when were ooshies invented?

Made with flat stamps or cylinder seals, they were found during the excavation of the Ziggarut of Ur, in modern-day Iraq, and date from 5th or 4th century BCE.

Hi Michael. An ooshie is a miniature plastic animal – usually, but not exclusively, a lion.

Created by Woolworths to tie in to the new Lion King movie, the ooshies are similar to the very popular Coles Little Shop. Customers are able to claim an ooshie when they spend $30 at a Woolworths store.

Australians have not reacted calmly to this marketing promotion. There are reports of the toys selling for astronomical sums on eBay. Numerous online sellers have received death threats, and Woolworths has launched an investigation into allegations that a corrupt black market has sprung up around their sale.

“We take the selling of The Lion King Ooshies and merchandise on eBay very seriously and we are making every effort to investigate this,” the company said on Facebook this week in response to allegations that a Woolworths insider was illegally selling the product.

The “one-of-a-kind” Simba ooshie Melissa and Stephen found was the number one “furry Ooshie” – the first one to be produced. A “furry ooshie” is an even rarer sub-category of ooshie, of which only 100 exist.

Right. But, who are Melissa and Stephen? And why were they holding an ooshie live on breakfast television?

A dark and troubling road led us to the events of Friday morning.

Melissa Portingale and Stephen Black are hay growers who live in Katandra West, near Shepparton, in Victoria. As previously covered by Guardian Australia, in a long-running series of investigations, drought and mismanagement of the Murray-Darling basin has left many farmers without adequate water.

After Melissa and Stephen found themselves in possession of the precious ooshie, they posted it for sale on Facebook. But they were subjected to a vicious barrage of online trolling for attempting to profit from the sacred creature. So, they decided to make a valuable political point instead.

Melissa told Channel Nine’s Today Show on Friday: “We copped a lot of abuse for it, so I decided to ask about water instead, which seems to be the more relevant issue at hand.”

She posted on Facebook: “I’m wanting to trade it for irrigation water to use on our dying farm due to the mismanagement from our government of the Murray-Darling Basin.”

OK, this is getting darker than I expected. What happened next?

Unfortunately, this only fanned the flames of the situation.

The online mob was not sated. Bids flew in but many were cruel tricks. Melissa received 4,000 messages to her phone, offering as little as 20c, and as much as $20,000 for the ooshie. They didn’t know which were real and which weren’t.

So Melissa and Stephen felt they had been pushed to the only logical option. The ooshie had to be destroyed.

“It’s the irrigation water,” they said, in a live cross on Friday morning. “We have a problem down the Murray-Darling of water. If everybody was so interested in that [the ooshie], then maybe ... the message would get out there.”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” said Today’s host Georgie Gardner. “And no one could criticise you for that.”

Stephen said: “We’re taking a stand against this online bullying, it’s just not on. If this is the moment I need to do something, then I need to do it. I don’t want to be standing here on national TV, but I do want the message to get out there.”

Please tell me Stephen did not harm the exquisite ooshie?

He took out a pair of scissors. It all seemed to happen in slow motion.

“What is a life worth? Is it worth ... what money? We don’t know,” he asked.

By Louise Grimmer, University of Tasmania and Martin Grimmer, University of Tasmania

Ooshies, the plastic collectible toys Australian supermarket chain Woolworths is using to lure shoppers to its aisles, aren’t just a bit of fun.

They’ve been connected to a black market among Woolworths staff, frenzied online trading replete with death threats, chaotic crowds, feral behaviour at supermarket swap days, and a shocking decapitation live on breakfast television.

The plastic figures, based on characters in Disney’s new movie The Lion King, are designed for kids, but are really intended to sway the shopping habits of parents (you get one for every $30 you spend). They have inspired some very bad adult behaviour — with the worst behaviour arguably that of Woolworths itself.

The Woolworths Group proclaims “family-friendly values”. Just last month it announced it would get out of liquor and pokies. Yet it has targeted children with a manipulative promotion that relies, among other things, on the same psychological triggers that can promote gambling addiction in adults.

Collectible promotions are tried and true. We seem to be hardwired to collect things.

Among the earliest evidence of this human impulse is a large collection of seal-impressions in clay. Made with flat stamps or cylinder seals, they were found during the excavation of the Ziggarut of Ur, in modern-day Iraq, and date from the 5th or 4th century BCE.

An estimated 30% of the population collects something, according to noted consumer behaviour expert Russell Belk. Among children, collecting is even more common. In one study, University of Nebraska researchers Menzel Baker and James Gentry interviewed 79 primary school students and found 72 (more than 90%) had some kind of collection.

Across generations, items commonly collected include rocks, shells, eggs, stamps, coins, sports cards and figurines.

Collecting is connected to children’s natural curiosity. It’s a process of making sense of things through gathering and categorising. This can be seen in the enjoyment children get from counting and subdividing their collections into categories. Young children typically care more about the quantity of their collection than aesthetic considerations.

As they get older, more subjective values develop. Quantity becomes less important. This is what ultimately distinguishes the psychological motivation to collect from the compulsion to hoard, in which one is incapable of making an emotional distinction between what is valuable and what is junk.

So tending to a collection can be both enjoyable and educational. Coins or stamps, for example, can spark an interest in geography, history and other cultures.

But there are aspects that also make the urge to collect exploitable by marketers.

One is the way things form part of what psychologists call the “extended self”. As Russell Belk explained in his 1988 paper Possessions and the Extended Self: “We cannot hope to understand consumer behaviour without first gaining some understanding of the meanings that consumers attach to possessions. A key to understanding what possessions mean is recognising that, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves.”

The extended self’s manifestation in possessions is particularly striking in young children, who take great comfort from favourite dolls, bears and the like.

Another unpalatable aspect that businesses exploit in marketing to children is the ‘thrill of the hunt’ through the use of so-called ‘blind bags’.

An astounding range of toys are based on the child not knowing what they are going to get until they open it.

This practice makes use of intermittent reinforcement. When the outcome is uncertain, the process is much more exciting and a desired result much more pleasurable. It’s the same neurological mechanism that makes gambling so addictive.

Blind bags are highly conducive to marketers pushing sales through the scarcity principle, which makes some toys ‘more valuable’. In the case of the Ooshies, there are 24 different toys produced in different quantities. Some are very rare — there are just 100 ‘furry Simbas’, for example.

This can inspire strong fears of missing out in child peer groups, putting pressure on parents to secure missing toys.

Finally, younger children are innocent to the cynical ways of the world. They do not necessarily understand the persuasive intent of such sales promotions. Children, even adolescents, don’t necessarily have the cognitive skills to recognise the manipulative aspects. They are the soft target. As one mother of three has put it: “Like most, I hate the fact they’re exploiting our children, but at the end of the day my kids love The Lion King.”

For these reasons, we believe the ethics of specifically targeting children with a collectibles promotional campaign are questionable — and the Ooshies promotion is unashamedly directed at children.

If Woolworths wants to celebrate family-friendly values, this is not the way to go about it.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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