Quotes About Consumerism

A thought struck me as I left – the bags in which you are given food at McDonald's are almost identical in texture, shape and size with the vomit bags tucked in the seat pockets of aircraft.

The spiritual values that are essential to human happiness are being lost or made to seem trivial. Everything is buy, earn, sell

I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites I'm more inclined to think they're selling something more schematic than that--something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat more and eat more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or French fry as it retreats over the horizon. And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. Joel Salatin

For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...

David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the jumbo fries.

How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?

It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products.

Nutritionism tends to foster a great deal of anxiety around the experience of shopping for food and eating it.

Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.

Our business has changed so much. Do people even want albums, or do they just buy singles now? You sort of feel like you're the last guy manufacturing VCRs... but I really like albums, and so I like doing them. I'll be the last one making them, even when no one's buying them.

Most e-commerce sites focus on a product lists, they don't have stories. They don't tell you why the products are made or a reason you'd want to have this in your home.

There was a Burger King in Hamilton, N.Y., where Colgate is, that had three sizes: Small, Medium, and Liter. I would go in there and order a large. And they'd say, 'We don't have large; we have liters.' So they'd make us order liters of cola, which I found to be just anti-American.

I don't spend a lot of money or buy a lot of things. I'm not a car guy, and I don't need a boat or a Jet Ski.

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats.

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.

I love commercials. I love to hate commercials, too. I talk back to them.

I hate clothes that look saleable. I love when they look desirable.

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.

Girls started going steady at twelve and thirteen, in junior high. Manufacturers put out brassieres with false bosoms of foam rubber for little girls of ten. And an advertisement for a child's dress, sizes 3–6x, in the New York Times in the fall of 1960, said: "She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.

With increasing skill, the ads glorify her role as an American housewife-knowing that her very lack of identity in that role will make her fall for whatever they are selling.

My first rule of consumerism is never buy anything you can't make your children carry.