Consumerism

Consumerism is a way of life rooted in mass production and the marketing industry. It includes a practice where social identity and prestige are constructed, experienced, and signaled through the purchase and possession of consumer goods and services. Consumerism is fueled by easy credit and by advertising designed to create desire for commodities by associating their acquisition with valued states such as happiness, peace of mind, attractiveness, gratification, affluence, and success. Consumerism is central to an economy in which people are preoccupied with material consumption to the point where the amount of goods acquired may be far in excess of actual need. Producers of commodities in industrialized societies profit by ever-expanding consumption, but meeting this growing demand has been using up natural resources at an unsustainable rate.

At the other end of the product life cycle, consumerism includes the practice of discarding broken, out-of-fashion, and even slightly used products, making room for new acquisitions. This has resulted in a huge and rapidly moving waste stream that itself has become problematic. Most social theorists agree that contemporary consumerism began at the dawn of the 20th century and gathered momentum with an expanding middle class in Europe and North America after World War II. [Page 151]With modern globalization it has spread worldwide, wherever consumer products and associated images and narratives have penetrated societies whose traditional cultural economies have been disrupted by colonialist or neoliberal restructuring.

The term consumerism also has a number of more specialized meanings. In economic theory, it refers to the idea that continuously expanding mass consumption is beneficial to an economy. In a related usage, consumerism is the idea that the choices made by consumers should shape production and, by extension, the structure of the economic system as a whole. In economic policy terms, it is used to characterize policies that promote consumption. Finally, consumerism is a synonym for the modern consumer protection movement, which advocates the rights and interests of those who purchase products. In this context, consumerism promotes policies to ensure product safety, quality guarantees, and truthful advertising.