Quotes About Consumerism

Most books are bought by women.

Women's bodies are used to sell anything and everything because it works, it grabs people's attention, and advertisers aren't going to stop using something that works.

It's a nebulous thing, but it is my belief—my experience also—that women do not have the need to collect that men have.

I love air conditioning and Starbucks.

People refuse to believe that I've never been to Starbucks or Disneyland.

All the airports kind of feel and look the same now. Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you're going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You're going to get your coffee and the 'USA Today' or 'New York Times' in every airport.

Starbucks is spreading like a cancer.

There is something romantic about the world being a diverse place, where every place has a Starbucks and Denny's.

People go shopping, we spend on so many things, and we just don't know. We don't know the prices of things. But gasoline, even when you're not buying, it's staring you in the face. Psychologists call this 'salience.'

Halloween starts earlier and earlier, just like Christmas.

Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.

Our own relentless search for novelty and social status locks us into an iron cage of consumerism. Affluence has itself betrayed us.

I think most people, no matter their status now, have big screen TVs, because they're the standard TVs now. And so why would you go to the cinema?

Our globalized, automated economy is full of magic - Everyday Low Prices and next-day delivery on that single Gatorade you one-clicked. But it is also full of loss - of jobs, of the dignity of steady work, of chances to rise.

Human nature says that you want a bargain, whether you want the goods or not. You think that something is a steal, you'll buy it.

I'm part of the consumer culture... I'm just using the space I am given to express something that is out of the space so I'm part of the consumer system but I'm advocating stepping out. Which is a contradiction but I could be part of he consumer system and say, 'let's consume even more.'

Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him—products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere.

Encouraging demographic self-recognition and self-expression through products is, similarly, the bread and butter not of leftist ideology but of consumerism. These things are part of the culture industry's very DNA.

Why biblical texts? Because biblical texts have the power to release what Brueggemann calls a "counter-imagination," a way of seeing the world that is an alternative to the consumerist, militaristic, death-obsessed imagination of the culture.

our youth are told that buying expensive items is normal behavior for affluent people. They are led to believe that the wealthy have a high-consumption lifestyle. They learn that hyperspending is the main reward for becoming affluent in America. Why

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that the customer would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all of our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product -- Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price -- Everything.

Meanwhile, in the realm of Something Lower, where books are but numbers in a series, the hacks grind out and the presses print the sf equivalent of Silhouette Romances. The sheer mass of Perry Rhodan lookalikes and fantasy-gaming disguised as books is awesome in much the same way that Niagara Falls is awesome: there is so much of it and it never stops.

Without this, your life is incomplete." Automobile commercials are particularly amusing in their overemphasis on these messages. They present ownership of their particular car as some sort of euphoric experience. In reality, we all know that cars are terrible investments that depreciate faster than anything else, and that when we purchase a new one, we spend most of our mental energy worrying that it will be stolen or damaged in the local mall parking lot.

She thought of the self-help books preaching the importance of gratitude that millions of Americans bought each year. How many of them could muster gratitude for a cup of tea?