Quotes About Consumerism

What's wrong with Disneyland? It brings joy to millions and tutors children about the corporate, overbranded world they've been born into.

Our industrialized society is out to satisfy all needs, and our consumer society is even out to create needs in order to satisfy them; but the most human of all human needs—the need to see a meaning in one's life—remains unsatisfied. People may have enough to live by; but more often than not they do not have anything to live for.

Our thoughts, feelings, desires and actions are being robotized; 'life' is coming to mean feeding apparatuses and being fed by them. In short: Everything is becoming absurd. So where is there room for human freedom?

They reveal that for major product and service categories, brands are generally becoming more similar, and as they are becoming more similar, people increasingly select based on price.

I think I want to stick to jewelry. Perfumes are for the bigger media stars, and I think that works well for them. I don't think you have to be a big star to have a jewelry line; if something's pretty, I think people will want to buy it.

I analyzed hundreds of consumer complaint letters sent to my brother, the consumer activist Ralph Nader throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in the hope that he would do something about their problems. Some of those letters were published in No Access to Law and formed the basis

Here, people hold bags not meant to carry, but to be pretty.

They may have three or four cars instead of one or two, and they may have two television sets instead of one,

Ever since they invented Hello Kitty, the world hasn't been the same. You can safely chart the rise of The Culture of Cute since that flat-faced skank started showing up everywhere.

After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism.

Wherever you go online, the Big Computer knows what you want before you want it. It's ready for you and waits patiently, humming. It knows where you will be tomorrow and what you will be doing, and it carefully calibrates the shame you carry with you in hopes that you will buy something to restore your peace of mind.

There is no weather in malls.

Every time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach. - Sherrie Ford

The small stuff matters. The company that became the largest and most powerful in history isn't a military contractor or a car company. It isn't the result of savvy lobbyists in Washington, or the happenstance of controlling the supply of petroleum, or some kind of cabal that is beyond the understanding of ordinary people. The largest and most powerful company in history is built by each of us handing over three single dollar bills over and over again.

They had the lure of the Wal-Mart volume," [Jim] Wier said. "Once you get hooked on the volume, it's like getting hooked on cocaine. You've created a monster for yourself.

Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.

I've been shopping all my life and still have nothing to wear.

I shop like a bull — I charge everything.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

To make more machines for more people to struggle and buy, to catch up with the great mad procession of the world struggling to get all out of life that was in it --Ah! Why would they not see? Why must so many be blind?

We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. Ask ourselves, 'Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?

Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.

Fear sells better than sex and the iPhone 5 combined.

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.