Quotes About Consumerism

In effect, Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.

America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.

Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to shop for fish at Whole Foods, he'll be broke within the year.

You are a product to dragnet surveillance capitalists like Google, Facebook, Comcast and Verizon. Your ideas are rarely your own, rather you are little more than a pawn to their perception steering initiatives to get you to read, believe and buy what they put in front of you. The first step to breaking out of this faux reality matrix is to stop using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Comcast and Facebook.

I hate Gucci. It's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.

I hate Gucci, said Francis. Do you? said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. Really? I think it's rather grand. Come on, Henry. Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity. I don't see what you think is grand about that. Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale, said Henry. this is by god not donna tartt

we were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard

To persuade the consumer, the creators of ads needed to touch people's basic, unchanging instincts—their "obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of their own.

Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

You're paid a lot and you're not happy, so the first thing you do is buy stuff that you don't want or need—for which you need more money.

A car, a blue convertible, sleek and desirable, came sweeping west out of Beverly Hills along the, as I understand it, gracious curves of Sunset Boulevard. Anybody seeing such a car would have wanted it. Obviously. It was designed to make you want it. If people had turned out not to want it very much, the makers would have redesigned it and redesigned it until they did. The world is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a permanent state of want.

Duty Free shops which are able to charge much lower prices than ordinary shops but - mysteriously - don't

McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.

McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger. He passed out.

McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger. He passed out.

Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

This place is like some cosmic dream crusher. All you can get out of a place like this is a creepy little tingle that lets you know your kid is never going to be anything more than a customer-that the whole world is being turned into casino.

But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.

The store is also lit to the point of painfulness by a ceiling loaded with more fluorescent bulbs than a landing mothership. Shielding my headachey eyes, I make my consumer choices, then head to the counter, where the clerk is wearing sunglasses. I pay the clerk with a five-dollar bill on which I have felt-penned the words: I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK AGES.

I cautiously parked in front of the craft store, went inside and found the glue gun, which, back home, would cost $12.99. There in Arizona it was $1.29, which is to say, it was basically free, and at that price they should have just gone out to the freeway and hurled glue guns at passing cars.

Humanity actually seems to be split down the middle on the definition of luxury: those who want gilded leopard-shaped teapots and those who want to live in the white box their iPhone came in.

jennie confirmed my suspicions that television advertising is directed mainly at people with the iq of a pongid

Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product it's an understanding of human nature.