" When the dog is repeatedly teased with the sight of objects inducing salivary secretion from a distance, the reaction of the salivary glands grows weaker and weaker and finally drops to zero."
Ivan Pavlov

bag lady

The End of Global Consumer Culture

Finding Happiness Outside of Material Consumption

"In order to turn reluctant consumers with few unsatisfied core needs into permanent shoppers, consumer product producers must dumb down consumers by shaping their wants essentially taking over their lives by encouraging impulse buying, cultivating shopoholism and manufacturing new desires." - Benjamin R. Barber

Theorists of consumption understand there is no primal need to own things.

Theorists of consumption understand that acquisition itself is dependent upon a conditioned, fabricated Pavlovian need engineered by advertisers.

Planned Obsolescence

The Light Bulb Conspiracy

"Misleading advertising leads to over consumption but that may be offsetting the under-consumption associated with monopoly prices." - Edward L. Glaeser, Gergely Ujhelyi, December 2006

"The FTC and the FDA don't have enough resources to go after every product sold under false pretenses. Consumers should be highly skeptical of claims made for any pill, patch, cream or device. We like to think of consumers as our agents in the field" - Matthew Daynard, a senior attorney in the Federal Trade Commission's advertising practices division

"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today is expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats - his home, his car, his pattern of food consumption, his hobbies. We require not only "forced draft" consumption, but "expensive" consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."- Victor Lebow

"Moving beyond range of TV hucksters, pesky telemarketers and the daily onslaught of direct junk mail is one of the great perks of maturity. It seems Americans are so thoroughly defined by commerce that a decline in ad dollars aimed our way challenges our identity according to the contemporary Cartesian principle: I consume therefore I am."- Daniel S. Hinerfeld

Seven blunders of materialistic consumerism

1. Wealth without work

2. Pleasure without conscience

3. Knowledge without character

4. Commerce without morality

5. Science without humanity

6. Worship without sacrifice

7. Politics without principle

Mahatma Gandhi

"Like most habitual shoppers, I was looking for something that I wanted more than I needed, something I could not necessarily describe but would recognize when I saw it. I was looking for something I had bought new long ago but had lost and was expecting to find once again. Call me a constantly lapsing recovering consumer. I am not proud of this, though I am not ashamed of it either. The worst thing it means is that I am an entirely average American, easily driven by complex and unpleasant realities to the escapist distractions of stuff. I am a member of what social critics and theorists like to call the "bewildered herd," though I like to think that I am less bewildered and more self-aware than most of my fellow cattle, even when I find myself buying another pair of high heels that I can't really walk in and don't need." - Erin Aubry Kaplan

"The word "consume" brings us back to the origins of separation in fire, a metaphor for our civilization's consumptive linearity. Indeed, the conversion of human bonds into money resembles an oxidative reaction in chemistry, which replaces existing internal chemical bonds with new, lower-energy bonds to something from the outside, an oxygen atom. Money is like the thermal energy liberated thereby, no longer bound to any individual and thus free to perform work. Incinerating relationships and converting them into services, the original bonds among individuals are severed. A purchased "service" is as generic as the money that buys it. Any social relationship embodies a kind of wealth in the form of bonds or ties, which can in principle be liquidated, turned into a commodity, and sold back as a service. Almost no relationship is exempt from this colonization of the social space: not parenting, not sex, not friendship, not trust. Let's start with an example of this colonization that also exemplifies the inauthenticity of commoditized relationships: the "hospitality industry". This is the name by which the hotel industry calls itself, but what a perversion of the original meaning of the word hospitality! Hospitality bespeaks a generous, welcoming attitude of sharing one's home. How would you feel if you shared the home of a friend for a few days and were then presented with a bill, with 500% markups for each telephone call, bottle of water, and item of food you consumed?" - Charles Eisenstein