Quotes About Consumerism

It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here.

Tony Blair believed in a consumerist idea of democracy.

Too many people in the world associate democracy with their ability to go and buy more and more every year. I come from a country where it's much more popular to remind people that democracy is available at every income level, and this is something which you need to protect.

We live in a world that is full of product. We have too much.

Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless.

We're living at this funny time, where we're all urged to express ourselves as unique individuals, but on the other hand, we share a limited set of tools for doing that. It's easy to feel like nothing more than the sum of your consumer choices.

Maybe it's naive to say, but it almost seems like, in the past, people tried to sell you something you would actually need, like a hammer or a broom or a toothbrush. But now there's this notion that they can sell you anything. And all they have to do is convince you that you need it.

Most people probably don't even know what toothpaste they buy; they just recognize the box on the shelf.

Other than things like toothpaste, I don't buy anything that isn't sold to me.

Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, where everything was in a strip mall.

The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.

CDs, too. Totally corporate. They look real cheap and soulless and they don't smell of anything.

Right now, the machine keeps us totally busy. If you don't react against it, you'll end up letting yourself go and become the perfect consumer. That's what they want.

Once shoppers become empowered, we will facilitate industries thinking in completely new terms; for example, making products that are totally biodegradable.

He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American 'consumerism' discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating Gibbs' prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like

Whoever said you can't buy happiness has never been shopping.

How can [Germany] be criticized for making things that people actually want to buy? And why encourage Germans to buy things they don't need with money they don't have?

Uno degli obiettivi del sistema [attuale] è di creare bisogni da soddisfare producendo nuovi beni a titolo di riparazione, compensazione o consolazione

Voler salvare l'occupazione a tutti i costi [...] sta a indicare nella maggior parte dei casi un attaccamento viscerale, conscio o inconscio, alla società lavorista. Invece non si tratta di salvare questa società, ma di uscirne.

non basta mettere in discussione il capitalismo, bisogna contestare ogni società della crescita. [...] Contestare la società della crescira implica la messa in discussione del capitalismo, ma l'inverso non è automatico.

Come si possono portare i consumi all'infinito? Il meccanismo è costruito su tre leve che sono la pubblicità che ci fa desiderare qualcosa, rendendoci insoddisfatti di ciò che abbiamo; il credito, che ci permette di acquistare qualcosa anche se non abbiamo il denaro necessario; e la cosiddetta obsolescenza programmata che ci impone di rinnovare il consumo perché il mercato offre oggetti costruiti per durare sempre meno.

Uno degli obiettivi del sitema [attuale] è di creare bisogni da soddisfare producendo nuovi beni a titolo di riparazione, compensazione o consolazione