Quotes About Consumerism

Amplifying body-image issues, profiting from anxiety, and employing virtual slaves in sweatshops are bad enough, but the fashion industry is also actively hastening the destruction of the very Earth we walk on. It insists on launching fresh collections each season, declaring yesterday's range obsolete on a whim.

If you come up with something that's useless and promote it the right way, everybody will have to have it yesterday, even though they get up the next morning and wonder why they bought it.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

Normal people with normal lives are not going to ask for sugar-free yogurt. They just take the stuff with sugar in it.

When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

As a young artist in New York, I thought about postwar Japan - the consumer culture and the loose, deboned feeling prevalent in the character and animation culture. Mixing all those up in order to portray Japanese culture and society was my work.

Why do we have 'Transformers 5 or 6?' Because young kids will go and see it four or five times.

I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of the toys on the market, especially for young kids. Most of them just add these new technologies just to make more flashing lights.

Buy, buy, buy, buy! They want to grab you and trap you and turn you into little Elizabeth Hurleys.

Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.

We live in such a celebrity-driven culture, but all those people have to go buy toilet paper, and all those people have products they use and their favorite sweet treats. They all have to write to-do lists, and they're all reading books - well, hopefully most people are doing those things.

It's just as easy to buy a $12,000 watch in East Hampton as it is to pick up a carton of milk, and new homeowners are so impatient that they landscape their front lawns with 'mature gardens' of full-grown trees.

Women have an instinct for what the market is. We have tremendous insight in terms of understanding products and consumerism.

If fashion is for everyone, is it fashion? The answer goes far beyond the collections and relates to the speed of fast fashion. There is no longer a time gap between when a small segment of fashion-conscious people pick up a trend and when it is all over the sidewalks.

I am not bound to spend my precious days on Earth trying to keep up with the Joneses - because the Joneses are really just a bunch of folks in conference rooms changing 'trends' rapidly to create fake monthly emergencies for us.

Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to initiate them.

I think people are sick of trends changing every six months - not because we're tired of them, but just for the sake of change. There is so much junk in the world: junk TV, junk movies, all those junk magazines with the same people on the cover.

If you don't shop smart, you get a little trendy.

America Online, of course, is a master of the hard sell, from stuffing mailboxes with free trial offers to forcing subscribers to click through ads before they can get their e-mail.

We function in a pack mentality. This is our tribe. And this is how we are exploited - sold a bill of goods and a household of products.

Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.

People don't want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.

I don't feel too excited about fashion today People just want cheap fast clothes and are happy to look like everyone else

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole!