Quotes About Consumerism

Unlike perfume, handbags are visible on the body, and--like Air Jordans for teenagers--give the wearer the chance to brandish the logo and publicly declare her status or aspiration.

God, it drives me crazy when I know exactly what I want and I can't find it anywhere! It's like does anybody want my money!? I mean what the fuck!?

Lie #3: Advertisers and fast-food restaurants know what will make you happy.

In an age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical, and functional needs is woefully insufficient. Engineers must figure out how to get things to work. But if those things are not also pleasing to the eye or compelling to the soul, few will buy them. There are too many other options.

A best seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.

It's certainly anyone's prerogative to say, 'I liked something more when it was this' or blah blah. But there's a kind of laziness as a consumer of entertainment, I think, to wish that something was repeating itself and doing the same thing. But to each their own, and I do it all the time. I've dropped television shows as a viewer.

Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.

Much of reality TV has been like the worst nightmares of Theodor Adorno and Jean Baudrillard come true, its seductive allure turning us into gossips in the global village.

There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

The truth is I got rid of 100% of my vinyl in the '90s. All the vinyl I have is re-bought.

CDs are not as good as vinyl, and you buy one in the supermarket along with the yoghurt.

The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads... It includes... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

As a child, I seriously believed my family was going down the road to bankruptcy. I was denied virtually every popular trend, from heavily logoed Tommy Hilfiger windbreakers to amusement park season's passes.

The fact is: America's obsession with meat and dairy has pretty much destroyed our sense of taste. The average burger and milkshake meal is so overloaded with fat, salt and sugar that it has numbed our taste buds to virtually anything else.

Americans have perfected the art of reducing complicated truths into formulas and products. We're desperate for instant, visible, measurable ways of knowing God, instead of trusting that it's complicated and a mystery.

The benefits of freer trade, such as job creation, lower inflation, and greater consumer choice, are often invisible or only partly visible.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

You can wander around these outlet shops for hours, accumulating clothing and accessories until your credit cards melt down. But you will not find one single shop that sells anything for the mind or the soul. There are no books. There is no music. There is no art. There is no poetry. The outlets are a spiritual wasteland.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

What is the point of labeling each individual piece of fruit? Buy the fruit, EAT the ad! We've carved a chunk out of the ozone, burned up all the rainforests, soon we won't be able to BREATHE, and all because we had to label each individual piece of fruit.

Ming Dynasty porcelain, Mao jackets, cheap toys and electrical goods, everything, though not pot-stickers, or crispy duck and pancakes and sweet and sour pork and fortune cookies, the fact that she never ate her fortune cookie though, just opened it to see her fortune.

If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature.

Look, if you need sexy egg cartons to sell our eggs, then you need to educate your customers. We don't intend to patronize big oil just so we can sell eggs at Whole Foods.