Quotes About Consumerism

Some candy bars had more protein than many cereals. [Jean] Mayer dubbed them "sugar-coated vitamin pills" and wrote, "I contend that these cereals containing over 50% sugar should be labeled imitation cereal or cereal confections, and they should be sold in the candy section rather than in the cereal section.

The aftertaste of affluence is boredom.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

Undoubtedly, the best way for a consumer to have a good time in the 2010s was to turn to Korean products: for a car, Kia and Hyundai; for electronics, LG and Samsung.

I spent whole afternoons at Bon Marché looking at pullovers, there was no sense in going on like that.

All in all, airport shops still form part of the national culture; but a part that is safe, attenuated, and wholly adapted to global consumption. For the traveler at the end of his journey, it is a halfway house, less interesting and less frightening than the rest of the country. I had an inkling that, more and more, the whole world would come to resemble an airport.

I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.

If an article is attractive, or useful, or inexpensive, they'll stop making it tomorrow; if it's all three, they stopped making it yesterday.

Each day, the American housewife turns toward television as toward a lover. She feels guilty about it, and well she might, for he's covered with warts and is only after her money.

Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.

Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash. Morrow Mayo

What do women want? Shoes.

Back then, we all thought Lever 2000 was the best because the number "2000" seemed so impressive. Were there 1999 formulas before they landed on this one? That sounds really well researched. I'm in!

A ljudi kupuju tu plastiku i te sli?ice, pa se igraju time kao djeca. Nije to baš mala stvar, bacati uvijek nove senzacije u gladnu fantaziju špitala. Treba tu osobita metoda da bi se išibali ovi klonuli živci i ova rezignacija.

We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.

Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb.

It's horrible when people are only interested in buying labels, because it doesn't bring them the happiness they think it will.

I love the excess of Christmas. The shopping season that begins in September, the bad pop star recordings of Christmas carols, the decorations that don't know when to come down.

You're buying into this celebrity bullshit? Don't you know it's all a facile celebration of commerce and mediocrity?

Today, we ask not what we can do for our country but what our country, employer, fast-food purveyor, or favorite airline can do for us.

If someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it … ask to see the evidence. Ask for the part of the story that's not being told.

We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.