Quotes About Consumerism

Sometimes that made me feel kind of tired. It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it. I felt like I'd been running toward it for a long time.

It's like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.

The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself. But

under it, when you come back, you can sense another more significant and more enduring vitality. It has been somewhat hammered down of late. The bell ringers and flag fondlers have been busily peddling their notion that to make America Strong, we must march in close and obedient ranks, to the sound of their little tin whistle. The life-adjustment educators, in strange alliance with the hucksters of consumer

This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor.

Where affluence is the rule, the true threat is the loss of desire.(...) What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices.

It's a sad culture. People live in a frenzy. They work all the time to make money to buy things to impress other people. They're measured by what they own.

You spend more on fancy coffee than I do on meals. Why can't you help the poor, the sick, the homeless?

You should always pay full price for a haircut, but if you have the chance to buy discount therapy you should grab it, because the markup on that shit is insane.

Even while you read this, whole square miles of identical boxes are spreading like gangrene; developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch.

The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.

In other words, you want to become totally bourgeois. You people have all been brainwashed. I imagine that you'd like to become a success or something equally vile.

Canned food is a perversion, Ignatius said. I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

The United States had no foreign policy, only the reflections of domestic politics internationally. There was no satisfaction in representing that. The country was succumbing to a consumerism in which people equated charm with the absence of halitosis, balanced competing claims about toothpaste, and fretted about whether their refrigerators ejected ice cubes or required an ice pick.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

Free your mind and free yourself from brand slavery.

That seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.

People are always going to go shopping. A lot of our effort is just: 'How do we make the retail experience a great one?

No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

Visit your local supermarket or retail chain. You'll experience a lot of visual stimulus, but it's unlikely that your other senses will encounter any compelling messages.

Mass market desire is about meaning and experience.

In my experience, those who make the biggest fuss about not spending much at Christmas are generally the ones who buy what they want and eat where they want 12 months a year.