Quotes About Consumerism

We need to recognise that what really matters isn't buying more and more consumer goods, but family, friends, and knowing that we are doing something worthwhile with our lives. Helping to reduce the appalling consequences of world poverty should be part of that reassessment.

Every product you buy comes with a corresponding promise that you invest in. Your heart is set on attaining both. But while you'll definitely come home with the object in your hands, you may or may not get the promise you see in your daydreams. Always look beyond the product to understand what's really motivating your purchases.

The message is constantly displayed on television commercials, where the motive of keeping up with (rather than cooperating with) the Jonses is treated as an unquestioned value.

YouGov BrandIndex reveals an interesting fact. McDonald's, for example, has 33 percent lovers and 29 percent haters, a near balanced polarization. Starbucks has a similar

He cut through the Twenty-First Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America.

Americans become unhappy and vicious because their preoccupation with amassing possessions obliterates their loneliness. This is why production in America seems to be on such an endless upward spiral: every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.

Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

Tout ce qui n'est pas griffé n'existe pas. Les jeunes placent leur cerveau et leur âme dans un petit crocodile vert, dans trois bandes noires, dans une virgule horizontale : ils n'existent pas en dehors. Lacoste, Adidas et Nike sont devenus la trinité d'une religion creuse, aux saints chaque jour plus nombreux, et qui condamne les hommes à se déguiser en hamburger pour gagner leur vie. Gagner sa vie, mais laquelle ?

The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We should ask ourselves what it is that we find lovely in them - the visions of friendship, togetherness, repose, or whatever. And then consider what would actually help us find these qualities in our lives.

I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascinating than any fashion salon.

I've been a regular customer at CVS Pharmacy, the country's second-largest drugstore chain, for 20 years. I've spent a small fortune there over that span, visiting several times a week to pick up everything from milk to toothpaste to prescriptions.

Like the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popular hopes for a new era of technological achievement and commercial abundance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, neon-lit streets pulsed with visual excitement from Vancouver to Miami.

Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.

I try to educate people about materialism through my work. I try to show them real visual luxury.

You work with people who are obsessive about shopping, obsessive about owning things and buying things, like this purchase is going to make them happy. And you want to say to them, 'You know, no amount of real estate is gonna fill that void.'

We're all weirdly single, middle-aged women with too much money who look to fill the void with too much shopping.

People are looking for more than a faster and faster PC. It has to do what they want. Will it fill some void, add some value, deliver something that they can't do previously at a price that people are willing to pay for?

When I was an impoverished graduate student, I would sometimes spend $20 or $30 on a T-shirt or accessory I didn't need or even particularly want. What I craved was the purchase, not the thing itself. Of course, a sense of not being deprived may fill an emotional void without ruinous consequences.

Teens say there's nothing I can do because I have no vote. The truth is, the only vote that matters is how you spend your money and who you give it to. Each coin is giving power. Notice and be careful who you give your power to.

Consumerist ads brainwash us into individualist and egotistic self-love.

It's not a question of McDonald's vanishing from the face of the earth. It's a question of these companies assuming some more responsibility for what they're selling.

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

In advertising, sex sells. But only if you're selling sex.

I read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' when I was 15. It's one of the things that's shaped my relationship to fame - to endorsements, to selling things.