Consumer Society

Alongside population growth, the development of a consumer society in the West and its worldwide diffusion (aided by globalization) is a significant contributor to the current [Page 89]environmental crisis—a main reason for concern about the chances of future generations to enjoy a minimally decent standard of living. The concept of a “consumer society” has been forged to describe the transformations that happened in Western industrialized societies, mostly in the aftermath of World War II, even though the rise of the consumer society has a long historical precedent. During this period, Western European and North American societies have undergone significant structural and cultural changes that can be described as a shift from production to consumption as the main structuring principle of daily life practices and social behavior, and as the ultimate criterion of efficacy for economy and the government. The shift of emphasis from production to consumption as a focal principle and the problem of affluent societies meant that people were more useful for the economy as consumers than as workers because, in a context of increasing globalization, productivity (thanks to technological innovation), and women's participation in the labor market, the main obstacle to economic expansion was less the risk of shortage in labor supply than an insufficient effective demand.

However, it is not so much consumption but the vital necessity of a steady and endless economic growth that characterizes the consumer society. If no society can survive without ensuring a sufficient level of consumption, only the consumer society depends for its very functioning and reproduction on permanent economic growth and, as a consequence, on expanding consumption to absorb the increasing supply of commercial goods and services. The crucial importance of consuming helps to explain the role of institutionalized waste, advertising, and consumption credit in consumer societies. They are necessary to overcome the two main barriers to a steady rise in consumption in a context of stagnant population: the lack of motivation to consume and the lack of money to do so. The lack of motivation can result either from actual satisfaction or from satiation—two similar but slightly different phenomena. In the first case, the consumer is simply satisfied by the goods and products already in their possession and sees no reason to replace them. Satiation refers to the fact that, for some needs such as food, for example, there is a threshold beyond which any additional unit of what satisfies the need brings no further satisfaction, if not sheer dissatisfaction. The satisfaction problem is addressed in consumer society by creating artificially the dissatisfaction of the customer, principally through the strategy of built-in obsolescence—a form of institutionalized waste organized by manufacturers to speed up the “buy-use-discard” cycle of their products. It consists in planning the short living or rapid outdating of their products (for material, functional, or stylistic reasons), so that the consumers are willing to replace them quicker than otherwise necessary. In other words, corporations regularly launch new versions of their products with minor functional or stylistic modifications sufficient for making the previous version comparatively less attractive and inducing customers to purchase the new one.

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