UK consumers 'waste' £52bn on unused gadgets

Posted on 4 Mar 2010 at 15:06

British consumers are wasting £52bn a year on gadgets that they never use fully, according to a recent poll conducted by Sky and Stuff magazine.

After conducting a survey of 3,000 people, the report found that the average Briton spends £3,065 on technology a year; however, on average more than half of the functions of each product never get used.

Using rather simplistic maths, the survey arrived at the £52bn figure by calculating the average percentage of features never used on technology products and the effective value in terms of the UK's total household technology spend.

This overwhelming figure massively misses the point: if you removed a feature from a product that's rarely used, the products wouldn't be any cheaper. This is hardly wasting money.

One of the key points of the survey was to highlight that a large number of people didn't realise that an HD TV wasn't being used to its full potential without an HD input, such as a (surprise, surprise) Sky+ HD box.

Again, this misses the point, and you could argue that using HD inputs for an HD TV is equally as wasteful, as the TV no longer has to use its upscaling functions. Besides, an LCD uses less power than a CRT, so upgrading can actually save money.

Likewise, not using, say, a phone's stopwatch feature is not a waste of money. That said, using it, we could use a stopwatch to time how long it takes the average person to read the original report, multiply this by the number of people working in the UK, divide by the average amount of time people at work spend on the internet and come up with a large figure for the number of man hours this report has cost the economy.

Author: David Ludlow

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