consumerist culture essay

A Brief History of Consumer Culture

The notion of human beings as consumers first took shape before World War I, but became commonplace in America in the 1920s. Consumption is now frequently seen as our principal role in the world.

People, of course, have always “consumed” the necessities of life — food, shelter, clothing — and have always had to work to get them or have others work for them, but there was little economic motive for increased consumption among the mass of people before the 20th century.

Quite the reverse: Frugality and thrift were more appropriate to situations where survival rations were not guaranteed. Attempts to promote new fashions, harness the “propulsive power of envy,” and boost sales multiplied in Britain in the late 18th century. Here began the “slow unleashing of the acquisitive instincts,” write historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb in their influential book on the commercialization of 18th-century England, when the pursuit of opulence and display first extended beyond the very rich.

But, while poorer people might have acquired a very few useful household items — a skillet, perhaps, or an iron pot — the sumptuous clothing, furniture, and pottery of the era were still confined to a very small population. In late 19th-century Britain a variety of foods became accessible to the average person, who would previously have lived on bread and potatoes — consumption beyond mere subsistence. This improvement in food variety did not extend durable items to the mass of people, however. The proliferating shops and department stores of that period served only a restricted population of urban middle-class people in Europe, but the display of tempting products in shops in daily public view was greatly extended — and display was a key element in the fostering of fashion and envy.

Although the period after World War II is often identified as the beginning of the immense eruption of consumption across the industrialized world, the historian William Leach locates its roots in the United States around the turn of the century.

In the United States, existing shops were rapidly extended through the 1890s, mail-order shopping surged, and the new century saw massive multistory department stores covering millions of acres of selling space. Retailing was already passing decisively from small shopkeepers to corporate giants who had access to investment bankers and drew on assembly-line production of commodities, powered by fossil fuels; the traditional objective of making products for their self-evident usefulness was displaced by the goal of profit and the need for a machinery of enticement.

“The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society,” Leach writes in his 1993 book “ Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture .” Significantly, it was individual desire that was democratized, rather than wealth or political and economic power.

The 1920s: “The New Economic Gospel of Consumption”

Release from the perils of famine and premature starvation was in place for most people in the industrialized world soon after the Great War ended. U.S. production was more than 12 times greater in 1920 than in 1860, while the population over the same period had increased by only a factor of three, suggesting just how much additional wealth was theoretically available. The labor struggles of the 19th century had, without jeopardizing the burgeoning productivity, gradually eroded the seven-day week of 14- and 16-hour days that was worked at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. In the United States in particular, economic growth had succeeded in providing basic security to the great majority of an entire population.

It would be feasible to reduce hours of work and release workers for the pleasurable activities of free time with families and communities, but business did not support such a trajectory.

In these circumstances, there was a social choice to be made. A steady-state economy capable of meeting the basic needs of all, foreshadowed by philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill as the stationary state , seemed well within reach and, in Mill’s words, likely to be an improvement on “the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other’s heels … the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.” It would be feasible to reduce hours of work further and release workers for the spiritual and pleasurable activities of free time with families and communities, and creative or educational pursuits. But business did not support such a trajectory, and it was not until the Great Depression that hours were reduced, in response to overwhelming levels of unemployment.

In 1930 the U.S. cereal manufacturer Kellogg adopted a six-hour shift to help accommodate unemployed workers, and other forms of work-sharing became more widespread. Although the shorter workweek appealed to Kellogg’s workers, the company, after reverting to longer hours during World War II, was reluctant to renew the six-hour shift in 1945. Workers voted for it by three-to-one in both 1945 and 1946, suggesting that, at the time, they still found life in their communities more attractive than consumer goods. This was particularly true of women. Kellogg, however, gradually overcame the resistance of its workers and whittled away at the short shifts until the last of them were abolished in 1985.

Even if a shorter working day became an acceptable strategy during the Great Depression, the economic system’s orientation toward profit and its bias toward growth made such a trajectory unpalatable to most captains of industry and the economists who theorized their successes. If profit and growth were lagging, the system needed new impetus. The short depression of 1921–1922 led businessmen and economists in the United States to fear that the immense productive powers created over the previous century had grown sufficiently to meet the basic needs of the entire population and had probably triggered a permanent crisis of overproduction; prospects for further economic expansion were thought to look bleak.

The historian Benjamin Hunnicutt, who examined the mainstream press of the 1920s, along with the publications of corporations, business organizations, and government inquiries, found extensive evidence that such fears were widespread in business circles during the 1920s. Victor Cutter, president of the United Fruit Company, exemplified the concern when he wrote in 1927 that the greatest economic problem of the day was the lack of “consuming power” in relation to the prodigious powers of production.

“Unless [the consumer] could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.”

Notwithstanding the panic and pessimism, a consumer solution was simultaneously emerging. As the popular historian of the time Frederick Allen wrote , “Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate consumer. Unless he could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.” In his classic 1928 book “ Propaganda ,” Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of the public relations industry, put it this way:

Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained—that is if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity.… Today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand … [and] cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda … to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.

Edward Cowdrick, an economist who advised corporations on their management and industrial relations policies, called it “the new economic gospel of consumption,” in which workers (people for whom durable possessions had rarely been a possibility) could be educated in the new “skills of consumption.”

It was an idea also put forward by the new “consumption economists” such as Hazel Kyrk and Theresa McMahon, and eagerly embraced by many business leaders. New needs would be created, with advertising brought into play to “augment and accelerate” the process. People would be encouraged to give up thrift and husbandry, to value goods over free time. Kyrk argued for ever-increasing aspirations: “a high standard of living must be dynamic, a progressive standard,” where envy of those just above oneself in the social order incited consumption and fueled economic growth.

President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes welcomed the demonstration “on a grand scale [of] the expansibility of human wants and desires,” hailed an “almost insatiable appetite for goods and services,” and envisaged “a boundless field before us … new wants that make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.” In this paradigm, people are encouraged to board an escalator of desires (a stairway to heaven, perhaps) and progressively ascend to what were once the luxuries of the affluent.

Charles Kettering, general director of General Motors Research Laboratories, equated such perpetual change with progress. In a 1929 article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied,” he stated that “there is no place anyone can sit and rest in an industrial situation. It is a question of change, change all the time — and it is always going to be that way because the world only goes along one road, the road of progress.” These views parallel political economist Joseph Schumpeter’s later characterization of capitalism as “creative destruction”:

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is, but never can be stationary .… The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterized as “progress,” promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth. Progress was about the endless replacement of old needs with new, old products with new. Notions of meeting everyone’s needs with an adequate level of production did not feature.

The nonsettler European colonies were not regarded as viable venues for these new markets, since centuries of exploitation and impoverishment meant that few people there were able to pay. In the 1920s, the target consumer market to be nourished lay at home in the industrialized world. There, especially in the United States, consumption continued to expand through the 1920s, though truncated by the Great Depression of 1929.

Electrification was crucial for the consumption of the new types of durable items, and the fraction of U.S. households with electricity connected nearly doubled between 1921 and 1929, from 35 percent to 68 percent; a rapid proliferation of radios, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators followed. Motor car registration rose from eight million in 1920 to more than 28 million by 1929. The introduction of time payment arrangements facilitated the extension of such buying further and further down the economic ladder. In Australia, too, the trend could be observed; there, however, the base was tiny, and even though car ownership multiplied nearly fivefold in the eight years to 1929, few working-class households possessed cars or large appliances before 1945.

The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterized as “progress,” promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth.

This first wave of consumerism was short-lived. Predicated on debt, it took place in an economy mired in speculation and risky borrowing. U.S. consumer credit rose to $7 billion in the 1920s, with banks engaged in reckless lending of all kinds. Indeed, though a lot less in gross terms than the burden of debt in the United States in late 2008, which Sydney economist Steve Keen has described as “the biggest load of unsuccessful gambling in history,” the debt of the 1920s was very large, over 200 percent of the GDP of the time. In both eras, borrowed money bought unprecedented quantities of material goods on time payment and (these days) credit cards. The 1920s bonanza collapsed suddenly and catastrophically. In 2008, a similar unraveling began; its implications still remain unknown. In the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a war economy followed, so it was almost 20 years before mass consumption resumed any role in economic life — or in the way the economy was conceived.

The Second Wave

Once World War II was over, consumer culture took off again throughout the developed world, partly fueled by the deprivation of the Great Depression and the rationing of the wartime years and incited with renewed zeal by corporate advertisers using debt facilities and the new medium of television. Stuart Ewen, in his history of the public relations industry, saw the birth of commercial radio in 1921 as a vital tool in the great wave of debt-financed consumption in the 1920s — “a privately owned utility, pumping information and entertainment into people’s homes.”

“Requiring no significant degree of literacy on the part of its audience,” Ewen writes, “radio gave interested corporations … unprecedented access to the inner sanctums of the public mind.” The advent of television greatly magnified the potential impact of advertisers’ messages, exploiting image and symbol far more adeptly than print and radio had been able to do. The stage was set for the democratization of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined.

Though the television sets that carried the advertising into people’s homes after World War II were new, and were far more powerful vehicles of persuasion than radio had been, the theory and methods were the same — perfected in the 1920s by PR experts like Bernays. Vance Packard echoes both Bernays and the consumption economists of the 1920s in his description of the role of the advertising men of the 1950s:

They want to put some sizzle into their messages by stirring up our status consciousness.… Many of the products they are trying to sell have, in the past, been confined to a “quality market.” The products have been the luxuries of the upper classes. The game is to make them the necessities of all classes . This is done by dangling the products before non-upper-class people as status symbols of a higher class. By striving to buy the product—say, wall-to-wall carpeting on instalment—the consumer is made to feel he is upgrading himself socially.

Though it is status that is being sold, it is endless material objects that are being consumed.

In a little-known 1958 essay reflecting on the conservation implications of the conspicuously wasteful U.S. consumer binge after World War II, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed to the possibility that this “gargantuan and growing appetite” might need to be curtailed. “What of the appetite itself?,” he asks. “Surely this is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question.”

“We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate,” retail analyst Victor Lebow remarked in 1955.

Galbraith quotes the President’s Materials Policy Commission setting out its premise that economic growth is sacrosanct. “First we share the belief of the American people in the principle of Growth,” the report maintains, specifically endorsing “ever more luxurious standards of consumption.” To Galbraith, who had just published “ The Affluent Society ,” the wastefulness he observed seemed foolhardy, but he was pessimistic about curtailment; he identified the beginnings of “a massive conservative reaction to the idea of enlarged social guidance and control of economic activity,” a backlash against the state taking responsibility for social direction. At the same time he was well aware of the role of advertising: “Goods are plentiful. Demand for them must be elaborately contrived,” he wrote. “Those who create wants rank amongst our most talented and highly paid citizens. Want creation — advertising — is a ten billion dollar industry.”

Or, as retail analyst Victor Lebow remarked in 1955:

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.… We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.

Thus, just as immense effort was being devoted to persuading people to buy things they did not actually need, manufacturers also began the intentional design of inferior items, which came to be known as “planned obsolescence.” In his second major critique of the culture of consumption, “ The Waste Makers ,” Packard identified both functional obsolescence, in which the product wears out quickly and psychological obsolescence, in which products are “designed to become obsolete in the mind of the consumer, even sooner than the components used to make them will fail.”

Galbraith was alert to the way that rapidly expanding consumption patterns were multiplied by a rapidly expanding population. But postwar industrial enterprise stoked the expansion nonetheless. The rise of consumer debt, interrupted in 1929, also resumed. In Australia, the 1939 debt of AU$39 million doubled in the first two years after the war and, by 1960, had grown by a factor of 25, to more than AU$1 billion dollars. This new burst in debt-financed consumerism was, again, incited intentionally.

Tapping into the Unconscious: Image and Message

In researching his excellent history of the rise of PR, Ewen interviewed Bernays himself in 1990, not long before he turned 99. Ewen found Bernays, a key pioneer of the new PR profession, to be just as candid about his underlying motivations as he had been in 1928 when he wrote “Propaganda”:

Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: A highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians is continuously at work … adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.… Throughout the interview, he described PR as a response to a transhistoric concern: the requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population.

Bernays’s views, like those of several other analysts of the “crowd” and the “herd instinct,” were a product of the panic created among the elite classes by the early 20th-century transition from the limited franchise of propertied men to universal suffrage. “On every side of American life, whether political, industrial, social, religious or scientific, the increasing pressure of public judgment has made itself felt,” Bernays wrote. “The great corporation which is in danger of having its profits taxed away or its sales fall off or its freedom impeded by legislative action must have recourse to the public to combat successfully these menaces.”

The opening page of “Propaganda” discloses his solution:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

The front-line thinkers of the emerging advertising and public relations industries turned to the key insights of Sigmund Freud, Bernays’s uncle. As Bernays noted:

Many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which [he] has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired, not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself … because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success.

Bernays saw himself as a “propaganda specialist,” a “public relations counsel,” and PR as a more sophisticated craft than advertising as such; it was directed at hidden desires and subconscious urges of which its targets would be unaware. Bernays and his colleagues were anxious to offer their services to corporations and were instrumental in founding an entire industry that has since operated along these lines, selling not only corporate commodities but also opinions on a great range of social, political, economic, and environmental issues.

Though it has become fashionable in recent decades to brand scholars and academics as elites who pour scorn on ordinary people, Bernays and the sociologist Gustave Le Bon were long ago arguing, on behalf of business and political elites, respectively, that the mass of people are incapable of thought.

According to Le Bon, “A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first”; crowds “can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas,” leading to “the utter powerlessness of reasoning when it has to fight against sentiment.” Bernays and his PR colleagues believed ordinary people to be incapable of logical thought, let alone mastery of “abstruse economic, political and ethical data,” and saw the need to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it”; PR could thus ensure the maintenance of order and corporate control in society.

Bernays and his PR colleagues believed ordinary people to be incapable of logical thought, let alone mastery of “abstruse economic, political and ethical data.”

The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the late 20th century, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, “people recognize themselves in their commodities.” Marcuse’s critique of needs, made more than 50 years ago, was not directed at the issues of scarce resources or ecological waste, although he was aware even at that time that Marx was insufficiently critical of the continuum of progress and that there needed to be “a restoration of nature after the horrors of capitalist industrialisation have been done away with.”

Marcuse directed his critique at the way people, in the act of satisfying our aspirations, reproduce dependence on the very exploitive apparatus that perpetuates our servitude. Hours of work in the United States have been growing since 1950, along with a doubling of consumption per capita between 1950 and 1990. Marcuse suggested that this “voluntary servitude (voluntary inasmuch as it is introjected into the individual) … can be broken only through a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the infrastructure of man [ sic ], a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values.”

The difficult challenge posed by such a transvaluation is reflected in current attitudes. The Australian comedian Wendy Harmer in her 2008 ABC TV series called “Stuff” expressed irritation at suggestions that consumption is simply generated out of greed or lack of awareness:

I am very proud to have made a documentary about consumption that does not contain the usual footage of factory smokestacks, landfill tips and bulging supermarket trolleys. Instead, it features many happy human faces and all their wonderful stuff! It’s a study of a love affair as much as anything else.

In the same vein, during the Q&A after a talk given by the Australian economist Clive Hamilton at the 2006 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, one woman spoke up about her partner’s priorities: Rather than entertain questions about any impact his possessions might be having on the environment, she said, he was determined to “go down with his gadgets.”

The capitalist system, dependent on a logic of never-ending growth from its earliest inception, confronted the plenty it created in its home states, especially the United States, as a threat to its very existence. It would not do if people were content because they felt they had enough. However over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for its “wonderful stuff.”

Kerryn Higgs is an Australian writer and historian. She is the author of “ Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet ,” from which this article is adapted.

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Definition of Consumerist Culture

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If culture is understood by sociologists as composed of the commonly understood symbols, language, values, beliefs, and norms of a society , then a consumerist culture is one in which all of those things are shaped by consumerism ; an attribute of a society of consumers. According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, a consumerist culture values transience and mobility rather than duration and stability, and the newness of things and reinvention of oneself over endurance. It is a hurried culture that expects immediacy and has no use for delays, and one that values individualism and temporary communities over deep, meaningful, and lasting connection to others.

Bauman's Consumerist Culture

In Consuming Life , Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explains that a consumerist culture, departing from the previous productivist culture, values transience over the duration, newness and reinvention, and the ability to acquire things immediately. Unlike a society of producers, in which people’s lives were defined by what they made, the production of things took time and effort, and people were more likely to delay satisfaction until some point in the future, consumerist culture is a “nowist” culture that values immediate or quickly acquired satisfaction .

The expected fast pace of consumerist culture is accompanied by a permanent state of busyness and a near-permanent sense of emergency or urgency. For instance, the emergency of being on-trend with fashion, hairstyles, or mobile electronics are pressing ones in a consumerist culture. Thus, it is defined by turnover and waste in the ongoing quest for new goods and experiences. Per Bauman, consumerist culture is “first and foremost, about being on the move .”

The values, norms, and language of a consumerist culture are distinctive. Bauman explains, "Responsibility now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself (‘you owe this to yourself’, ‘you deserve it’, as the traders in ‘relief from responsibility’ put it), while ‘responsible choices’ are, first and last, those moves serving the interests and satisfying the desires of the self.” This signals a set of ethical principles within a consumerist culture that differ from those of periods that preceded the society of consumers. Troublingly, Bauman argues, these trends also signal the vanishing of the generalized “Other” “as object of ethical responsibility and moral concern."

With its extreme focus on the self, “[t]he consumerist culture is marked by a constant pressure to be someone else .” Because we use the symbols of this culture—consumer goods—to understand and express ourselves and our identities, this dissatisfaction we feel with goods as they lose their luster of newness translates into dissatisfaction with ourselves. Bauman writes,

[c]onsumer markets [...] breed dissatisfaction with the products used by consumers to satisfy their needs -- and they also cultivate constant disaffection with the acquired identity and the set of needs by which such an identity is defined. Changing identity, discarding the past and seeking new beginnings, struggling to be born again -- these are promoted by that culture as a duty disguised as a privilege.

Here Bauman points to the belief, characteristic of consumerist culture, that though we often frame it as a set of important choices we make, we are actually obligated to consume in order to craft and express our identities. Further, because of the emergency of being on-trend, or even ahead of the pack, we are constantly on the lookout for new ways to revise ourselves through consumer purchases. In order for this behavior to have any social and cultural value, we must make our consumer choices “publicly recognizable.”

Connected to the ongoing quest for the new in goods and in ourselves, another characteristic of consumerist culture is what Bauman calls “the disabling of the past.” Through a new purchase, we can be born again, move on, or start over with immediacy and ease. Within this culture, time is conceived of and experienced as fragmented, or “pointillist” — experiences and phases of life are easily left behind for something else.

Similarly, our expectation for a community and our experience of it is fragmented, fleeting, and unstable. Within a consumerist culture, we are members of “cloakroom communities,” which “one feels one joins simply by being where others are present, or by sporting badges or other tokens of shared intentions, style or taste.” These are “fixed-term” communities that allow for a momentary experience of the community only, facilitated by shared consumer practices and symbols. Thus, consumerist culture is one marked by “weak ties” rather than strong ones.

This concept developed by Bauman matters to sociologists because we are interested in the implications of the values, norms, and behaviors that we take for granted as a society, some of which are positive, but many of which are negative.

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Home — Essay Samples — Economics — Consumerism — The Effects Of Consumerism In America

The Effects of Consumerism in America

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Introduction, body paragraphs, economic impact, social impact, environmental impact, impact on individual well-being.

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• > International Review of Social History
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• > Too Much of a Good Thing? Consumption, Consumerism,...

Article contents

Consumerism between theory and practice, consumption between cooperation and individualism, new directions in the history of consumption, too much of a good thing consumption, consumerism, and consumer cooperation in modern history.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2018

T rentmann , F rank . Empire of Things. How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first. Penguin Books, London [etc.] 2016. xviii, 862 pp. Ill. £30.00; $63.95.

A Global History of Consumer Cooperation since 1850. Movements and Businesses. Ed. by Mary Hilson, Silke Neunsinger & Greg Patmore. [Studies in Global Social History, vol. 28.]. Brill, Leiden [etc.] 2017. Xxix, 847 pp. ill.

Denounced by evangelical Christians, the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists, new age cultists, and conservative and liberal moralists alike, consumerism has had a strange history as a subject of scholarship. Economics as a discipline has always assumed that demand played a central role in determining prosperity or poverty. Yet, only in the last thirty years has consumption, the purchase and use of goods and services by individuals, become a subject of systematic inquiry by historians and social scientists. Frank Trentmann, professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, is the world’s foremost scholar on the history of what we buy. The “Cultures of Consumption” research program, which he led at the University of London from 2002 to 2007, generated an impressive set of scholarly studies that have defined the field. Footnote 1 His magnum opus, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First is now not only the standard work on consumption in all of its aspects, historical and modern, but is also one of the most impressive pieces of historical scholarship in our generation. Footnote 2

The ubiquity of commercialized, capitalist-controlled consumption inevitably raises the question of whether we could have developed a different model of consumption, one less controlled by private, profit-seeking interests and more attuned to public welfare. Consumer cooperatives, stores owned by consumers themselves, have long been the major alternative to capitalist retail. Along with labor unions and the women’s movement, consumer cooperation has played an important role in spawning modern consumer movements. Footnote 3 Although consumer cooperation is a global phenomenon, it has typically been studied in individual countries. Footnote 4 Mary Hilson, professor of history at Aarhus University in Denmark, one of the leading scholars on consumer cooperation, and her collaborators, labor historians Silke Neunsinger of Uppsala University, Sweden, and Greg Patmore of the University of Sydney, Australia, have now produced what is the standard account of the consumer cooperative movement as a truly international phenomenon, A Global History of Consumer Cooperation Since 1850: Movements and Businesses , with an impressive thirty-seven contributors. Together, the works of Trentmann and Hilson and her collaborators offer us the opportunity to assess the recent wave of scholarship on consumption and suggest what may lie ahead, as well as to ponder what our obsession with buying means for us as citizens.

Mainstream scholarship traditionally treated consumption as a passive, private act. Producers, traders, or financiers had economic interests, not consumers. As James Madison put it in the Federalist Papers in 1787: “A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes.” Footnote 5 Neo-classical economics treated consumption as a set of maximizing choices that had changed little over time. Social historians focused on workers, middle classes, or farmers, but almost never on consumers.

As traditional working class movements waned, women’s history highlighted the crucial role of women as consumers, and the effects of the post-World War II boom became clear, consumption began to receive its due. Beginning in the 1980s, new scholarship, including the seminal work of Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb and that of Robin Wrightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, spawned a still-rising tide of historical scholarship. Footnote 6 Economists such as Gary Becker studying human capital and the family as an economic unit also recast consumption as the intersection between macroeconomic trends and individual action. Footnote 7

Five major contributions made by Trentmann in his massive work deserve to be highlighted: the origins of modern consumerism, the role of the state in shaping consumption, a new definition of consumption as both private and public, a skewering of the Western critique of consumption, and insightful comparisons between consumption in the industrialized West and industrialized East. While recent scholars have argued that Ming China or Renaissance Italy created consumer societies, Trentmann makes a strong case that they did not. In these societies, antiquity was still prized above fashion, and purchased goods were as important as assets as they were as commodities to be used. Most of all, “Like Renaissance Italy, late Ming China failed to generate a sense that consumption might make a positive contribution to state, society, and economy.” Footnote 8 By contrast, in seventeenth-century the Netherlands, and still more in Britain in the eighteenth, “fashion was institutionalized into an industry, with its own spaces, calendar, and media”. Footnote 9

As Trentmann shows throughout his work, the state powerfully shapes consumption. When Western European governments fostered trade on a global scale for the first time – and, tragically, massive enslavement of Africans – sugar, rum, tea, coffee, chocolate, and cotton stimulated demand. Industrialization, too, did not simply expand the goods available to consumers. Public services, provided by or regulated by the state – water supply, electricity, telephones, transportation – transformed daily lives. These were services that were consumed, but that also stimulated more consumption. Department stores, appliances, easily washable clothes, and automobiles depended on public services. Industrial societies in the twentieth century also vastly expanded parks, swimming pools, and public spaces. Trentmann thus expands the definition of consumption from private to public goods in ways that many scholars will have to debate and explore. While the Depression set back consumption, confronting the Depression finally moved consumption onto center stage. Building on work by Victoria de Grazia and Amy Randall, Trentmann argues that regimes as diverse as the New Deal, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Conservative Britain sought to convince consumers that the state could best meet their needs through a specific mix of regulation and private initiative. Footnote 10 The recent boom in consumption during globalization, too, argues Trentmann, has depended heavily on governments that lowered interest rates, cut taxes, and reduced regulation. Contemporary tourism would be unthinkable without airline deregulation and massive state investment in airports. Governments also expanded consumption in the broadest sense, he says, through welfare. “In the twentieth century, the advance of consumption was as profound outside the marketplace as within it.” Footnote 11 Our obsession with choice, advertising, and shopping distracts us, says Trentmann, from understanding the full impact of modern consumption. Many industrial societies choose to provide services through government or government-supported or subsidized means. “As countries get richer, private consumption makes up less of GDP.” Footnote 12 In the nineteenth century, no country spent even three per cent of GDP on social welfare. By the late twentieth century, twenty per cent was typical. Footnote 13 Between 1954 and 1974, non - wage incentives in American firms, largely sheltered from taxation by government action, went from twenty per cent of payroll to thirty-seven per cent. Footnote 14

Similarly, despair over crazed consumers buying themselves into bankruptcy says more about the moralists than the consumers, and ignores the role of the state. “The idea of a more sober, restrained past is the stuff of myth, not history.” Footnote 15 “In England in 1700, every second head of a household left behind unpaid debts at death.” Footnote 16 Trentmann rejects the profligate, debt-ridden consumer as the driver of consumption. It was governments that loosened up credit through deregulation of banks, interest rates, and social welfare. “For many Americans in the 1990s and 2000s – a period of stagnant wages and rising inequality – the credit card acted as a private substitute for a missing welfare state.” Footnote 17 Trentmann argues the consumers have often wisely used credit when times were good and then cut back. At its peak in 2009, when the full force of the recession hit, household debt in the US rose to eighty-seven per cent of the level of the nation’s economic output; by 2017, it had still only reached sixty-six per cent, despite almost eight years of recovery. Footnote 18

Trentmann also sketches a new intellectual history of consumption. Early modern Britain and the Netherlands created “a favorable climate of ideas and institutions that encouraged men and, especially, women, to join the ranks of wage earners and consumers”. Footnote 19 One of the joys of Trentmann’s scholarship is his interweaving of ideas and material culture. Swift’s quip that “the souls of fashionable folk are to be found in their garments” captures the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century along with Smith’s definition of consumption as the “sole end of production” and Mandeville’s fable of the bees pursuing obsessive gain and creating the common good. Trentmann trenchantly points out that the focus on production by Marx, classical economists, and reformers during industrialization obscured the ongoing expansion of consumption for all classes during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the stubborn hold of this tradition helps explain why social scientists and historians in the twentieth century long neglected consumption. What Fabian and Christian moralist R.H. Tawney decried as the “Acquisitive Society” in 1920 was a society dedicated to ownership and protection of property, not to buying and acquiring goods. Footnote 20

One of the delights of Trentmann’s marriage of theory and practice is the revelation of how the same tired themes have reoccurred as critiques of consumerism and how rarely these critiques have been tested. “Complaints about conspicuous consumption by the rich and by others who spend beyond their means in an attempt to imitate them are as old as human civilization.” Footnote 21 Rousseau, Veblen, Adorno, and Galbraith have been recycled endlessly, including by more recent authors such as Benjamin Barber and Neal Lawson. Footnote 22 Trentmann makes short shrift of these jeremiahs. Rousseau failed to see how oppressed the poor were by lack of access to markets. Conspicuous consumption was worse among pre-industrial elites, contra Veblen, than in the ranks of the twentieth-century rich. Adorno knew almost nothing about the consumer culture he denounced. Radio, he argued, was destroying classical music. In contrast to Galbraith’s “private wealth, public squalor”, almost all societies have spent more on public consumption as they have grown richer. Nor was Galbraith right about consumption deadening the intellect and driving inequality. Spending on books boomed in the 1950s. Inequality lessens consumption; consumption does not increase inequality. Just as important, there is “a curious mismatch between real trends in spending and the ink most theorists have devoted to the consumer as a shopper buying yet another branded handbag”. Footnote 23 Total consumption has changed little. Housing, clothes, and personal goods now take the place of food. In the 1950s, many Europeans spent forty-five per cent of their income on food; by 2007, it was ten.

Bourdieu is one theorist Trentmann finds useful: the freeing up of income has allowed Western consumers to experiment with choice, what Bourdieu called the search for distinction. Footnote 24 Trentmann draws on the insights of anthropologists in recognizing that people invest goods, even those purchased for everyday use, with a variety of social meanings, involving status, security, community. Footnote 25 “The empire of things expanded in part because possessions became increasingly important carriers of identity, memory, and emotions.” Footnote 26 As even one of the angriest critics of consumption admits, “For shopping to have such a grip on our lives, it has to connect to some of the prime drivers of what it means to be human.” Footnote 27 Trentmann denies that modernity has become distinctly attached to goods; we have changed our attachments, not our needs: “All societies, rich and poor, have emotional relationships with goods.” Footnote 28

Finally, Trentmann outlines a new comparative, global history of consumption. Free trade and British hegemony spread markets, new goods, and habits worldwide, although Europeans exaggerated their own uniqueness. Footnote 29 “The contrast between ‘traditional’ tribal Africa, where homo economicus had not yet set foot, and a ‘modern’ Western world of goods, inequality and individualism was a convenient figment of the imperial imagination.” Footnote 30 While the modern history of African and Middle Eastern consumption is still being written, Trentmann argues that East and South Asia may have evolved their own distinctive path as consumer societies. In the West, societies urbanized, created regimes based on citizenship, and only then felt the full force of commercialized consumption. Asians have become “modern before they were urban”. And, unlike the West, political rights have lagged behind social ones. In Asia, “Citizenship meant duties, not rights.” Footnote 31

As a result, Asian consumerism has helped create modernization. Indian families in the countryside that got electricity “saved more than their neighbors, invested more in the education of the children, and bought more consumer goods”. Footnote 32 Americanization as the ideal type of consumerism should be discarded as Japanese, Chinese, and perhaps even Middle Eastern models of consumer society prove more relevant for global trends. Trentmann suggests that, as the history of consumer societies lengthen in Asia, we may need to re-write the Western history of consumption. Asian societies appear to accept consumption with less moralism and to check its excesses with more equanimity. Most sermons and bestsellers decrying “consumerism” hail from the United States and Europe, not Japan, India, and China. India has one of the most vigorous consumer NGOs in the world: the Consumer Unity and Trust Society, founded in 1983. By creating a state-sponsored consumer movement to check its own state-owned and subsidized enterprises, “Communist China rules with consumers, not against them.” Footnote 33 Trentmann has less to say about the Middle East, but even here, his insights are instructive: “The Islamic revival has been not so much anti-consumerist as about creating a distinctive style of consuming with its own range of products”, not just halal meat, but halal films, cosmetics, and hotels, for example. Footnote 34

One of the most profound ways that societies have differed in their consumption is in the success of consumer cooperation. As the essays in A Global History demonstrate, consumer cooperation in some form has emerged in almost every country. Worldwide, an estimated one billion people are members of a cooperative economic organization, but the two most popular kinds of cooperatives are agricultural cooperatives and credit cooperatives, also known as credit unions. Consumer cooperatives are the third most common kind of cooperative, with producer or worker-owned cooperatives and service cooperatives much less common still. Footnote 35

Two major contributions of the immense volume edited by Hilson and her collaborators are its global perspective on consumer cooperation and a re-thinking of the factors making for consumer cooperation’s success or failure. Consumer cooperation arose and flourished during the first era of globalization, when a liberal world economy emerged during the nineteenth century. Its growth slowed during the mid-twentieth century as welfare states and monopoly capitalism strengthened. The individualist consumerism of the second era of globalization in the late twentieth century brought the collapse of once strong consumer cooperative movements in Austria, Belgium, France, and Germany, and severely weakened those in Britain and Canada. Footnote 36

One key to the early forms of consumer cooperation in almost every country was the dividend given to cooperative members based on their purchases. The dividend concept originated with the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in northern England, founded in 1846, and popularized by G.J. Holyoake’s Self-Help By the People , published in 1858 and widely translated or summarized. Footnote 37 Dividends put money or credit into consumers’ pockets and symbolized that consumers owned the cooperative. Liberal, socialist, and Christian missionaries alike spread the gospel of cooperation. Catholic priests from Canada and the United States promoted cooperatives in Central America and the Caribbean, with particular inspiration coming from the Antigonish movement in Quebec. Footnote 38 Adding to the indigenous African-American tradition of self-help through mutual insurance in the United States were influences as diverse as the visit of Japanese Christian cooperative leader Toyohiko Kagawa to the US in 1935 and study tours by African-American activists to Antigonish in Quebec and Mondragon in Spain. Footnote 39 Antigonish even influenced Korean cooperation where, as in Japan, Christians had a significant influence in developing cooperatives. Footnote 40

Consumer cooperation always differed from agricultural cooperation and credit unions because it had to wrestle with whether or not to identify with socialist or working-class parties. This difference helps to explain why consumer cooperation has not succeeded as well as other kinds of cooperation. Two broad paths emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: cooperatives could be aligned with Socialist or working-class movements, or they could be neutral and apolitical, at least not associated with a political party. Vooruit (Forward) in Ghent, in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, is the most famous example of the former path and influenced Socialist and working-class parties all over the world. Footnote 41 By contrast, British and Scandinavian cooperatives officially maintained political neutrality, as did a strong group of French cooperatives influenced by the economist Charles Gide. Footnote 42 This separation from partisan politics occurred, at least officially, even though a large proportion of these cooperative movements’ members were working class and most political observers aligned the cooperatives with social democratic parties. Although the Belgian path was eventually rejected by the international cooperative movement, even an apolitical stance did not prevent many consumers from seeing consumer cooperatives as fundamentally working class. One of the virtues of A Global History is to show that those European consumer cooperative movements that collapsed or declined – Austrian, Belgian, British, French, and German – never convinced consumers in the late twentieth century that cooperatives transcended their working-class origins. Footnote 43

Politically neutral or not, genuine consumer-controlled cooperatives have always fostered political education, which is why dictatorships feared them. Dulce Freire and Joana Dias Pereis show that many Portuguese consumer cooperatives survived under the authoritarian Estado Novo from 1926 to 1974 by leveraging their apolitical status. Footnote 44 Even apolitical cooperatives served as sites for political education and civic participation under dictatorships and colonial regimes, as seen in Portugal, Spain, and Korea. Footnote 45 Communist dictatorships rarely allowed cooperatives independence, despite rhetorical support. After initially relying on consumer cooperatives and even flirting with direct product exchange in a moneyless economy, the Soviets recreated a retail system with a range of stores in the 1930s. Cooperatives went from 59.2 per cent of retail turnover in 1932 to twenty per cent in 1937 and succeeded only in rural areas. Footnote 46 The Chinese Communists eliminated cooperatives, although their rural collectives under government control were sometimes, inaccurately, described as cooperatives. Footnote 47 When cooperation declined in democratic countries, it still laid the foundation for consumer movements. As Simon Lambersens and his colleagues put it in the case of France, “Educating people to cooperate was replaced by simply informing the consumer.” Footnote 48

By illuminating the divergent histories of consumer cooperative movements in industrialized countries in Europe, North America, and Asia, A Global History makes an important contribution to scholarship. The standard arguments for the failure of consumer cooperatives have been that they lacked capital, were slow to innovate, and did not exploit economies of scale as did major commercial chains. None of these arguments hold up conclusively. Footnote 49 English, Scottish, and Scandinavian cooperators were far in advance of most of their commercial competitors in creating vertically integrated, highly capitalized wholesaling operations. As Hilson shows in her essay on the early history of British cooperatives, they pioneered in integrating wholesale and retail, introducing advertising, emphasizing quality as well as price, and introducing self-service supermarkets. Footnote 50 The English Cooperative Wholesale Society was astonishing in its global reach already in the late nineteenth century. Footnote 51 The multinational Nordisk Andelsforbund, founded in 1918, supplied Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish cooperatives. Footnote 52

So, why have some consumer cooperative movements thrived while others, including some of the largest and once most innovative, failed? The once powerful British consumer cooperative movement never exploited its economies of scale. When it finally merged local cooperatives in the 1970s, “most of the mergers did not happen from positions of strength, but were carried out only as a last resort and sometimes resulted in complete or partial failure”. Footnote 53 Nor did the British shed their focus on the working class. By contrast, Italian, Japanese, and Scandinavian consumer cooperation succeeded by judicious innovation. Scandinavian consumer cooperatives not only pursued larger scale, but pioneered in advertising, educating consumers, and emphasizing quality. In 1939, a quarter of all Norwegians lived in a household that belonged to a cooperative. The Swedish cooperative federation, Kooperativa Forbundet (KF), had over a third of the retail food sector during the 1930s and 40s. In 1934, the two large Finnish wholesale cooperatives accounted for forty per cent of retail sales in Finland. Footnote 54 Too often, Scandinavian consumer cooperative success has been attributed to unique characteristics of the region’s civic-minded or homogenous populations or its pragmatic social democratic traditions, even though the cooperatives resolutely sought political neutrality. In fact, as Espen Ekberg explains, in one of the most analytical essays in A Global History : “The Nordic cooperatives simply found efficient ways of re-aligning modern retailing practices with the more traditional virtues of the cooperative model.” Footnote 55 Swedish coops invested already in 1925 in one of their country’s largest advertising agencies. Footnote 56 By contrast, French consumer cooperatives in the 1970s “were not quick to become computerized or start advertising”. Footnote 57

Italian consumer cooperatives are the best example of success in Europe outside of Scandinavia. Coop consumatori is the market leader in mass retailing with 7.9 million members. It is true that, because much of Italian retailing remained small scale longer than elsewhere, the cooperative movement was “the pioneer of modernization”, creating supermarkets, offering self-service, and creating larger stores. Yet, in the end, Italian cooperatives faced the same challenges – mass advertising, brand consciousness, the decline of working class communities – as other cooperative movements. Footnote 58 As Hilson explains Patrizia Battilani’s argument on the Italians’ success:

What was really key to the Italian cooperatives’ success was their ability to redefine their social role. Cooperation shed its working class image to become a supermarket for all social groups, but one that was highly sensitive to the needs of its customers and in particular emphasized consumer health and environmental protection. Footnote 59

Swiss and Spanish consumer cooperatives flourish in strikingly similar ways: breadth beyond one class, an emphasis on quality not just price, and quality embracing health, environmentalism, and consumer protection. Footnote 60 The two largest consumer cooperatives in Spain in 2010 accounted for thirteen per cent of the retail food market among the eleven largest entities in the sector, with the cooperative Grupo Eroski as the third largest retailer in the country. Footnote 61

What new directions do these impressive volumes by Trentmann and Hilson and her collaborators suggest? First, we need to integrate the history of consumption and consumer cooperation into economic and business history, and bring insights from the latter fields into the study of consumption and cooperation. Except for England’s Cooperative Wholesale Society, consumer cooperatives have almost always depended on capitalist sources of production. Footnote 62 But far too much of the history of both consumption and cooperation does relatively little with the history of retailing or with economic analysis. Similarly, mainstream economists and business historians typically ignore cooperation. Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave note that the Business History Review , published at Harvard University, has never published research articles dealing specifically with consumer cooperatives. Footnote 63

How have consumers shopped in the past and how has shopping changed over time? Despite impressive membership numbers of cooperators, many cooperators apparently did only a small share of their shopping at the cooperatives. In Belgium 1938, for example, 416,000 families in a population of about 6.5 million belonged to consumer cooperatives, which may have represented around twenty per cent of households. But cooperatives accounted for only 3.15 per cent of total sales. Footnote 64 We need to know more about consumer behavior over time in order to understand why individualist consumption or cooperation takes the form that it does. Trentmann’s research suggests that by focusing on food and clothing, cooperatives missed the twentieth-century revolution in homemaking. Women had previously only done what was necessary to cook and wash. Men did barely that. Appliances, more spacious dwellings, and the eight-hour day created homemaking. Women could now shop for variety and quality. Men spent roughly twice as much time on domestic chores and repairs in 1945 as in 1900. The home became the “energy cell of consumer culture”. Footnote 65

Why do consumer cooperatives arise at all? The standard argument is that consumer cooperation arose during the late nineteenth century, when working-class families felt oppressed by high prices. Cooperation declined with the fall of food prices and the growth of commercial retail in the post-1945 era. Footnote 66 What was true for Australia and New Zealand supposedly holds elsewhere: “consumer cooperatives tended to be established at the back-end of an economic slump, or when prices and the cost of living were increasing”. Footnote 67 Yet, the late nineteenth century was a time of falling food prices in terms of real wages. Cooperatives did grow during World War I’s scarcity. Footnote 68 But when food prices fell over the late twentieth century, Italian, Japanese, Scandinavian, Spanish, and Swiss consumer cooperative movements all flourished, while those in Austria, Belgium, France, and Germany all collapsed, along with those in Argentina, Australia, and South Korea. Trentmann’s work suggests that, not scarcity, but quality and choice were always much more important factors behind consumer behavior, including for cooperators. Cooperatives that grasped this succeeded.

Neither Trentmann, nor Hilson and her collaborators study brands. Yet, brands are crucial assets – and feared icons. Children recognize major brand logos by age three. To Naomi Klein, brands bewitch the innocent into mindless consumption. Footnote 69 Thanksgiving, the oddly American holiday, was created entirely by marketers, going back to Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book [sic] in 1846, who wanted a secular national holiday that could help unify an increasingly diverse country. The subsequent evolution of Thanksgiving is the product literally of advertising by commercial companies promoting their brands – Swift’s Premium Turkey, Eatmor Cranberry Company, Diamond walnuts (for turkey dressing), and Borden’s pumpkin pie filling. Footnote 70 Buying a product connects people, or, as Adam Arvidsson puts it, “People may ‘bowl alone’, but they socialize around brands.” Footnote 71 Hartmut Kaelble argues that a European identity has begun forming through the popularity of Europe-wide brands. Footnote 72 During China’s reform era, its leaders realized that Western and Japanese brands attracted consumers everywhere, not simply in China, whereas almost no Chinese brands had much esteem. Through diligent improvement and concentrated marketing, Chinese firms have improved their position. In 2011, the China Market Research Group found that eighty-five per cent of Chinese consumers preferred foreign brands. By 2016, only forty per cent did. Similar trends appear to be at work elsewhere in Asia, with local firms learning to compete with L’Oreal, Nestle’s, and the host of brands owned by Unilever. Footnote 73 A true history of consumption and cooperation’s success or failure would draw on why people buy the brands they do, drawing insights from market research and consumer psychology. Footnote 74

Finally, we need to write a new political history of consumption and citizenship. Traditional political philosophy believed that consumers could not exercise effective power as citizens. Activists on both left and right have feared consumption as inimical to political community. As Eric Hobsbawm lamented, “Participation in the market replaces participation in politics; the consumer takes the place of the citizen.” Footnote 75 The growth of consumer activism across the industrialized world challenges this pessimism. Footnote 76 Just as importantly, perhaps many political struggles in the past could be reinterpreted as battles over consumption, not simply production, as Alan Milward argued already in 1981 in an insightful essay, “Tariffs as Constitutions”. Footnote 77 Market riots over high prices began a history that continued with attacks on agricultural tariffs as “bread taxes” and led to demonstrations against housing shortages and inflation. The growth of consumerism, combined with the social welfare state, led some observers to hope that a more consumer-oriented society would be more equal and less dominated by the wealthy. Footnote 78 The pioneering market researcher and Labour activist Mark Abrams prophesied during World War II that “we have moved and are moving towards a much more egalitarian state by means of transferring purchasing power from the rich to the poor, and from those who live on property to those who live by manual labour”. Footnote 79

Contra Hobsbawm, do consumers have identifiable rights that they can expect to be honored and around which they can organize? On 15 March 1962, US President John F. Kennedy listed the right to safety, the right to be informed, the right to choose, and the right to be heard as basic consumer rights. In various, slightly altered forms, these rights have shaped movements around the world, particularly those in the International Organisation of Consumer Unions, and form the basis of both European Union guidelines and the United Nations Guidelines on Consumer Protection . Footnote 80 The ubiquity of consumption should not lead us to assume passivity on the part of consumers. As Trentmann suggests, consumers can exercise more choice and autonomy than the tidal wave of mind-numbing advertising might suggest. Citizens can participate in a robust consumer culture and still keep their political consciousness – ill-informed or biased as it may be – relatively separate. When the Labour government tried to treat citizens only as consumers, it had relatively little success. In Britain, few people who use public services see themselves narrowly as “consumers”, but rather as patients, members of the public, or service users. Footnote 81 Cooperation, in new political forms that we have still to evolve, may emerge as a path by which consumption develops. In any case, we can expect a new political history of consumption to emerge as historians re-examine old conflicts in a new light. As they do, these two milestone works by Trentmann and Hilson and her collaborators will remain widely read for decades.

1 Trentmann , Frank (ed.), The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power, and Identity in the Modern World ( Oxford , 2006 ) Google Scholar ; Brewer , John and Trentmann , Frank (eds), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges ( Oxford , 2006 ) Google Scholar ; Trentmann , Frank and Just , Fleming (eds), Food and Conflict in the Age of Two World Wars ( Basingstoke , 2006 ) Google Scholar ; Soper , Kate and Trentmann , Frank (eds), Citizenship and Consumption ( Basingstoke , 2007 ) Google Scholar ; Bevir , Mark and Trentmann , Frank (eds), Governance, Consumers, and Citizens: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics ( Basingstoke , 2007 ) Google Scholar ; Trentmann , Frank (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption ( Oxford , 2012 ) Google Scholar .

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3 Hilton , Matthew , Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization ( Ithaca, NY , 2009 ) Google Scholar .

4 Previous global treatments are Brazda , Johan and Shediwy , Robert (eds), Consumer Cooperatives in a Changing World , 2 vols ( Geneva , 1989 ) Google Scholar ; Birchall , Johnston , The International Coopeartive Movement ( Manchester , 1997 ) Google Scholar ; Furlough , Ellen and Strikwerda , Carl (eds), Consumers Against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan ( Lanham, MD , 1999 ) Google Scholar . None are as extensive as Hilson , Mary et al . (eds), A Global History of Global Consumer Cooperation Since 1850: Movements and Businesses ( Leiden , 2017 ) Google Scholar .

5 James Madison, Federalist , 10, pp. 265–266.

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8 Trentmann, Empire , p. 51.

9 Ibid. , p. 70.

10 Victoria de Grazia, “Changing Consumption Regimes in Europe, 1930–1970”, in Strasser, Getting and Spending , pp. 59–83; Randall , Amy F. , The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s ( London , 2008 ), pp. 158 – 179 ; Baranowski , Shelley , Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich ( Cambridge , 2004 ), pp. 40 – 71 CrossRef Google Scholar .

11 Trentmann, Empire , p. 523.

12 Ibid. , p. 540.

13 Ibid. , p. 537.

14 Ibid. , p. 530.

15 Ibid. , p. 432.

16 Ibid. , p. 407.

17 Ibid. , p. 429.

18 Ben Luebsdforf, “Household Debt Hits a New High”, Wall Street Journal , 17 November 2017, p. A2. The source is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

19 Trentmann, Empire , p. 76.

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21 Trentmann, Empire , p. 677.

22 Barber , Benjamin , Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole ( New York , 2007 ) Google Scholar ; Lawson , Neal , All Consuming: How Shopping Got Us Into this Mess and How We Can Find Our Way Out ( London , 2009 ) Google Scholar .

23 Trentmann, Empire , p. 339.

24 Bourdieu , Pierre , Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA , 1984 ) Google Scholar .

25 Appadurai , Arjun (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective ( Cambridge , 1986 ) CrossRef Google Scholar .

26 Trentmann, Empire , p. 686.

27 Lawson, p. 61.

28 Trentmann, Empire , p. 321.

29 Collingham , Lizzie , The Taste of Empire ( New York , 2017 ) Google Scholar ; Brewer and Trentmann (eds), Consuming Cultures.

30 Trentmann, Empire , p. 135.

31 Ibid. , p. 356. See also Gerth , Karl , As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers Are Changing Everything ( New York , 2010 ) Google Scholar .

32 Trentmann, Empire , p. 367.

33 Trentmann, Empire , p. 397.

34 Ibid. , p. 618.

35 Hilson , Mary , Neunsinger , Silke , and Patmore , Greg , “ A Global History of Consumer Cooperation since 1850: An Introduction ”, in Hilson, A Global History , pp. 3 – 16 , 3 Google Scholar .

36 Ibid. , p. 8.

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43 The best synthesis is Ekberg , Espen , “ Confronting Three Revolutions: Western European Cooperatives and Their Divergent Development ”, Business History , 54 : 6 ( 2012 ), pp. 1004 – 1021 CrossRef Google Scholar .

44 Freire , Dulce and Pereira , Joana Dias , “ Consumer Cooperatives in Portugal: Debates and Experiences from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries ”, in Hilson, A Global History , pp. 297 – 325 Google Scholar .

45 Hyungmi, “The Experience”, pp. 352–373.

46 Randall, The Soviet Dream World , p. 28.

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49 Furlough , Ellen and Strikwerda , Carl , “ Economics, Consumer Culture, and Gender: An Introduction to the Politics of Consumer Cooperation ”, in Ellen Fulough and Carl Strikwerda (eds), Consumers Against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990 ( Lanham, MD , 1999 ), pp. 29 – 37 Google Scholar .

50 Hilson, “Rochdale and Beyond”, p. 76.

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54 Hilson, “Consumer Cooperation in the Nordic Countries”, p. 138.

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65 Trentmann, Empire , p. 375.

66 Full disclosure requires saying that my collaborator and I advance this view: Furlough and Strikwerda, “Economics, Consumer Culture, and Gender”.

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70 This draws on the research of Samantha Cross. See Samantha N.N. Cross and Cecilia Ruvalcaba, Consumer Culture Theory: Research in Consumer Behavior (forthcoming, 2018).

71 Arvidsson , Adam , Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture ( London , 2006 ), p. 5 Google Scholar .

72 Quoted in Rainer Gries, “Cultures of Products and Political Cultures: Looking for Transfer Performances”, in Kerstin Bruckweh (ed.), The Voice of the Citizen Consumer: A History of Market Research, Consumer Movements, and the Political Public Sphere , pp. 243–269, 253.

73 Gretler , Corinne , “ Foreign Brands Losing Ground in Asia ”, Bloomberg Businessweek , 27 November 2017 , pp. 15 – 16 Google Scholar .

74 Kahneman , Daniel , Thinking, Fast and Slow ( New York , 2011 ) Google Scholar provides an introduction to a rapidly growing field that includes what could be described as behaviorial economics, or the intersection of economics and psychology.

75 Hobsbawm , Eric , Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism ( London , 2007 ) Google Scholar , ch. 6, “The Prospects of Democracy”, p. 104.

76 Hilton , Matthew , Consumerism in Twentieth Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement ( Cambridge , 2003 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; Hilton , Matthew , “ The Consumer Movement and Civil Society in Malaysia ,” International Review of Social History , 52 : 3 ( 2007 ), pp. 373 – 406 Google Scholar .

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79 Quoted in Madge , Charles , “ Public Opinion and Paying for the War ”, Economic Journal , 51 ( 1941 ), pp. 36 – 46 CrossRef Google Scholar , 38.

80 Hilton , Matthew , “ Consumer Activism: Rights or Duties? ”, in Brückweh, The Voice of the Citizen Consumer , pp. 99 – 116 , 105 Google Scholar .

81 Clarke , John , “ Citizen-Consumers: Hyphenation, Identification, Depoliticization? ”, in Brückweh, The Voice of the Citizen Consumer , pp. 225 – 242 , 235 Google Scholar .

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• Volume 63, Issue 1
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• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859017000670

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Consumer Culture by Steven Miles LAST REVIEWED: 31 August 2015 LAST MODIFIED: 31 August 2015 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0135

Consumer culture is a form of material culture facilitated by the market, which thus created a particular relationship between the consumer and the goods or services he or she uses or consumes. Traditionally social science has tended to regard consumption as a trivial by-product of production. However, sociologists have increasingly come to recognize the value of studying consumer culture for its own sake. It could indeed be argued that consumer culture represents one of the primary arenas in which elements of social change are played out in everyday life. Consumer culture can be distinguished from consumption per se , insofar as it is more about the relationship between the material and the cultural rather than the status and inequalities implied by the ownership of consumer goods. In this sense consumer culture is not simply a process by which commercial products are “used up” by consumers. People’s relationship to consumer culture is meaningful and reflects, and potentially reproduces, particular values and forms of status. In this sense consumer culture arguably lies at the heart of the relationship between structure and agency in contemporary society. It demonstrates the power of capitalism to reproduce the parameters within which citizens of a consumer society live their everyday lives. Consumer culture gives us the tools to express who it is we are, but while doing so it simultaneously reinforces an economic system in which the individual’s ability to be free or to choose is, ironically, constrained. A number of texts have sought to understand the social significance of consumer culture and this ability to divide as well as to provide.

Consumer culture came to sociological prominence in the 1990s and 2000s as scholars came to recognize that consumption was significant for its own sake. This reflected broader trends such as the “Cultural Turn” and the increased focus on the cultural dimensions of post-modernity. A range of books have sought to demonstrate the significance of consumption to social change. Featherstone 1990 examines the sociological significance of the accumulation of material culture, while Ritzer 1993 looks at the way in which rationalization functions in the context of consumer culture. By utilizing a range of well-chosen extracts from a diverse range of sources, Lee 2000 pinpoints the contemporary significance of consumer culture. Meanwhile, Slater 1997 designates consumer culture as an issue intimately bound up with that of modernity, while Gabriel and Lang 1995 explores the consumer from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Lury 1996 is particularly effective on the consumption of identity in a changing world, while Nava 1991 and Sassatelli 2007 highlight the political significance of consumption.

Featherstone, Mike. 1990. Perspectives on consumer culture. Sociology 24.1: 5–22.

DOI: 10.1177/0038038590024001003

A key contribution that emphasizes the sociological significance of the accumulation of material culture. Specifically, Featherstone highlights the emergence of postmodernity, which is effectively characterized by a situation in which individuals lives appear to be more controlled by structural processes and yet freer at one and the same time.

Gabriel, Yiannis, and Tim Lang. 1995. The unmanageable consumer: Contemporary consumption and its fragmentations . London: SAGE.

Gabriel and Lang argue that the key barrier to consumer choice is money. For them contemporary society is notable for its fragmented volatility. The book considers the consumer in various guises, including that of chooser, identity-seeker, and victim and the proposition is that the more social institutions, such as industry or politicians, try to control the consumer the more unmanageable he or she becomes.

Lee, Martyn J., ed. 2000. The consumer society reader . Malden, MA: Blackwell.

This collection brings together a wide range of the key contributions to debates on the significance of consumer culture. It focuses on some of the key theoretical contributions to such debates from the work of Marx to that of Baudrillard, as well as key contributions to the discussion regarding the historical character of the consumer society from the work of Vance Packard to that of David Harvey.

Lury, Celia. 1996. Consumer culture . 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

In this volume Lury considers the ways in which an individual’s position in social groups structured by class, gender, race, and age affects the nature of his or her participation in consumer culture. Consumer culture is seen to provide new ways of creating social and political identities to the extent that consumer culture is actively redrawing questions of difference, struggle, and inequality.

Nava, Mica. 1991. Consumerism reconsidered: Buying and power. Cultural Studies 5:157–173.

DOI: 10.1080/09502389100490141

This piece critically considers the ability of consumerism to create new forms of economic, political, personal, and creative participation. Arguing that waters had previously been muddied by competing theoretical perspectives on consumerism, Nava suggests that a kind of “utopian collectivism” lies within the consumerist project, which may engender its own revolutionary seeds. Nava therefore illustrates the political complexities that are implied by the ability to consume.

Ritzer, George. 1993. The McDonaldization of society: An investigation into the changing character of contemporary social life . Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge.

Ritzer is concerned with the way in which rationalization is played out in the context of consumer culture, namely, through the processes of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. As such, McDonalds is effectively a metaphor for a world that makes us consume in particular ways. However, Ritzer’s contribution has been criticized by some critics for underestimating the potential of consumers to construct their own meanings.

Sassatelli, Roberta. 2007. Consumer culture: History, theory and politics . London: SAGE.

In one of the most comprehensive of the key textbooks on consumer culture, Sassatelli presents a rich interpretation of the diverse range of theoretical approaches to consumer culture. One of the achievements of her contribution is to balance the needs of a range of disciplines, including sociology, history, geography, and economics.

Slater, Don. 1997. Consumer culture and modernity . Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Slater’s work takes a thematic approach in considering some of the key points of tension around consumer culture, including needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, and culture. Slater argues that “consumer culture”—a culture of consumption—is unique and specific, and that it represents the dominant mode of cultural reproduction developed in the West over the course of modernity.

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Consumerism: An Economic Critique

Consumerism, a hallmark of American life, may not be as beneficial as we all think.

Modern macroeconomists disagree about a lot of things, but one thing they almost universally agree on is that ever-increasing consumption is both necessary for society and good for our quality of life.  In a 1995 paper , Juliet Schor writes about the possibility of a different sort of economics.

Schor starts by looking at a time when constantly accelerating consumption was more controversial. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, the book that gave us the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” Veblen questioned the desirability of consumerism. Meanwhile, Schor writes, other economists and businessmen of Veblen’s day thought demand for consumer goods was crucial to the economy, but worried it wouldn’t keep rising. The prevailing wisdom was that, if wages were high enough to cover essential necessities, workers would only be marginally interested in luxury goods; given the option, they would opt to work less rather than overextend themselves for more money.

But in the 1920s, as mass production revved up, economists increasingly came to see material desire as unlimited. Meanwhile, manufacturers and advertisers actively worked to stoke consumer demand. By the post-WWII era, economists almost universally saw the relationship between consumption and happiness as “unproblematic and uninteresting,” Schor writes.

The discipline became about individual choices: the assumption was that each person could shift their work and consumption to line up with their wants and needs. If people work long hours and buy lots of stuff, they are simply following their preferences. In this view, scholars who question consumerism are elitists who don’t trust individuals to make their own choices.

Schor argues that this view misses some important market failures. First, as anyone who’s ever had a job knows, most of us have little choice about how many hours we work. Since World War II, employers have not offered workers a chance to reduce their hours as productivity grows. Instead, the employer promises higher pay.

Schor also writes that market systems are unable to address environmental questions. Future generations and people in poorer nations who suffer the most from environmental damage, would likely prefer wealthy nations to consume less, but there’s no market mechanism for having their voices heard.

Lastly, Schor notes, there’s a prisoners’ dilemma problem found in the conspicuous consumption that Veblen noticed. Research has found that people’s absolute level of consumption may be correlated to how well they stack up against their neighbors rather than its role in shaping individual happiness. That means each individual has an incentive to work more and spend more, even if it would ultimately be better for everyone to collectively make a decision to work less and spend less.

Schor argues for a new kind of analysis: looking at the costs of consumption in terms of the environment and our quality of life.  She also suggests legislative reforms to address the market failures she outlines, including the choice to negotiate working hours and increasing the market costs of environmental damage through taxes and other methods.

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Consumerism

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• First Online: 18 August 2022
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• Milan Todorovic 7  

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Consumer-centered strategies ; Consumption crisis/critiques ; Citizen/consumer shifts ; Consumer experience ; Resource depletion debates ; Human-made waste/pollution ; Output-focused economies ; User activism ; Social/commerce tensions ; Use-goal utility ; Tangible leisure attainment

There are two essential and opposing ways of looking at the long-contested subject of consumerism ; a set of combined, context-dependent approaches have been emerging as sustainability discourses, management practices, and consumer behaviors had grown and developed over time.

Two very restricted opposing definitions may be offered at this point, before due elaboration ensues. The third may not (yet) be fully formulated at a level of definition:

First, as the practice of upholding the rights and enfranchisement of consumers – and the very notion of consumption as a doctrine fundamental to the conception of capitalist systems, especially in their advanced mass-market forms – understood to be...

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Todorovic, M. (2022). Consumerism. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_427-1

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“In this essay collection, Muratovski focuses on how the marketing of products and services affects our lives and lifestyles, looking at brands as ‘icons of popular culture’ and links to our identities and political/economic systems. He points out that ‘consumer economics influences every facet of our lives.’ . . . One example noted in the book is that logos of well-known brands like Apple and McDonald’s have a power in our lives similar to the totems carried by early tribes. And the videos posted on YouTube enable us to share stories in much the same way that ancient civilizations did. What's more, linking New Zealand wines to the country’s Central Otago gold miners in the 1800s turns out to be a good way to capture the fancy of wine lovers. Recommended for upper-division and graduate marketing students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners.”

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Cover Story

Consumerism and its discontents

Materialistic values may stem from early insecurities and are linked to lower life satisfaction, psychologists find. Accruing more wealth may provide only a partial fix.

By TORI DeANGELIS

June 2004, Vol 35, No. 6

Print version: page 52

Compared with Americans in 1957, today we own twice as many cars per person, eat out twice as often and enjoy endless other commodities that weren't around then--big-screen TVs, microwave ovens, SUVs and handheld wireless devices, to name a few. But are we any happier?

Certainly, happiness is difficult to pin down, let alone measure. But a recent literature review suggests we're no more contented than we were then--in fact, maybe less so.

"Compared with their grandparents, today's young adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less happiness and much greater risk of depression and assorted social pathology," notes Hope College psychologist David G. Myers, PhD, author of the article, which appeared in the American Psychologist (Vol. 55, No. 1). "Our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective well-being."

These findings emerge at a time when the consumer culture has reached a fever pitch, comments Myers, also the author of "The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty" (Yale University Press, 2000).

So what does psychologists' research say about possible effects of this consumer culture on people's mental well-being? Based on the literature to date, it would be too simplistic to say that desire for material wealth unequivocally means discontent. Although the least materialistic people report the most life satisfaction, some studies indicate that materialists can be almost as contented if they've got the money and their acquisitive lifestyle doesn't conflict with more soul-satisfying pursuits. But for materialists with less money and other conflicting desires--a more common situation--unhappiness emerges, researchers are finding.

"There's a narrowing of the gap between materialists and nonmaterialists in life satisfaction as materialists' income rises," notes Edward Diener, PhD, a well-known researcher of subjective well-being and materialism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "So if you're poor, it's very bad to be a materialist; and if you're rich, it doesn't make you happier than nonmaterialists, but you almost catch up."

Why are materialists unhappy?

As with all things psychological, the relationship between mental state and materialism is complex: Indeed, researchers are still trying to ascertain whether materialism stokes unhappiness, unhappiness fuels materialism, or both. Diener suggests that several factors may help explain the apparent toll of pursuit of wealth. In simple terms, a strong consumerist bent--what William Wordsworth in 1807 called "getting and spending"--can promote unhappiness because it takes time away from the things that can nurture happiness, including relationships with family and friends, research shows.

"It's not absolutely necessary that chasing after material wealth will interfere with your social life," Diener says. "But it can, and if it does, it probably has a net negative payoff in terms of life satisfaction and well-being."

People with strong materialistic values appear to have goal orientations that may lead to poorer well-being, adds Knox College psychologist Tim Kasser, PhD, who with Berkeley, Calif., psychotherapist Allen Kanner, PhD, co-edited a new APA book, " Psychology and Consumer Culture " (APA, 2004), featuring experts' research and views on the links between consumerism, well-being and environmental and social factors.

In Kasser's own book, "The High Price of Materialism" (MIT Press, 2002), Kasser describes his and others' research showing that when people organize their lives around extrinsic goals such as product acquisition, they report greater unhappiness in relationships, poorer moods and more psychological problems. Kasser distinguishes extrinsic goals--which tend to focus on possessions, image, status and receiving rewards and praise--from intrinsic ones, which aim at outcomes like personal growth and community connection and are satisfying in and of themselves.

Relatedly, a not-yet-published study by University of Missouri social psychologist Marsha Richins, PhD, finds that materialists place unrealistically high expectations on what consumer goods can do for them in terms of relationships, autonomy and happiness.

"They think that having these things is going to change their lives in every possible way you can think of," she says. One man in Richins's study, for example, said he desperately wanted a swimming pool so he could improve his relationship with his moody 13-year-old daughter.

The roots of materialism

Given that we all experience the same consumeristic culture, why do some of us develop strongly materialistic values and others don't? A line of research suggests that insecurity--both financial and emotional--lies at the heart of consumeristic cravings . Indeed, it's not money per se, but the striving for it, that's linked to unhappiness, find Diener and others.

"Research suggests that when people grow up in unfortunate social situations--where they're not treated very nicely by their parents or when they experience poverty or even the threat of death," says Kasser, "they become more materialistic as a way to adapt."

A 1995 paper in Developmental Psychology (Vol. 31, No. 6) by Kasser and colleagues was the first to demonstrate this. Teens who reported having higher materialistic attitudes tended to be poorer and to have less nurturing mothers than those with lower materialism scores, the team found. Similarly, a 1997 study in the Journal of Consumer Research (Vol. 23, No. 4) headed up by Aric Rindfleisch, PhD, then a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now an associate professor of marketing there, found that young people whose parents were undergoing or had undergone divorce or separation were more prone to developing materialistic values later in life than those from intact homes.

And in the first direct experimental test of the point, Kasser and University of Missouri social psychologist Kenneth Sheldon, PhD, reported in a 2000 article in Psychological Science (Vol. 11, No. 4), that when provoked with thoughts of the most extreme uncertainty of them all--death--people reported more materialistic leanings.

More money=greater happiness?

The ill effects of materialism appear subject to modification, other research finds. In a longitudinal study reported in the November 2003 issue of Psychological Science (Vol. 14, No. 6), psychologists Carol Nickerson, PhD, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Norbert Schwarz, PhD, of the University of Michigan, Diener, and Daniel Kahnemann, PhD, of Princeton University, examined two linked data sets collected 19 years apart on 12,000 people who had attended elite colleges and universities in the 1970s--one drawn in 1976 when they were freshmen, the other in 1995.

On average, those who had initially expressed stronger financial aspirations reported lower life satisfaction two decades later than those expressing lower monetary desires. But as the income of the higher-aspiration participants rose, so did their reported life satisfaction, the team found.

James E. Burroughs, PhD, assistant professor of commerce at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce, and the University of Wisconsin's Rindfleisch conclude that the unhappiest materialists are those whose materialistic and higher-order values are most conflicted. In a 2002 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research (Vol. 29, No. 3), the team first gauged people's levels of stress, materialistic values and prosocial values in the domains of family, religion and community--in keeping with the theory of psychologist Shalom Schwartz, PhD, that some values unavoidably conflict with one another. Then in an experimental study, they ascertained the degree of conflict people felt when making a decision between the two value domains.

The unhappiest people were those with the most conflict--those who reported high prosocial and high materialistic values, says Burroughs. The other three groups--those low in materialism and high in prosocial values, those low in prosocial values and high in materialism, and those lukewarm in both arenas--reported similar, but lower levels of life stress.

His findings square with those of others: that the differences in life satisfaction between more and less materialistic people are relatively small, says Burroughs. And most researchers in the area agree that these values lie along a continuum, he adds.

"Material things are neither bad nor good," Burroughs comments. "It is the role and status they are accorded in one's life that can be problematic. The key is to find a balance: to appreciate what you have, but not at the expense of the things that really matter--your family, community and spirituality."

The bigger picture

Even if some materialists swim through life with little distress, however, consumerism carries larger costs that are worth worrying about, others say. "There are consequences of materialism that can affect the quality of other people's and other species' lives," says Kasser.

To that end, he and others are beginning to study links between materialistic values and attitudes toward the environment, and to write about the way consumerism has come to affect our collective psyche. Psychotherapist Kanner, who co-edited "Psychology and Consumer Culture" with Kasser, cites examples as minor as parents who "outsource" parental activities like driving their children to school and those as big as international corporations leading people in poor countries to crave products they can ill afford.

Indeed, consumerism is an example of an area where psychology needs to stretch from its focus on the individual and examine the wider impact of the phenomenon, Kanner believes.

"Corporate-driven consumerism is having massive psychological effects, not just on people, but on our planet as well," he says. "Too often, psychology over-individualizes social problems. In so doing, we end up blaming the victim, in this instance by locating materialism primarily in the person while ignoring the huge corporate culture that's invading so much of our lives ."

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Consumerism in the Great Gatsby: a Reflection of the Roaring Twenties

How it works

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gatsby’s Flashy Facade: The Hollow Pursuit of Wealth
• 3 Daisy’s Materialistic Desires: Wealth Over Love
• 4 Tom’s Old Money Arrogance: Power and Moral Decay
• 5 Conclusion

Introduction

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, really captures what the Roaring Twenties were all about. It was a time when the U.S. saw a huge economic boom and lots of cultural changes. The book dives deep into themes like wealth, social status, and the American Dream. But one thing that stands out is how consumerism plays a big role in the story. Set in the flashy Jazz Age, the book uses consumerism to show the moral decay and disillusionment that comes with chasing after material success.

By looking at characters like Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, and Tom Buchanan, Fitzgerald shows how shallow and hedonistic consumerism can be. In the end, he suggests that chasing wealth and status leads to feeling empty and morally bankrupt. Let’s take a closer look at how consumerism is shown in The Great Gatsby and what it means for the characters and their society.

Gatsby’s Flashy Facade: The Hollow Pursuit of Wealth

Jay Gatsby is like the poster child for extreme consumerism in the story. His flashy lifestyle, with a huge mansion, wild parties, and fancy clothes, shows off his new wealth. But he’s not just enjoying his riches for himself. He’s using them to catch the attention of Daisy Buchanan, the woman he’s obsessed with. Gatsby’s need to show off is all about trying to relive an idealized past and fit in with the East Egg elite. His big parties are filled with New York’s socialites, symbolizing the era’s excesses but also showing how empty these gatherings are. Even though he seems successful, Gatsby is still an outsider, never fully accepted by the old-money crowd he wants to join. His sad end shows that all his consumerist efforts were pointless. Money can’t buy real happiness or love.

Daisy’s Materialistic Desires: Wealth Over Love

Daisy Buchanan is another key character who shows the allure and emptiness of consumerism. She’s beautiful and charming, but her values are deeply materialistic. Her voice is even described as being “full of money,” showing her consumerist mindset. Daisy’s marriage to Tom Buchanan isn’t about love; it’s about the security and luxury his wealth gives her. She’s so focused on material things that she ignores the moral side of her actions, making choices that favor comfort over doing the right thing. Daisy can’t commit to Gatsby, even though they had a past romance, because she’s too wrapped up in the consumerist idea that wealth equals worth. In the end, she goes back to Tom despite his cheating, showing that in a consumerist world, material comfort often wins over emotional satisfaction.

Tom’s Old Money Arrogance: Power and Moral Decay

Tom Buchanan represents old money and the arrogance that comes with inherited wealth. His consumerism isn’t about showing off new riches but about keeping his dominance and control. His lavish lifestyle, from his big estate to his affairs, shows he believes he’s inherently superior and has the right to consume without consequences. His affair with Myrtle Wilson is another form of consumption, treating people like disposable items. Tom’s disdain for Gatsby, whom he sees as a social climber, highlights the class distinctions that consumerism reinforces. Tom’s indifference to the destruction he causes, like Gatsby’s death and Myrtle’s demise, reveals the moral bankruptcy of consumerism, where human lives are less important than maintaining wealth and power.

In The Great Gatsby, consumerism isn’t just the backdrop; it’s a driving force that shapes the characters and their fates. Through Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom, Fitzgerald offers a harsh critique of the 1920s consumerist culture, exposing its superficiality and moral emptiness. Gatsby’s tragic chase for material wealth to achieve his dream, Daisy’s hollow life defined by luxury, and Tom’s ruthless grip on his social status all highlight the novel’s main message: that the American Dream, tainted by consumerism, leads to disappointment and despair. Fitzgerald’s portrayal of consumerism in The Great Gatsby is still relevant today, serving as a warning about the dangers of equating material success with personal worth in any era.

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Consumerism: 12 Examples and How They Affect Life on Earth

By Denise Doherty Categories: People & Society December 8, 2022, 7:04 AM

Looking for examples of consumerism? It’s more than fast fashion and roomy cars: basically it’s everything that sustains a capitalist and booming economy. But do these things also sustain a high quality of life and planetary wellbeing?

There are examples of consumerism in every corner of the globe because humans have always consumed. It’s an innate and necessary part of our existence. Up until recent decades though, humans generally consumed what they needed — as opposed to what they wanted. Therefore, the term consumerism has evolved to be associated with the unrelenting acquisition of goods and services . Consumerism is the core and vital ideology of global capitalism. It is essential for the health of a capitalist economy that people buy things — otherwise it risks collapse.

The term ‘consumerism’ was first penned by the economist and engineer, Sidney A. Reeve, in his 1921 book, called Modern Economic Tendencies . Reeve was discussing how goods had to appeal to the consumer in order to sell well. Just over 100 years later, and goods are appealing and selling so well that it looks as though we have created a capitalist society of over-consumption that might just annihilate our planet and wellbeing.

National Geographic points out that Americans and Western Europeans have held the monopoly on consumerism for decades, but recently, less capitalist regions of the world are quickly catching up to create a ‘consumer class’ of 1.7 billion people globally . This emergence of over one billion new consumers, has sizeable environmental impacts — particularly due to a diet based strongly on meat and possession of over one-fifth of the world’s cars.

Many experts warn that this is driving climate change and environmental chaos. If the global population reaches its predicted 9.6 billion by 2050, we will need the natural resources of three planet Earths to sustain our current lifestyle.

So, is consumerism the foundation of our society? What exactly is it and what are examples of consumerism in our lives? And more importantly, is our consumerism driving the forces that threaten our very existence on the planet? Let’s take a look.

4 Examples of Consumerism: Understand the Process and What Drives It

Various factors drive our current cycle of consumerism in the west. A materialistic culture, high-level wants and desires, and high living standards all contribute. Advertising and marketing tactics also play a major role in influencing our purchasing psychology.

Planned obsolescence — whereby companies deliberately design products to expire or become outdated — is a tactic frequently used by major corporations to increase spending. New car models every year, constantly updated versions of technology and software, and planned system malfunctions are just some common examples.

Propaganda has been at the heart of marketing ploys for decades. Science, expert opinions and research are frequently employed (and often manipulated) by businesses to sell their products.

A man called Edward Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis — literally saved the bacon, when he convinced the American public that the commercially failing product was the healthiest way to start the day. He did this by publicizing expert medical opinions stating that protein (which exists in high levels in meat) is healthier than sugar (commonly found in the traditional American breakfast of orange juice and toast).

These are just some of the many drivers of our consumerist behaviors — of which there are so many. There are even more examples of consumerism itself.

A brand of sportswear has a top-selling pair of trainers for children. They add a new feature — like lights or designs — to the trainers every six months. This puts pressure on parents to keep their children up-to-date with what other children have. Therefore, parents buy the newest edition each time one is released, whether they are needed or not.

Many gaming console manufacturers release new models regularly — with updated features and software that is not compatible with the games for earlier editions. The consumer then has to purchase a new console and new games to continue to play the latest releases.

A celebrity is given the latest fashion and jewelry trends free-of-charge by large corporations, so that they will be photographed in the item. Fashion-conscious consumers rush out and buy the — often over-priced — item, despite not needing it.

As the festivities approach, we only need to turn on the TV to see the onslaught of advertisements for Christmas gifts. The season places a massive demand on the general public to shop and buy themselves into debt. Even a visit to see Santa himself might involve a few hidden extra costs when your child wants a picture with the elf, a bigger gift or a few over-priced candy canes. The Santa experience can now involve an overnight stay or even a sleigh-ride in a different country.

Consumerism Examples

Every single item or service we purchase can be seen as an example of consumerism. The debates and issues begin when consumption goes beyond what we need and persistently towards getting what we want — aka conspicuous consumption . The reality is that we have basic needs — like food, clothes, heat and shelter. Other material items — such as cars, jewelry, widescreen TVs, tumble dryers, modern furniture and even the Christmas tree — are, in harsh reality, luxuries, and therefore perfect examples of consumerism.

More examples of consumerism:

• Replacing a perfectly working mobile phone or laptop because a new model is out
• Food choices
• Buying disposables and convenience items/foods
• New cars with advanced technology
• Luxury and unnecessary travel
• Modern gadgets and electrical/digital items
• Beauty and cosmetic services/products
• Presents, decorations, ornamental items

A consumerist society is one in which people frequently purchase goods and services that are not essential and where high value is placed on owning many material things — especially goods that they do not need. The US is considered an example of a hyper-consumerist society in view of the many examples of consumerism that are part of daily life here — such as large houses filled will material possessions, huge volumes of children’s toys and multiple cars per family.

Our mass consumerist ethos has been described as one of America’s most important and controversial contributions to the world. The year of 2008 saw consumerism at its absolute worst when a Walmart worker was trampled to death and others were injured — including a woman who was eight months pregnant — by out of control consumers at a Black Friday shop opening in New York.

This is probably one of the most shocking and serious examples of consumerism’s darkest side. Unfortunately though, these dark sides are many and pose just as many threats.

Anti-Consumerism

If consumerism suddenly stopped, our economy would essentially collapse , because for capitalism to prevail successfully, corporations need us to continue to buy whatever they are selling. Millions of jobs would be lost and we would likely slump into a deep recession. Despite this fact, consumerism is not without criticisms. Some of the major concerns over capitalism and mass consumerism include :

• Produces or contributes to natural resource depletion and environmental decay
• Consumer debt
• Competitive or unnecessary consumption
• Unequal distribution of wealth and poverty
• Time spent pursuing consumerism as opposed to more meaningful pursuits
• Temporary satisfaction only
• Capitalist advertising to influence mindsets and drive fantasizing about products and brands
• Generating superiority-inferiority divides based on material possessions
• Creates a sense of duty to purchase unnecessary goods to sustain the economy
• The belief that a successful nation is a capitalist one.

Despite these concerns, consumer spending in the US — which accounts for over two-thirds of American economic activity, rose 0.6 per cent in October 2022 against all expectation. Capitalism and the many examples of consumerism there are remain plentiful across the country.

Born in the USA

The post World War Two era is often heralded as the period when examples of consumerism became abundant. Industrialized nations were eager to spend after years of rationing, jobs were plenty and wages were good. Others, however, would argue that examples of consumerism can be traced back as far as the late 1800s in America — where large corporations, shopping malls and department stores were replacing local produce and retailers.

According to MIT Press, these large-scale operations had access to investment bankers and drew on assembly-line production of commodities that were powered by fossil fuels. They also highlight that the traditional objective of making products for necessity and usefulness was displaced by the goal of profit.

These claims are reinforced by the British Broadcasting Company — who also trace to the origins of global consumerism to American soil during the late 1800s. Both publications quote the author William Leach — who wrote the acclaimed 1993 book Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture .

According to Leach: “The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.”

Examples of How Consumerism Affects Our Lives

The views depicted by William Leach in 1993 have since been strengthened by several researchers and materialism is a factor. Consumers that are highly materialistic generally believe that having material things is a vital element in reaching happiness and satisfaction in life. The more they buy, the happier they think they will become — perhaps due to social class pressures, cultural norms, or other contributing factors.

Research findings have shown that materialism is associated with compulsive spending, low self-esteem, envy, and non-generosity. This link between consumerism and negative outcomes, low levels of life satisfaction quality of life is abundantly documented . So is consumer debt. Just under half of Americans are unable to pay off their monthly credit card balance. 2021 ended with record levels of consumer debt — totaling $15.6 trillion.

Some believe that this materialistic tendency may stem from early insecurities. Personality may play a role in how materialistic we become and how much we feel we need to consume. However, researchers have found that situations that activate a consumer mindset result in disruptions to wellbeing — including depression, debt, anxiety and social disengagement — irrespective of personality.

The American Psychology Association warns that materialistic and financial accumulation may only provide a quick or partial feeling of contentment. They also point out that the least materialistic people report the best life satisfaction. For materialistic people with low amounts of money — unhappiness emerges.

However, as materialists’ income rises, so does life satisfaction — but still not to the extent reported by non-materialists. Overall, the APA find that people with strong materialistic values have goals and ambitions that may lead to poorer well-being than those less driven by consumerism.

‘Til Debt Us Do Part

Our biggest debt is to the earth and her raw materials. Forbes highlights that our earth produces enough resources to meet all of our needs, but not enough to meet all of our wants. This fact has massive implications for planetary wellbeing — as well as human.

Portions of the carbon footprint generated by many other countries is actually driven by and rooted in American consumerism — such as China, and Mexico . Research has found that the production and use of household goods and services is responsible for 60 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, choices we as American consumers make — in and out of our homes — impact the whole planet.

The United Nations (UN) agrees that the choices American — and global — consumers make will directly impact climate change. Their 2020 report found that the richest one percent of the global population emit more than twice the amount of greenhouse gases than the poorest 50 percent.

A typical American’s yearly carbon emissions are  five times that of the world’s average person. Others report that consumers with more than $100,000 in yearly household income only make up 22.3 percent of the population, but produced almost one-third of all US households’ total carbon emissions.

Anti-​capitalists argue that because our consumerism is so destructive, free markets must be reined in and consumerism opposed. Because of the risks to the global economy and the living conditions of billions, it’s not so simple.

Alternatives to Consumerism

Monash University research illustrates that consumerism is challenged in settings of communal living because residents rely on each other for values, resources and experiences — and not the market. The researchers do admit that a utopian society may not be realistic — but projects like agrihoods and community gardens are steps in the right direction.

Economists are examining transitions from our current linear economy — where we mine raw materials that we process into a product that is thrown away after use — to a circular economy — that closes the cycles of all these raw materials. This means the environmental, economic and social impact is positive in the long-term. Differences between linear and circular consumerism outlined by some include :

• In a linear economy, the production of beef is made more sustainable by changing the way cows are fed to reduce methane gas emissions and maintain the same production level of meat and dairy.
• In a circular economy, production is made more sustainable by not making beef from cows, but by imitating it as a meat substitute. Plants are then cultivated to produce substitutes — contributing to biodiversity, employment and landscape management.

Environmental Consumerism

Sustainable consumption and production is about doing more and having better quality of life with less and promoting more sustainable lifestyles. It is also about separating economic success from environmental decay, minimizing the use of natural resources, toxic materials, emissions, waste and pollutants, according to the UN .

Achieving sustainable consumption represents a major challenge for authorities, businesses and consumers because it requires economic, social and environmental equilibrium and change.

Many feel that Covid-19 has influenced our consumerism behaviors — reminding people that we can survive with less and live happier, simpler and less materialistic lives. This shift in consumer mindset may be a key towards changing our current trends, and towards more sustainable consumerism, according to some researchers . They state that change could be on the horizon because brands need to put the consumer’s core values at the center of their business strategy. The values they uncovered included:

• 66 percent of global consumers align themselves with brands that mirror their values.
• 88 percent of global consumers want brands to help them make a difference.
• 71 percent of global consumers are willing to pay a premium for brands that provide traceability.

If society’s values and mindset continues to change and veer towards more sustainable and environmentally-friendly trends, businesses will have to cater for these values if capitalism and the economy is to survive. Our individual needs are the drivers of consumerism and every example of it — therefore, each household’s choices and behaviors matter.

Food, water and energy are highlighted as core elements of Goal 12 of the UN’s post-Covid Sustainable Development Goals . Goal 12 aims to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns and states that:

• Humankind is polluting water in rivers and lakes faster than nature can recycle and purify.
• Agriculture is by far the largest water consumer of water.
• Over 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress.
• Over the period 1995–2015, floods accounted for 43 per cent of all documented natural disasters — affecting 2.3 billion people, killing 157,000 and causing US$662 billion in damage.
• Households consume 29 per cent of global energy and consequently contribute to 21 per cent of resultant CO2 emissions.
• The global population without access to electricity fell from 1.2 billion in 2010 to 840 million in 2017.
• Each year, an estimated one third of all food produced – equivalent to 1.3 billion tons worth around $1 trillion – ends up wasted.
• 38 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2019.
• Land degradation, declining soil fertility, unsustainable water use, overfishing and marine environment degradation are all lessening the ability of the natural resource base to supply food.
• The food sector accounts for around 30 per cent of the world’s total energy consumption and accounts for around 22 per cent of total Greenhouse Gas emissions.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Are we on track to bridging the emissions gap? According to the Emissions Gap Report 2020 — absolutely not. Can the examples of consumerism in your life and household help close the gap? Absolutely yes.

There are many things you can do to get started in conscious consumerism . Shopping local and asking yourself “Do I even need this?” are good places to start. Find out what organic means , learn more about fair trade and check out a plant-based diet .

Read some of our tips for living more sustainably or our article on superfoods for energy and sustainability for just a few ways to make sure your consumerism behaviors deplete as little as possible of the earth’s natural resources.

Learn about sustainable development and green architecture if you are planning a building project. And look into types of renewable energy you could perhaps install in your home. Reduce, reuse and recycle when it comes to consumerism in your life.

• Environmental Organizations: 8 NGOs and Non-Profits Worth Supporting
• The 16 Best Movies & Documentaries About Sustainability & the Environment
• Social Sustainability in 2022: Everything You Need to Know

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