Consumerism – an Historical Perspective

Sharon Beder

Citation: Sharon Beder, 'Consumerism – an Historical Perspective', Pacific Ecologist 9,

Spring 2004, pp. 42-48.

This is a final version submitted for publication. 

Minor editorial changes may have subsequently been made.

Sharon Beder's Other Publications

The development of consumer societies meant the erosion of the traditional values
and attitudes of thrift and prudence. Expanding consumption was necessary to create
markets for the fruits of rising production. Ironically this “required the nurture of
qualities like wastefulness, self-indulgence, and artificial obsolescence, which directly
negated or undermined the values of efficiency” and the Protestant Ethic that had
originally nurtured capitalism.[1]  Advertisers sought to redefine people’s needs,
encourage their wants and offer solutions to them via goods produced by corporations
rather than allowing people to identify and solve their own problems, or to look to
each other for solutions.[2]

Consumerism has also played a major role in legitimating a social system which
rewards businessmen and top corporate executives with incomes many times those of
ordinary workers. The consumer society gives ordinary workers some access to the
good life. Surrounded by the bounty of their work—the television set, stereo, car,
computer, white goods—they are less likely to question the conditions of their work,
the way it dominates their life, and the lack of power that they have as workers.
Advertisers constantly tell them that these are the fruits of success, that this is what
life is all about. To question a system which delivers such plenty would seem
perverse.

Overproduction and the shorter working week

The growth in production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries required
growing markets and this meant expanding the consuming class beyond the middle
and upper classes to include the working classes. Production between 1860 and 1920
increased by 12 to 14 times in the US while the population only increased three
times.[3]Supply outstripped demand and problems of scarcity were replaced by
problems of how to create more demand.

By the early 1920s, when American markets were reaching saturation,

‘overproduction’ and lack of consumer demand was blamed for recession. More goods
were being produced than a population with “set habits and means” could consume.
[4]
 There were two schools of thought about how this problem should be solved. One
was that work hours should be decreased and the economy stabilised so that
production met current needs and the work shared around. This view was  held by
intellectuals, labour leaders, reformers, educators and religious leaders. In America
and in Europe, it was commonly believed that consumer desires had limits that could
be reached and that production beyond those limits would result in increased leisure
time for all.[5]

The opposing view, mainly held by business people and economists, was that
overproduction could and should be solved by increasing consumption so that
economic growth could continue. Manufacturers needed to continually expand
production so as to increase their profits. Employers were also afraid of such a future
because of its potential to undermine the work ethic and encourage degeneracy
amongst workers who were unable to make proper use of their time. Increasing
production and consumption guaranteed the ongoing centrality of work.[6]

Keen to maintain the importance of work in the face of the push for more leisure,
businessmen extolled the virtues and pleasures of work and its necessity in building
character, providing dignity and inspiring greatness. Economists too argued that the
creation of work was the goal of production. John M. Clark, in a review of economic
developments, stated: “Consumption is no longer the sole end nor production solely
the means to that end. Work is an end in itself...” Creating work, and the right to
work, he argued, had a higher moral imperative than meeting basic needs.[7]

Manufacturer, H. C. Atkins, along with the president of National Association of

Manufacturers, John E. Edgerton, warned that a five day week would undermine the
work ethic by giving more time for leisure.[8] If work took up less of the day it would
be less important in people’s lives. Edgerton, observed: “I am for everything that will
make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its
importance.... the emphasis should be put on work — more work and better work,
instead of upon leisure.”[9]

Most businessmen believed that shorter hours meant less production and that this
would limit the growth of America’s business enterprise. They argued that they could
not afford shorter work weeks, that they would become uncompetitive and go
bankrupt. They also feared that given extra free time, people would spend it in
unsociable ways, turning to crime, vice, corruption and degeneracy and perhaps even
radicalism. “The common people had to be kept at their desks and machines, lest
they rise up against their betters.”[10] And Edgerton, argued “nothing breeds
radicalism more quickly than unhappiness unless it is leisure. As long as the people
are kept profitably and happily employed there is little danger from radicalism.”[11]

In the US consumption rates were increasing in the mid 1920s and the “new
economic gospel of consumption” gained many adherents.[12] The idea that there were
limits on consumer wants began to be eclipsed by the idea that such wants could be
endlessly created. In 1929 the President’s Committee on Recent Economic Changes
stated that “wants are almost insatiable; that one want satisfied makes way for
another... by advertising and other promotional devices, by scientific fact finding, and
by carefully predeveloped consumption, a measurable pull on production... has been
created.”[13]

The public was urged by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to “end the
buyers’ strike”.[14] However the desire to consume did not come naturally, it had to be
learned: “People had to move away from habits of strict thrift toward habits of ready
spending.”[15] From the 1920s corporations began advertising to the working classes
in an effort to break down these old habits of thrift and encourage new consumerist
desires. At the same time they sought to counter anti-corporate feelings generated by
the conditions of work in their factories.[16]

Higher wages helped in this shift from the Protestant ethic of asceticism to one of
consumerism that fitted with the required markets for mass production.[17] In boom
times, workers were given increased wages rather than increased leisure. Between
1910 and 1929 the average purchasing power of workers in the US increased by
40%.[18] With these rising wages they bought more and the upward spiral of
production and consumption was maintained. In earlier times higher wages might
encouraged workers to work shorter hours, but once workers had been coached into
becoming consumers there was little danger of this. With the help of marketers and
advertisers, workers could be trusted “to spend more rather than work less.”[19]

In this context it was important that leisure was not an alternative to work and an
opportunity to reflect on life but rather a time for consumption. In this way the forty
hour week, rather than threatening economic growth would foster it. Leisure goods
such as radios, phonographs, movies, clothes, books and recreational facilities all
benefited from increased leisure time.[20] At the same time leisure had to be 
subordinate to work and importantly, a reason to work.

Business people still wanted to limit the reduction of work hours and believed that by
‘educating’ workers to become consumers, the demand from workers for reduced
working hours would also be limited.[21] Manufacturers expanded markets by
expanding the range of goods they produced, moving from the basic requirements of
living such as food, clothing and building materials to items such as cars and radios
that provided entertainment and recreation.[22]

US unions fell in with the consumption solution to overproduction in the late 1920s
and concentrated on fighting for higher wages. Union leaders promoted increased
production and economic growth as a way of increasing wages. It was not till the
Great Depression of the 1930s that they again fought for a shorter working week as a
solution to unemployment.[23]

After the second world war the idea of solving unemployment by reducing working
hours disappeared from mainstream thinking. During the war a demand for consumer
goods had built up and following it workers tended to prefer wage rises to shorter
hours.[24] The unions no longer pressed for shorter working hours and workers
themselves became wedded to a consumer lifestyle that required long hours to
support. Many unions in fact gave up their fight for control of production in favour of a
share of the fruits of production and “ever-increasing levels of material well-being for
their workers”.[25]

The promise of full-employment assuaged fears that long work hours might create
unemployment. Leisure became consumer-oriented, revolving round the home with
its entertaining and convenience goods and the vacation where workers could enjoy
living in luxury for a short time.[26] As Cross noted: “The identification of leisure with
consumption won many to hard and steady work in disagreeable jobs.”[27]

Juliet Schor noted in her 1991 book The Overworked American that productivity in the
US has been increasing steadily since the 1940s: “we could now produce our 1948
standard of living (measured in terms of marketed goods and services) in less than
half the time it took in that year. We could actually have chosen the four-hour day. Or
a working year of six months....” Instead workers work more hours now than in 1948
and consume more than twice as much.[28]

It was the “social decision to direct industrial innovation toward producing unlimited
quantities of goods rather than leisure” that created the foundation for our modern
consumer culture, “a culture of work and spend”. The movement for more free time
for workers and leisure time free of market forces, was defeated by the middle of the
century when mass consumer culture took off.[29] The consumer culture, rather than
eroding the work ethic, tied people even more closely to working long hours in order
to earn the money for their consumer desires.

Consumerism as opiate of the masses

Stuart Ewen in his book Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots
of the Consumer Culture showed that advertising for mass consumerism was not only
aimed at increasing markets for goods but also at shifting the locus of discontent from
people’s work to arenas that advertisers could promise would be satisfied by
consumption. Their frustrations and unhappiness could then be directed towards
buying rather than political protest against working conditions or other elements of
industrial society.[30]

Ewen claims that consumerism, “the mass participation in the values of the mass-
induced market,” was not a natural historical development but an aggressive device
of corporate survival.” Discontent in the workplace could lead to a challenge to
corporate authority but discontent in the consumer sphere provided an incentive to
work harder and reflected an acceptance of the values of the capitalist enterprise.[31]

Similarly Robert Lane claims in his book on Political Ideology that:

The more emphasis a society places upon consumption—through advertising,

development of new products, and easy installment buying—the more will social
dissatisfaction be channeled into intraclass consumption rivalry instead of interclass
resentment and conflict...the more will labor unions focus upon the ‘bread and butter’
aspects of unionism, as contrasted to its ideological elements.[32]

If people were dependent on the products of the factories they were less likely to be
critical of the appalling working conditions within them. The good life attained through
this consumption was also compensated for the unpleasantness of work and
distracted attention from it. Advertisements were careful not to depict people working
in factories. A leading copywriter in the 1920s, Helen Woodward, advised that
consumption could help to sublimate and redirect urges that might otherwise be
expressed politically or aggressively. “To those who cannot change their whole lives
or occupations,” she argued, “even a new line in a dress is often a relief.”[33]

Department store merchant Edward Filene, a spokesperson for industrialists in the

1920s and 30s, spoke frankly about the need for social planning in order to create a
consumer culture where industry could “sell to the masses all that it employs the
masses to create” and the need for education to train the masses to be consumers in
a world of mass production. He argued that consumer culture could unify the nation
and, through education, social change could be limited to changes in the commodities
that industry produced.[34] 

Consumption allows people at the bottom of the social hierarchy to feel that they
have some measure of access to the good life for all their troubles. The escape from
real life provided by leisure activities allow people to continue what might otherwise
be a dreary and downtrodden existence. Lisa Macdonald and Allen Myers from Green
Left Weekly, claim workers attempt to gain ownership of what they produce and
overcome their alienation through consumption: “it is only as purchasers, ‘shoppers’,
that we are treated with the courtesy worthy of a human being.”[35]

Employers encouraged workers to think of consumerism as the rationale for their

work but measures of success were moved from the realm of production and work to
the realm of consumption. Advertising messages affected people’s aspirations.  They
portrayed a bounty of consumer goods as the fruits of the American Dream. Rather
than aspiring for their children to become leading businessmen or top executives or
political leaders, advertisements offered messages such as “Some Day your Boy will
own a Buick”.[36]

Advertisers also undermined the nineteenth century “culture of character” which was
the basis of the myth of the self-made man, someone who succeeded as a result of
hard work, morality and discipline. In its place a “culture of personality” evolved
which promoted the importance of presentation and appearance, things that
advertisers were so helpfully offering to assist with. What mattered in getting ahead
and influencing people was the impression a person made on others. Things like their
clothes, their home furnishings, their personal cleanliness were all used by others to
judge their character.[37]

Also advertising and consumerism played a major role in the acceptance of the
capitalist vision and its associated inequalities. Roland Marchand in his
book Advertising the American Dream argued that advertisers repeatedly used “the
parable of the democracy of goods” to sell their products to the middle classes. In this
parable, although there was a social hierarchy with wealth concentrated at the top,
ordinary people could enjoy the same products and goods that the people at the top
did. Joe Blo could drink the same brand of coffee as the wealthiest capitalist. Mary
Jane could buy the same soap as the lady with the maid in waiting. The most humble
of citizens (although not the poor who were not the targets of these advertisements)
could afford to purchase the same quality products as a millionaire.[38]

The social message of the parable of the Democracy of Goods was clear. Antagonistic
envy of the rich was unseemly; programs to redistribute wealth were unnecessary.
The best things in life were already available to all at reasonable prices... Incessantly
and enticingly repeated, advertising visions of fellowship in a Democracy of Goods
encouraged Americans to look to similarities in consumption styles rather than to
political power or control of wealth for evidence of significant equality.[39]

According to Filene, the process of buying goods was a means by which people were
supporting industry and thereby electing the manufacturers, who made the goods, to
a government which would satisfy their needs. They were voting industry leaders into
positions of leadership in society. In this way “the masses have elected Henry Ford.
They have elected General Motors. They have elected the General Electric Company,
and Woolworth’s and all the other great industrial and business leaders of the day.”[40]

Not only was the desire for social change displaced by a desire for changes in
commodities, but political freedom was equated with consumer choice and political 
citizenship with participation in the market through consumption. Consumption was
promoted as democratising at the very time it was being used to pacify the political
unrest of workers.[41] According to well-known sociologist Daniel Bell:

If the American worker has been ‘tamed’ it has not been through the discipline of the
machine, but by the ‘consumption society’, by the possibility of a better living which
his wage, the second income from his working wife, and easy credit all allow.[42]

Production, consumption and status

Vance Packard, in his book The Status Seekers argued that the use of consumer
goods as status symbols was a deliberate strategy of advertisers, or ‘merchants of
discontent’, who took advantage of the “upgrading urge” that people felt. The
message that workers could improve their status through consumption was
particularly aimed at people who had little chance of raising their status through their
work because opportunities for promotion were slim.[43] Employers sought to divert
the dissatisfaction of workers with the nature of their work into a more personal
dissatisfaction that could be fed with consumer goods: “offering mass produced
visions of individualism by which people could extricate themselves from the mass.”[44]

The advertiser offered workers the possibility of gaining social status through buying
goods that were better than their neighbours. With the help of instalment plans and
credit, they could purchase the signifiers of success even if they weren’t achieving
that success in their workplace. This was not something that came naturally to
working people who were, for the main part, resigned to their position in life.
According to Packard “they need prodding and ‘educating’ to desire many of the
traditionally higher-class products the mass merchandisers desire to move in such
vast numbers, such as the electric rotating spits or gourmet foods.”[45]

Car manufacturers, particularly, exploited people’s desire for status, spending “small
fortunes exploring the status meaning of their product”. They found, for example that
people in housing developments where all the houses looked similar, were most likely
to leave their large new cars parked on the street in front of the house rather than in
the garage where no-one would see them. Plymouth  advertisements pictured a
family in front of their car saying “We’re not wealthy... we just look it!” Dodge
advertisements featured a man saying to a Dodge car owner “Boy, you must be rich
to own a car as big as this!” And Ford advertisements showed the back of one of their
cars and stated “let the people behind you know you are ahead of them!”[46]

Such advertising was so successful that people began diverting funds from other
purchases into the purchase of a car that would enhance their status, and by the end
of the 1950s Americans “were spending more of their total income on the family
chariot than they were in financing their homestead, which housed the family and its
car or cars.”[47]Not to be outdone home builders and sellers ensured that the home
became a status symbol that rivalled the motor car.

Chinoy observed that consumption provided automobile workers in the 1950s a way
of rationalising their failure to advance in their work: “Advancement has come to
mean the progressive accumulation of things as well as the increasing capacity to
consume... If one manages to buy a new car, if each year sees a major addition to
the household—a washing machine, a refrigerator, a new living-room suite, now
probably a television set—then one is also getting ahead.”[48] Rather than question the
American Dream workers would either blame themselves for their failure to live up to
it, or find other ways to interpret it.

Such trends were not confined to the US. The consumerism that proliferated in the US
in the 1920s and 1930s, spread to other industrialised nations after the second world
war, particularly in the 1950s.[49] In  his book on the rise of a consumer society in
Australia, Greg Whitwell said:

The ownership of certain sorts of consumer goods, each ranked according to brand
names, came to be seen as guides to an individual’s income which in turn, so it is
believed, said something about his or her inner worth. Consumer goods became
external signs, used to give a sense of hierarchy by members of a society
characterized by an emphasis on change and on social and geographical mobility.[50]

In a British study of the working class in the 1950s Ferdynand Zweig found “a steep
rise in acquisitive tendencies and pre-occupation with money in work attitudes.” There
was far less difference between middle class and working class purchase of consumer
durables (cars, white goods, electrical appliances) than previously and class self-
identification had come to depend more on factors such as house ownership than type
of work. In fact Zweig found workers impatient with questions about class. They were
more interested in status as a way of organising the social spectrum.[51]

Increased consumerism led to an increased emphasis on the importance of pay. 

Many people work so as to earn the money to buy consumer goods and some
measure of status that accompanies them. A European study by the Henley Centre in
1991 found that “better pay” was the priority for new jobs for 70 percent of those
surveyed, compared with enjoyable work, which was a priority for 58 percent.[52]

A US study found that those who believed “having lots of money” was “extremely
important” had gone up to almost two thirds in 1986 from  less than half in 1977. It
ranked higher than any other of goal in life.[53] Americans born since 1963, those
referred to as generation X, are more likely to agree that “The only really meaningful 
measure of success is money” than any previous generation. They spend more money
on stereos, mobile phones, beepers and cars than older people and are more likely to
take a less interesting  job if it pays well.[54]

Jimmy Carter, as President of the US noted that “Human identity is no longer defined
by what one does, but by what one owns.”[55] Consumption has become a more
important source of self-identity and status than work for many people. Compton
Advertising undertook a survey of public attitudes to the economic system in 1974
and found that two thirds of those surveyed identified their role in the economic
system as that of “consumers and spenders of money” rather than workers or
producers. This included one half of those in the labour force.[56] Also more recent
opinion surveys show that in countries like the US and Japan, “people increasingly
measure success by the amount they consume.”[57]

In a society where people don’t know each other very well, appearances are
important and social status, though more securely attained through occupation, can
be attained with strangers through consumption. When people are uprooted and
move to the cities they are strangers to each other. Previously everyone knew one
another's business and the status that should be accorded to each person. In an
anonymous city a person can adopt a certain lifestyle, clothes, car that is higher up
the status ladder than their occupation would indicate, particularly if they are willing
to go into debt to do it. Consumption then becomes an indicator of achievement.[58]

The desire to consume is often portrayed as a natural human characteristic that

cannot be changed. However it is clear that populations have been manipulated into
being avaricious consumers. What people really want, more than the multitude of
goods on offer, is status and history has shown that the determinants of status can
change. If we want to live in an ecologically sustainable society, then we need to
award status to those who are happy with a basic level of comfort rather than those
who accumulate possessions. If, as a community, we admired wisdom above wealth
and compassion and cooperation above competition, we would be well on the way to
undermining the motivation to consume.

Excerpted from Sharon Beder, Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to
Corporate PR, Scribe, Melbourne, 2000.

References

[1]
 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making way for modernity, 1920-
1940(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 158.

[2]
 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer
Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 70, 108.

[3]
 David J. Cherrington, The Work Ethic: Working Values and Values that Work (New York:
AMACON, 1980), p. 37.

[4]
 Gary Cross, Time and Money (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 38; Rodney Clapp, ‘Why the
Devil Takes Visa’, Christianity Today, Vol. 40, No. 11 (1996).

[5]
 Cross, note 7, pp. 7-8, 28.

[6]
  Ibid., pp. 7,9,39; Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours
for the Right to Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 42, 67.

[7]
 Ibid., pp. 62-3.

[8]
 Paul Bernstein, American Work Values: Their Origin and Development (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1997), p. 157.

[9]
 Cross, note 7, p. 16.

[10]
 Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline in Leisure (USA:
BasicBooks, 1991), p. 74.

[11]
 Quoted in Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 41.

[12]
 Hunnicutt, note 9, p.; 42.

[13]
 Quoted in Cross, note 7, p. 41.

[14]
 Quoted in Ibid., p. 38.

[15]
 Clapp, note 7.

[16]
 Ewen, note 5, p. 19.

[17]
 Ibid., p. 29.
[18]
 Cross, note 7, p. 7.

[19]
 Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 43.

[20]
 Ibid., p. 45.

[21]
 Ibid., pp. 46-7.

[22]
 Robert Eisenberger, Blue Monday: The Loss of the Work Ethic in America (New York:
Paragon House, 1989), p. 11.

[23]
 Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 79.

[24]
 Cross, note 7, p. 85.

[25]
 Schor, note 15, p. 78; Daniel Yankelovich and John Immerwahr, ‘Putting the Work Ethic to
Work’, Society, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1984), p. 59.

[26]
 Cross, note 7, p. 155.

[27]
 Ibid., p. 153.

[28]
 Schor, note 15, p. 2.

[29]
 Cross, note 7, pp. 5, 9.

[30]
 Ewen, note 5, pp. 43-5.

[31]
 Ibid., pp. 54, 109.

[32]
 Robert E. Lane, Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What he
Does(New York: The Free Press, 1962), p. 80.

[33]
 Ewen, note 5, pp. 77-8, 85-6.

[34]
 Ibid., p. 54.

[35]
 L. Macdonald and A. Myers, ‘Malign Design’, New Internationalist (November 1998), p.
21.

[36]
 Marchand, note 4, pp. 162, 222.

[37]
 Ibid., pp. 209-10.

[38]
 Ibid., p. 218.

[39]
 Ibid., pp. 220, 222.

[40]
 Quoted in Ewen, note 5, p. 92.

[41]
 Ibid., pp. 89, 91.

[42]
 Daniel Bell, ‘Work and Its Discontents (1956)’,  in A. R. Gini and T. J. Sullivan (eds), It
Comes with the Territory: An Inquiry Concerning Work and the Person (New York: Random
House, 1989), pp. 122-123.

[43]
 Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behaviour in
America(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), pp. 269-70.

[44]
 Andrew Hornery, ‘Family Pack aims for the children’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24
September 1998, p. 45.

[45]
 Packard, note 84, p. 271.

[46]
 Ibid., pp. 273-4.

[47]
 Ibid., p. 274.

[48]
 Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream, 2nd ed (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinios Press, 1992), p. 126.

[49]
 Stewart Lansley, After the Gold Rush: The Trouble with Affluence: ‘Consumer Capitalism’
and the Way Forward (London: Century Business Books, 1994), p. 85.

[50]
 Greg Whitwell, Making the Market: The Rise of Consumer Society (Melbourne: McPhee
Gribble Publishers, 1989), p. 7.

[51]
 Ferdynand Zweig, The New Acquisitive Society (Chichester: Barry Rose, 1976), pp. 15, 21-
2, 26-7.

[52]
 Cited in Lansley, note 90, p. 136.

[53]
 Alan Thein Durning, How Much is Enough: The Consumer Society and the Future of the
Earth, ed. Linda Starke, Worldwatch Environmental Alert Series (London: Earthscan, 1992), p.
34.

[54]
 Dan Zevin and Carolyn Edy, ‘Boom Time for Gen X’, US News and World Report (20
October 1997)

[55]
 Quoted in Thomas H. Naylor, William H. Willimon and Rolf Osterberg, The Search for
Meaning in the Workplace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 69.

[56]
 Compton Advertising, ‘National Survey on the American Economic System’, (New York:
The Advertising Council, 1974), p. 17.

[57]
 Durning, note 94, p. 22.

[58]
 Bell, note 71, p. 68.

Professor Sharon Beder is an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Wollongong.

Sharon Beder's Publications can be found at http://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb