Culture

You Must Watch This Footage Of A Rare Woolworths Collectable Being Solemnly Destroyed On TV

“You ask yourself, ‘what is a life worth?'” said Stephen, pulling a pair of scissors out of his pocket and getting down to the grave task of mangling the Ooshie. “Is it worth money? We don’t know.”

by Joseph Earp  2 August 2019
Woolworths Ooshie Today show

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We’re going to have to unpack pretty much every single word here, so we might as well jump straight to it: A couple of farmers just destroyed an Ooshie they attempted to sell for water on The Today Show to protest online bullying.

Okay. Let’s take things slow.

First off: what the fuck are Ooshies, you might ask? Well, Ooshies are the newest series of plastic thingamabobbies that Woolworths is peddling to eager kids and their exhausted parents. Yep, Coles has the Little Shop promotion, and Woolworths have the Ooshies, tiny plastic replicas of key characters from The Lion King that come ‘free’ with every shop.

Notice the scare quotes around the word free, because, as I overheard a parent grimly intone to their crying child in Woolies the other day, something’s not free if you have to pay money to get it.

Now, Ooshies come in different variants, some much rarer than others. Indeed, some of these Ooshies are in such high demand that there have been attempts to sell them for outrageous prices on the internet, with some listed for thousands of dollars.

Enter Melissa and Stephen. The pair of farmers recently nabbed themselves an ultra-rare Ooshie and decided to capitalise on the welcome twist of fate by valuing the thing at $5,000, and waiting for the offers to roll in.

Instead, Melissa and Stephen were inundated with abuse.

“Just hate and suicidal threats,” Melissa told The Today Show in her appearance this morning. “Just some really awful things were said.”

Changing tack, the pair then decided to use the Ooshie fiasco as a teachable moment, asking not for money but water to bring attention to the drought currently affecting Australian farmers.

But when that didn’t pan out either, the pair took the next natural step: they destroyed the Ooshie on live television.

“You ask yourself, ‘what is a life worth?'” said Stephen, pulling a pair of scissors out of his pocket and getting down to the grave task of mangling the Ooshie. “Is it worth money? We don’t know.”

Perhaps understandably, the stunt has attracted significant attention online.

It is worth stating that the drought affecting farmers is a serious issue, causing significant stress and financial hardship to at-risk Australians. Moreover, such droughts will only get worse as climate change ramps up, hurting farmers rather than the supermarket chains that will continue the cycle of exploitation inherent to capitalism which in turn will see us starving ourselves of our natural resources before the century is out.

But still, gotta admit, watching a man solemnly slicing up an Ooshie with a pair of scissors while musing on the nature of humankind sure is a trip.