Consumerism In The Short Story 'Hungry Teens' By Joan Green

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Everyone has their own meaning of the word consumerism. Calgary teen Brooke Wladyka at the age of 17 quoted as saying “If you don 't have brand name clothes, you 're not looked up to.” “It 's about what other people think of you.” She says she doesn 't judge people on what they 're wearing or how they look but there are people out there that do. Consumerism is a social and money-based order and ideology that encourages the purchase of products that are bought and sold at services in ever-increasing amounts. The push for more is known as wanting something that you don’t need and pushing the limit to buy it all. Throughout the short stories in the textbook Interface edited by Joan Green the theme of consumerism is shown from a push for more and …show more content…

In the short story “Hungry Teens” the teens look for the most nicest pieces of clothing to buy and getting the latest gadgets. This shows push for more when the teens keep wanting more and better. For this to actually happen the teens need the money to get these expensive designer clothing and gadgets. So they would need to get a job to buy the things they want bacause not every teens parents are going to buy their son or daughter $150 clothing piece or gadgets. “It depends,” admits Wladyka. “You could say you need it because you definitely need things like a cellphone these days, but I guess it’s still luxury in a way.” This will show the teens that how hard money is made and won 't buy the latest and most expensive items. The short story “Cracking the desired code” the story tells us how not to waste our money on items we don 't even need or how to use. Apple launched a new device called Ipod you could watch videos, text message, play games, and listen to music. The people that had MP3 players could only listen to music when the Ipod came out lot of people wanted it even the people who just wanted to listen to music but the people who just wanted to listen to music it was a waste of purchase because they didn 't need to use the other features of the Ipod and just use it for the music. This shows the push for more when people keep wanting the newest and latest gadgets when they might not