable.)
In Hong Kong, they queue for a carry-bag.
On Thursday after work, around 7pm, I walked through IFC (for you non-Hongkies, that’s a typically opulent and frigidly-air-conditioned shopping arena passing itself off as a mall) to find what was apparently a queue to nowhere. More than a hundred teens had set up camp on the cold hard floors. For what, I didn’t know.
Until the next morning.
At 8:45am Friday, the queue had sprouted another couple of S-bends and was streaming out the tall glass doors onto the covered walkway, stretching another 50 metres away. This time curiosity got the better of me, so, after stepping over sleeping bodies, I approached a solo guy, who must have been about 18, and asked him what was going on.
He pointed to the name “Anya Hindmarch” in his floorplan of the mall and said there was a bag on sale.
“A bag?” I asked, incredulously.
“It’s very cheap,” he said.
He was talking about the fashion designer’s green gesture: a designer carry-bag that, ostensibly, could be used instead of more environmentally-harmful plastic bags. The printed message on the receptacle makes the distinction explicit: “I’m not a plastic bag“. It was selling for HK$120 (US$15).
How quintessentially Hong Kong: make an airy gesture at caring about the environment by being party to hyperconsumerism. Forget the fact it’s almost impossible to find a recycling bin, or that, even if you do find them, the bins are filled with other trash. Forget the fact that most newspaper readers still accept plastic bags in which to carry their newspapers when buying from a store or stall. Forget the fact that air-conditioners are uniformly ratcheted down 10 degrees below the government’s recommended levels and 15 degrees below a comfortable room temperature.
Sadly, most Hong Kongers don’t think about environmentalism in those terms — if they think about it at all. They are, however, more than willing to succumb to savvy marketing and spend unnecessary hours in unnecessary queues waiting to buy unnecessary fashion items masquerading as tools of social conscience.
2 comments July 8, 2007
