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Excessive Consumerism In America

427 Words2 Pages

In 1950, only one percent of Americans had microwaves, today over ninety-seven percent own microwaves. This is an amazing statistic for modern times, but these statistics also have some drawbacks. People are now buying so much that it is leading to certain problems with our generation. Excessive consumerism is negatively impacting a lot of people 's lives. First off,excessive consumerism is negatively impacting family. Americans, when they get stressed they shop to counteract that stress, people buy items to help them. This is commonly known as “shopping overload”. Americans possess over one billion credit cards and over one million people go bankrupt every year, some of those one billion is thanks to poor management of their money because their money is on a card instead of in the form of paper. In fact, over one-fifth of Americans live in dying poverty. Americans …show more content…

One of the things to blame is something called “shopping fever”, shopping fever is when someone shops too much instead of spending time doing other important things. America 's own schools are getting a treatment of ads in certain places around the school. One of those places is channel one news, a channel a lot of schools are required to watch. Companies will overpay just to get one ad on the news, almost 200,000 dollars for one ad on the news. Companies are also sending in products for schools to model projects around. An example would be gushers sending their products to elementary schools to teach kids how to count, but they are really just trying to get kids to remember their brand name. There has also been a decline in community involvement over the years. Since people are spending too much time shopping and playing with all the new stuff they bought, they don’t have enough time to spend with the community. This is bad because it means a decline in community service like picking up garbage, can drives, and making community

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