Quotes About Consumerism

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

I try to do the right thing with money. Save a dollar here and there, clip some coupons. Buy ten gold chains instead of 20. Four summer homes instead of eight.

Those prizes in Cracker Jacks are a joke. I once got a magnifying glass. It was so poorly made, ants were laughing at it.

In Beverly Hills...they don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.

I bought some batteries, but they weren't included.

Capitalism is founded on greed and envy

Ellos (Los Auténticos) creen que los objetos generan miedo. Cuantas más cosas tienes más tienes que temer. Al final sólo vives para tener cosas.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

Some innovations just don't attract enough economic or social demand: just as supersonic flight and manned space flight stagnated after the 1970s, today (in 2002) the potentialities of broadband (G3) technology are being taken up rather slowly because few people want to surf the Internet or watch movies from their mobile phones.

Sex doesn't sell anything other than itself

When we brand things, our brains perceive them as more special and valuable than they actually are.

As James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, puts it, "75 percent of spontaneous food purchases can be traced to a nagging child. And one out of two mothers will buy a food simply because her child requests it. To trigger desire in a child is to trigger desire in the whole family.

de-couple the animals themselves from the products on sale. This is a rule of thumb in the United States, but nothing you would ever see in Europe. Europeans have known extensive food shortages, and rationing, and Americans, fortunately, never have. When US tourists visit a marche or charcuterie in France, many are startled and even repulsed by the displays of meat and fowl

We've been trained by Industrial Age marketers to believe anything good is already on the shelf.

It is a known fact that men are practical, hardheaded realists, in contrast to women, who are romantic dreamers and actually believe that estrogenic skin cream must do something or they couldn't charge sixteen dollars for that little tiny jar.

This is crazy Donald. When I see the prices at the mall, I just want to vomit.

Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.

That quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliche. Flowers and Christmas lights, it's what we're programmed to love.