IKEA is now letting customers pay for goods with their time. Yes, that’s right: the more time customers spend travelling to IKEA, the more they can buy. Because beginning from this month, IKEA Dubai is running a campaign that will allow customers to spend their time as a currency, simply by showing IKEA checkout staff their Google Maps timeline, which proves how much time they’ve spent travelling to IKEA stores.

While restricted at this moment in time to IKEA Dubai, this promotion opens the door to a significant and profound change in how consumers purchase goods, and in how they relate to brands. Timed to coincide with the opening of a new store in Jebel Ali, this new campaign encourages potential customers to visit IKEA more frequently, so that they can notch up more time spent travelling to IKEA’s outlets. By extension, it encourages them to spend more time in IKEA’s stores, which in turn will ultimately encourage them to buy more goods.

Dubbed “Buy With Your Time,” the idea behind the new promotion is that customers usually spend an inordinate amount of time travelling to IKEA outlets, usually because said outlets reside on the outskirts of towns. In view of this, IKEA has added “time currency” prices for every item in its Dubai stores, which are based on the average Dubai salary. As such, customers are now able to buy products using all the time they’ve spent travelling to IKEA over the years (in addition to the usual dirhams).

“Before the birth of this campaign, we realised two things: time is precious today, and many loyal IKEA customers spend a significant chunk of it visiting our locations, which are sometimes away from the city centre,” said an IKEA spokesperson. “We think it’s only right to reward our customers’ efforts by repaying them for the time spent reaching us. It’s our way of helping the Dubai community make the most of every minute.”

Of course, the really significant aspect of this story isn’t the fact that you can now spend time as a currency in IKEA. Rather, the involvement of Google Maps in the promotion entails that people who want to spend their time as currency have to not only download Google Maps, but also have to let it track them wherever they travel. In other words, the promotion is another step towards normalizing the idea that it’s okay to be watched wherever we go so long as we receive ‘free stuff’ in exchange. Given that Google recently became a trillion-dollar company, it’s not entirely clear if the trade is a fair one.

On top of this, the promotion is an obvious attempt to entice people into spending even more time travelling to IKEA. Yes, we may receive some rewards for spending half an hour or more at a time travelling to IKEA. But the long-term effect will be to seduce us into giving away even more time than we would otherwise have done. So instead of, say, learning a new language, a new musical instrument, or working out how to collectively organise a political challenge to the growing authoritarianism of our era, our time will be increasingly devoted to becoming increasingly materialist. We’ll be ‘compensated’ for the time we’ve lost by losing even more of it.

That’s why IKEA’s latest innovation could potentially become very significant. In letting us pay for goods with time, it could encourage more companies to follow its example. And eventually, this novel ability could induce us to devote as much time as possible to the world’s brands and corporations, as if they don’t already take enough of our time as it is.

You know a sunburn is not actually a burn, right? Not a burn such as you would get from acute exposure to a hot stove or an open flame. Sunburns are actually radiation damage caused by ultraviolet light. In the short term, this UV exposure causes redness, pain and peeling; in the long term, too much unprotected exposure to sunlight can lead to skin cancer.

There’s a silver lining here, though: the same UV light (in particular UV-C light, which has a wavelength between 200 and 280 nanometers, while visible lights smallest wavelength measures 380 nm) that damages the very DNA of human skin over time can be harnessed and used to kill off germs in a matter of minutes.

With a good UV light sanitizing device, you can clean surfaces like desktops and door handles, sinks and toilets, or those items that are always with you, like your phone. And by the way? You should really clean your phone from time to time. According to multiple studies, our phones are about the dirtiest objects in our lives, harboring on average nearly 20,000 distinct types of bacteria.

And while wiping down a smartphone with soap and water or isopropyl alcohol might not be the best idea, UV phone sanitizing cases won’t damage the device but will eradicate bacteria and viruses, so long as you use the sanitizing hardware properly and regularly. Here are some of the best UV sanitizers for phones and more.

PhoneSoap Wireless UV Smartphone Cleaning Case