Modern Consumerism In Shop-Happy, By Juliet Schor

“Modern Consumerism” Consumerism has been increasing all over the world for decades. In today’s rapidly growing environment, new products are put out onto the public market everyday with new ideas following right behind them. It is one’s instinct to work towards obtaining these materialistic objects. Unfortunately, in recent years consumerism has become increasingly excessive, leading towards a negative lifestyle. The articles “Waste” by Wendell Berry, “Shop-Happy” by Joan Smith, and “The New Consumer” by Juliet Schor analyze the reasoning as to how Americans have acquired today’s consumerism.The American consumer's preoccupation with social status, careless spending, and susceptibility to marketing and advertising strategies have

Marketing is very big in promoting a materialistic lifestyle. Everywhere you look you see different styles of marketing and advertising, all of which are geared towards grabbing society’s attention and making people consider buying things which they may not necessarily need. Joan Smith points out Schor’s explanation that we seek to gain the “lifestyle of the rich and famous” due to “more sophisticated marketing techniques”. Celebrities are often used to show off new things in advertisements because people tend to listen and pay attention to them. Knowing that a specific celebrity who people look up to owns a certain product makes us want to own something we may not be in need of. Often times this advertisement is so subliminal that we aren’t even aware of how it is affecting our desire to buy new things. With each new purchase, marketers gain even more insight to our spending habits and further progress their techniques to reel us into their strategies. When you look towards television or the internet, there are certain advertisements that grab your attention and give you the desire to buy certain goods. It is then when we give in to these temptations where we are promoting modern day consumerism. We want to buy things that will make people envy us or make people interested in our own individual lifestyles. Advertisement for the newest and

What many fail to realize are the impacts of this culture of consumerism. As Wendell Berry states in his article appropriately titled “Waste”, all consumers are “at once the victims and the perpetrators”. Not only do consumers experience the negative effects of this excessive consumption, they are also the ones that are fueling this culture of consumption. Unless consumers wish to continue down this harmful path of wasteful consumption, they would do well to see these effects “as evidence of good work not done by people able to do it” (Berry. p.8). Just as consumers are both victims and perpetrators of this culture of consumerism, they must also accept their third role as the advocates of