Quotes About Consumerism

It's the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn't care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake.

People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder they work, the more labor-saving appliances they feel they need to acquire.

The drift of all this was that the British don't expect over-the-counter drugs to change their lives, whereas we Americans will settle for nothing less.

but then Americans appear to know a great deal about drugs. Nearly all the advertisements assume an impressively high level of biochemical familiarity.

To an American shopper there are just three spans of time: now, tomorrow at the very latest, and we'll look elsewhere.

can never understand these people who rush to buy new gadgets; surely they must see that they are going to look like idiots in about a year when the manufacturers come up with tiny lightweight versions of the same thing at half the price. Like the people who paid $200 for the first pocket calculators and then a few months later they were being given away at gas stations. Or the people who bought the first color televisions.

New Rule: Someone has to make a mustard container that doesn't squirt out yellow water before it gets to the actual mustard. I get all excited for lunch, and then Grey Poupon pees on my sandwich. I suppose I could shake the bottle first, but fuck you, I'm an American consumer. Not only should your mustard be pre-blended to my specifications, it should also whiten my teeth.

We preach about capitalism and the beauty of unfettered market forces determining price--but not when it comes to gas. When it comes to gas, we need it cheap, and the president had better get it for us, or else, we don't care how.

It's amazing. TV used to give Americans the reverse fantasy: What if you, normal person, suddenly became a millionaire? Now it's "Oh, who are we kidding? You consider yourself lucky to hold on to your job deep-frying chicken parts, but how'd you like to be briefly introduced to a millionaire? Would you like that? You can even touch his garments!" And people watch this shit and find it inspirational.

Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer.... Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously?

Calvin: Trick or Treat! Adult: Where's your costume? What are you supposed to be? Calvin: I'm yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak! ...Boy, am I scary or what?

Nowadays, ads don't just sell a product. They sell an attitude! Look at this one! Here's a cool guy saying nobody tells him what to do. He does whatever he wants and he buys this product as a reflection of that independence. So basically, this maverick is urging everyone to express his individuality through conformity in brand-name selection?

Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.

How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food and beer conglomerates. Who'd have ever guessed product consumption, popular entertainment and spirituality would mix so harmoniously. It's a beautiful world, all right.

Yep, Christmas is around the corner. And what better way to celebrate a religious holiday than with a month of frenzied consumerism.

This is the typical fallacy on which all of CONSUMER AMERICA is based. Some piece of useless crap will make people like you.

I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.

We no longer accumulate to live; we live to accumulate.

I had a hunger for things I knew realistically I didn't actually care for.

It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

Work-and-spend has become a mutually reinforcing and powerful syndrome-a seamless web we somehow keep choosing, without even meaning to.

a comfortable consumer civilization of socialized human animals, aided by all the discoveries of science and industry and reproducing demographically in a squirming, catastrophic crescendo.

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.

We buy our way out of jail but we can't buy freedom,We buy a lot of clothes when we don't really need them,Things we buy to cover up what's inside.