Quotes About Consumerism

Well, yeah, Dovey said. That's America. We watch shows about rich people's houses and their designer dresses and we drool. It's patriotic.

He got born in the historical moment of no more free lunch. Friends will probably count more than money, because wanting too much stuff is going to be toxic.

We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we've sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. We often have the form of liberty, but not the substance

capitalism, with its need for endless growth, is no longer viable? That we, the middle class, have to learn not to want so much?

Passing through every wall are electronic beams that create a shadow play of desire staged by the puppeteers of globalized commerce, who fund their advertising each year with more than a hundred dollars spent for this planet's every man, woman, child.

Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery-store shelves with thirty brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and I think, 'What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?' I think it's fear.

no patience for anyone who enjoys meat but moans about slaughterhouses, who wears cheap clothes but deplores sweatshops, who weeps about climate change from behind the wheel of an SUV or from the window seat of an airplane.

As advertising professor James Twitchell puts it, "Ads are what we know about the world around us.

IT IS MAXIMIZERS WHO SUFFER MOST IN A CULTURE THAT PROVIDES too many choices.

Even though we don't expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.

You buy a pair of shoes that turn out to be uncomfortable. Thaler suggests the expensive they were, the more often you'll try to wear them. Eventually you'll stop wearing them, but you won't get rid of them. And the more you paid for them the longer they will sit in your closet. At some point, after the shoes have been fully depreciated psychologically, you will throw them away.

when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what's familiar, even if it's only familiar because they know its name from advertising.

I want a pair of jeans—32–28," I said. "Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?" she replied. "Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?" I was stunned. A moment or two later I sputtered out something like, "I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind.

there is a cost to having an overload of choice.

I believe that many modern Americans are feeling less and less satisfied even as their freedom of choice expands. This book is intended to explain why this is so and suggest what can be done about it.

There are some strategies you can use to help you avoid the disappointment that comes from thinking about opportunity costs: Unless you're truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always buy. Don't be tempted by "new and improved." Don't "scratch" unless there's an "itch." And don't worry that if you do this, you'll miss out on all the new things the world has to offer.

The Paradox of Choice has a simple yet profoundly life-altering message for all Americans. Schwartz's eleven practical, simple steps to becoming less choosey will change much in your daily life…. Buy This Book Now!" —PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO

We give disproportionate weight to whether yogurt is said to be five percent fat or 95 percent fat free. People seem to think that yogurt that is 95 percent fat free is a more healthful product than yogurt that has five percent fat.

Both books point out how the growth of material affluence has not brought with it an increase in subjective well-being. But they go further. Both books argue that we are actually experiencing a fairly significant decrease in well-being.

Taking care of our own "wants" and focusing on what we "want" to do does not strike me as a solution to the problem of too much choice. It is precisely so that we can, each of us, focus on our own wants that all of these choices emerged in the first place.

I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.

When you work in the glove department at Neiman's, you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.

So in the tradition of Poland Spring, Evian, and other hydro-geniuses, we've decided to bottle something that was freely available and charge you money for it.

Sony inaugurated research into the first consumer videocassette recorder in 1969, but didn't ship its first Betamax for another seven years, and VCRs didn't become a household necessity until the mid-eighties.