The Consumer

In keeping with the trend of using our last post as a jumping off point for the subsequent one, we found consumerism to be an analogous topic to oversaturation. After all, we are constantly bombarded by advertisements selling us products and services, most of which we arguably don’t need. According to the media that feeds us “information” 24/7, we are consumers first and citizens second. So how did we acquire this mentality and how does it reflect in our behavior?

Diana: Consumerism is such a big part of our culture today. Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, we all see ourselves as consumers. This is a big part of our identity, but it wasn’t always like that. I’m taking a television and culture class, and, as is typical with media classes, we are starting at the beginning of television’s history: the 1940s. Up until that point, society had only known rationing and saving given that the Great Depression and World War II had just happened. It was necessary and seen as a person’s patriotic duty to both save and ration (either for their family to survive or for the nation to win a war). Today, that’s no longer the case. Thanks to executives’ use of television as the perfect medium through which to advertise to the masses, television became a platform from which to sell stuff to people, and the culture was of course affected by it. It became the “norm” to buy. People were shown that they could “buy” their way into the middle class and given that it was the 1950s, who didn’t want to be white, middle class with 2.5 kids? This is the image most people saw on television with shows like “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show” and it would be hard to argue that viewers were not to a certain degree aspiring to be like the perfect middle class family they saw every day. One of my favorite examples of the seismic shift in how Americans view consumerism is from Mildred Pierce (not the new one with Kate Winslet) when Mildred buys a brand new car for her spoiled daughter and this is looked down upon in the film. It just wasn’t done in 1945. It was seen as overly extravagant for any family to have two cars and particularly excessive for a teenager to have one. Although I personally still wouldn’t do this today with a 16 year old, it’s certainly acceptable now to buy a car for a teenager.

Elsa: I have a long-standing hateful relationship with this word, and it goes all the way back to high school. I worked retail through college, but anyone who worked with me can attest to how much I hated every second of it. Working part-time was manageable, but the first time I worked anywhere near 40 hours in a week, my misery manifested itself in a permanently frustrated facial expression that got me sent home to ‘reset’. You might wonder what about working retail could cause me so much distress and unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a simple and straightforward answer to that. Instead, I’ll provide you with one example of the face-palmingly ridiculous things I encountered that made me sour on the entirety of the retail sales system: The summer between junior and senior year of college, I worked at a high-end specialty/import retail store. They carried all sorts of pretentious merchandise ranging from home décor to gourmet foods and wine, but more on the merchandise some other time. This is only a set-up to give the reader an idea of what the typical customer was like (spoiler alert: it was the kind of person who would drop $400 for a chair because her mother-in-law stopped by unexpectedly. Yeah… I didn’t follow either). I’m not entirely sure if it was a holiday weekend or if this particular lady was just trying to take advantage of the pleasant summer weather, but she walked in asking for help finding items for an outdoor dinner party. Simple enough request, right? Outdoor lights and decorations are in the back right corner, kitchen stuff is all along the left wall. Boom - customer assisted, job done.

“Wait!” she said. “Can you help me find items that are thematically consistent?”

There are several things wrong with this request, but let’s discuss the one that upset me the most. This wasn’t a Party City. The merchandise wasn’t sectioned off by color or by popular children’s cartoon character. Thematically consistent entailed not pairing your rectangular victorian glass plates with your round Madras chargers. That example took me an ungodly amount of time to come up with, which should give you an indication of how difficult it is to fuck up picking out things that match. Pretty much everything in that store matched, is what I’m saying.

“Sure,” I responded. “What theme are you going for, exactly?”

“I don’t really know. Could you help me with that too? Also, I don’t have a list of specific items that I need. I was hoping to come in and get ideas.”

I obviously told her to wait there while I grabbed someone else to hold her hand while she shopped...

Diana: While I don’t have such a long-standing hate for consumerism, it certainly has bothered me for other reasons. Today, consumerism is kind of seen as the “right” thing to do. After 9/11, President Bush said that the best thing we could do was “go shopping.” Consumerism is necessary for capitalism to work and if you’re not a capitalist then you’re obviously some sort of communist. I’m not immune to shopping by any means, but let’s face it, a person who doesn’t shop is seen as kind of “Other” (I thought this was so weird when I first read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Kartheiser#Personal_life). What we buy defines us. Rappers like to brag about the shit they buy all the time. I would posit that we do the same thing, albeit on a much smaller and less grandiose level. 

Elsa: Agreed. The bottom line is that I personally associate this word with a helpless, aimless sort of person who attempts to “solve” a self-inflicted problem by throwing money at it. Now, is this what all consumers are like? Not by a long shot – the word encompasses any and all people who buy things for personal use. Obviously, I have a huge bias against people standing on the other side of the counter. But harkening back to the aforementioned chair lady for a moment, I found it incredibly frustrating to watch her make a frivolous purchase of a big-ticket item for what I considered to be no good reason. Granted, I was only 19 years old at the time, and it’s possible this is a problem I will someday encounter and fully relate to. Though, I can only hope to avoid all of the terrible life decisions I’d have to make to get me to that point.