Who Is Responsible For The Rise Of Consumerism In The 1920s

The roaring 1920s earned its name for the enormous prosperity and lively culture it witnessed. In the post war society, the American industry was in need for new markets as its capacity had increased significantly, which resulted in the flourishing of mass production, mass consumption economy. While arguably a stepping stone to the following Great Depression, the rise of consumerism during the era did help raise the living standard of many Americans and bring enormous benefits to investors and had remained one of the most prominent quality of American economy ever since.

One of the factors responsible for the rise of consumerism in the 1920s was the drastic advancement in technology development. With new techniques and innovations that utilized

As people were induced to keep spending, companies were making more and more money, allowing them to further lower prices while improving service and merchandise selections, boosting consumer spending which in turn would bring in even more profits. It also allows more companies to get involved with the stock market, raising the price of their stocks.Following heavy advertising and well publicized successes, the general public who had never previously invested in stocks joined in looking for easy profits as they saw this was a foolproof way to prosperity because of economy's seemingly never ending growth at the time. In 1928 the stock market was booming and buying on margin became a popular but risky practice amongst investors where they would borrow money from their brokers to pay for their stocks. This was partly one of the reasons for the looming Great Depression in the upcoming years but many people were too blinded by the thrill to get rich to notice the signs that the stock market wouldn't keep soaring indefinitetly like they had

Modern Americans are still motivated to spend on various products, whether they are useful and necessary or not, as the result of powerful mass advertising campaigns, widely broadcast through many forms of media. Children and young adults are usually the main targets for such campaigns. It is estimated that the average American child watches between 25,000 to 40,000 television commercials per year so advertising undeniably has a great power over the young minds, who in turn would influence their parents and guardians (Shah, 2010). More than 30 billion dollars are spent by families every year as the result of this strategy, which is progressively adapted by many companies (Shah, 2010). Additionally, thanks to these advertisements, people pay more attention to keeping up with the current trend, with what is considered the most up to date rather than the overall necessity of the product. This behavior is evident in Apple's iPhone sale numbers throughout the years. According to the company, the recently introduced iPhone 6 model has sold for over 10 million units in only three days after the launch. The fact that such a large amount of people feel the need to purchase the new model, which came out only 2 years after the previous model with not many drastic changes really shows how mass consumerism has been deeply rooted in many Americans' consciousness. Many