It’s impossible to avoid ads in everyday life. They bombard us at every turn. They wake us up when we’re dozing in front of the TV, they fall out of our mailboxes in colorful flyers, they fill our inboxes, and they grab our attention the moment we step outside.
 
Unfortunately, even the most impressionable members of our society—children and seniors—cannot escape this pressure.
Children under the age of 7 lack the ability to distinguish what is real in an advertisement and what is not. This leads to major challenges in explaining how things really work, what is true, what will never happen, what works completely differently, and what is even dangerous. It then falls to parents to endlessly repeat to their children that what they see is only on TV.
It’s heartbreaking when you come across a young mother whose shopping cart contains only the items her budget allows, while she literally drags a child by the hand who is crying and throwing a tantrum because they spotted that amazing toy on a shelf—the very one they saw about five times during a morning cartoon—and so that’s actually the one thing they took away from watching TV. Supermarket
flyers, meanwhile, relentlessly target seniors in particular. The discount onslaught is so massive that they can’t make sense of it, and in their quest for the best deals, they end up spending much more money and bringing home a pile of things they don’t need but bought on sale.
The only practical solution to avoid spending money on nonsense is to calmly make a shopping list at home and stick to it while shopping. The only useful feature of promotional flyers is that by keeping them for a short time, you can see how the price of a given product fluctuates throughout the year. The range of advertised products at individual stores usually repeats itself, and if you take a moment to flip through older offers, you’ll easily discover that the “delicacy” at a sensational price the store is offering for a given holiday was advertised a few months ago for a different holiday and cost a quarter less.
 
Some advertisements for consumer goods should be banned because they prey on human nature. Or do you know a mom of three who’s thrilled when her kids get covered in dirt from head to toe and nearly wreck the kitchen? She immediately imagines spending the whole day using those effective cleaning products that the smiling, well-groomed lady in the white lace blouse uses while cleaning. Or maybe you and your husband are arguing at home over who will do the laundry because your husband saw that well-groomed hunk in a commercial who, in his spare time, removes stains from clothes and dispenses detergent into the washing machine. Even though that’s more of a joke, most men don’t have a clue how to turn on a washing machine.