Some people get a buzz from shopping; others hate it.  When we talk about a vision for a world where shopping makes us happier, we're not so much talking about the buzz as about the total effects.  Impulse buys for candy bars or tools we never use or jewelry we never wear, for example, might provide the buzz, but few of us would argue that it nets a lot of long term happiness.

The glory of a market is that it meets needs.  One pitfall is that it encourages marketers to create more needs for us.  Marketing presses upon us the insufficiency of our current state, and tells us how much happier our next purchase will make us.  One definition of wealth is the ratio of what you have to what you need.  In this scheme, when your needs grow, you get poorer.  But the bulk of our marketing is intended to do exactly that: grow needs.

How can informed shopping make us happier?  First, there are some ways in which the shopping experience itself will become more pleasant.  We'll have a lot more help finding our way through mounds of information, we'll enjoy the learning experience, and we'll often learn from third party sources about interesting alternatives that don't involve buying anything at all.  Beyond enhancing the buzz, we'll also be able to make healthier decisions for ourselves and our communities, which will certainly generate more health and happiness.

What's more, we may even begin to weaken the type of marketing that makes us feel poorer in the first place.  Whom do you trust more: Consumer Reports or Toshiba?  Chances are, you put more trust in the much less biased Consumer Reports, but few of us tend to have all the right information at hand when we're making our choices, so we fall back on our impulses about brands, much of which comes from marketing.  That will change.  Hooze.org wants to make product and company information much more accessible and easier to use.  Increasingly our loyalty and our decision-making will then attach to third-party information sources, not to manufacturers.  Sure, marketers will still sell those needs, but their strategy will lose steam.  When Hooze.org offers better ways to make choices, exploiting the old ways will cease to work.