Consumer Protection Bcom 6 Semester
Consumer Protection Bcom 6 Semester
Consumer Protection Bcom 6 Semester
Consumerism
Consumerism is the belief that personal wellbeing and happiness depends to a very large extent on
the level of personal consumption, particularly on the purchase of material goods. The idea is not
simply that wellbeing depends upon a standard of living above some threshold, but that at the
center of happiness is consumption and material possessions. A consumerist society is one in which
people devote a great deal of time, energy, resources and thought to “consuming”. The general view
of life in a consumerist society is consumption is good, and more consumption is even better. The
United States is an example of a hyper-consumerist society. People are constantly bombarded with
advertisements urging them to buy things.
Time scarcity is a continual source of stress, but the cultural pressures and institutional
arrangements that accompany consumerism make it difficult for people individually to solve these
problems. A good case can also be made that hyper-consumerism leads to less fulfilling and
meaningful lives than does a less manically consumption-oriented way of life. Research on happiness
tells us something that we have always sort of known, but that competitive consumption tends to
crowd out. Happy people are those that feel they are interested in their work and think I is useful,
feel part of a community, and have some time with friends and family. Nobody on their death bed
says “gee, I wish I had had more toys and spent even less time with my spouse, my friends, and my
kids.” If people would really be better off with a less hyper-consumerist lifestyle, why then do they
embrace consumerism? The basic idea here is that through various mechanisms there is a systematic
consumption-bias in the decisions people make. If this bias were eliminated, people would in fact
make different choices, consume less and in the end be happier. The issue, then, is not really that
there is anything intrinsically wrong with shopping and consuming as such, but rather that the
nature of the market system in which we live shapes peoples preferences and choices excessively in
favor of consumption over other values. In the rest of this chapter we will examine some of the
critical processes in play in contemporary American society that foster this strong consumerist
culture.
1. The consumption bias in capitalist profit-maximization strategies Perhaps the most fundamental
process that generates consumerism is the nature of profitmaximizing competition in a capitalist
economy. One of the great virtues of capitalism is that the competition among firms puts pressures
on firms to innovate, and many of these innovations increase productivity over time. Productivity
refers to the amount of inputs needed to produce a given amount of output. More specifically,
increasing productivity means that it takes less laboring time to produce a given quantity of output.